EA career guide for people from LMICs

By Surbhi B, Mo Putera, varun_agr, AmAristizabal @ 2022-12-15T14:37 (+252)

Executive Summary

Individuals from Low and Middle Income Countries (LMICs)[1] engaging with EA often find that existing EA career advice does not address various frequently arising questions and challenges. This post attempts to address that gap by sharing the tentative outcomes of discussions between the authors (who are all from LMICs) on the pros and cons for various career paths. 

We hope that this guide will serve as a tool for individuals in LMICs to prioritize career paths. This post may be particularly useful as material for localized introductory or in depth fellowships.

Note that this post is not meant to be the final word on how EAs from LMICs should think about career paths, but rather a conversation-starter and call-to-action to improve LMIC-specific diversity in EA. It builds upon excellent prior work by several LMIC groups and community builders, which the authors have compiled in this resource bank. 

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Alejandro Acelas, Agustin Covarrubias, Claudette Salinas, Siobhan McDonough, Vaishnav Sunil, and Yi-Yang Chua for all of your feedback on previous drafts. 

Introduction 

Engaging with EA when you come from a Low or Middle Income Country (LMIC)[1] raises some challenges that might not be obvious to the current EA majority, composed of people from higher income countries, often in the Western world. EA principles framed from a high-income audience can fall flat in contexts where individuals lack the ability to donate, don’t have access to large EA networks for continued engagement, and where EA principles may be at odds with typical cultural norms and histories. 

If you come from an LMIC, you have probably wondered how your strategy and prioritization fits in with the EA movement at-large. Some common questions/concerns we hear from LMICs audiences (that you might have at the moment) are: 

We have pondered similar questions and regularly hear about these uncertainties in our countries and our neighboring LMICs (the authors of this post are from India, Malaysia and Colombia). We created this post to start a conversation about some of these difficult questions. 

Many of these concerns are matters of career path prioritization: How should we, individuals from LMICs, think about prioritizing career paths to maximize our impact? Should we do charity evaluations in our countries? Should we move to Oxford and work on existential risks instead? Should career advice be different for us due to our contexts and preferences? We went through different paths of impact and debated pros and cons of each. This post aims to share the tentative outcomes of these discussions.

This is not a final answer and you should take our advice with caution. We had diverse perspectives and internal disagreements about the best paths to greater impact, so this is an invitation to start a community-wide discussion so we can get to better answers. 

Potential paths to greater impact via LMICs

There are many paths you can engage in to maximize your impact, and many approaches to each: general community-building, working in local organizations, entrepreneurship, local priorities research and others. Since the very best options can be 10-100x better than average, it’s worth putting the time and effort into prioritizing instead of going by your instincts. This prioritization involves taking into consideration: 

With that in mind, the following sections provide an overview of different paths you can take to increase your impact, including LMIC-specific considerations and actionable next steps.

Build career skills and learn more about EA

Contributing to solving the world’s most pressing problems requires career capital (hard and soft skills, credentials, connections and resources) that takes time and experience to build. We believe that accumulating career capital early can be particularly fruitful in the longer term by unlocking additional, high leverage opportunities. 

While the movement has sought to build infrastructure to help individuals build such career capital through training programs and fellowships, many of these resources are not available to EAs in LMICs. In addition, unfortunately many LMICs’ education systems are insufficient to teach some skills that are broadly important for impactful careers (e.g. English fluency in non-English speaking contexts, soft skills such as project management, professional communication for corporate contexts, etc.). Many of these issues are structural and require large-scale interventions, but individuals in LMICs can start investing in themselves to bridge existing skills gaps. Some of those things might involve improving particular skills (improving English, research, technical skills) or building networks (attending conferences, finding mentors, starting internships). 

For those who are particularly interested in EA principles, this path could mean learning more about EA by participating in virtual or in person programs, connecting with a local or virtual EA community, reading and discussing EA ideas to critically analyze them and form your own conclusions. 

Reasons to focus on building career capital

Potential considerations against this path

So, how recommended is this path for EAs in LMICs? 

We think this should be the default path for new entrants to EA (both from LMICs and around the world). A bias towards action is good but when acted upon too early, could have potential for sub-par outcomes if: 

  1. You have not engaged deeply with EA ideas and critiqued them yourself
  2. You are letting go of potential high impact opportunities that could’ve been available to you through upskilling

Actionable steps 

Contribute as an individual to global EA causes 

Regardless of where you come from, you can work on current best guesses of the world’s most pressing problems. Most organizations working on the top global priorities as defined by EA tend to be based in high-income countries but they are increasingly hiring from around the world (either remotely or by supporting immigration). 

Also consider that current EA global priorities are only best guesses and shouldn’t be seen as the ultimate authority to define an impactful job. As noted in the previous section, you should spend time learning more about EA principles and figuring out how to apply them to your own life before proceeding in any specific direction. 

Reasons to work on global EA causes

We have seen that many people in LMICs don’t consider working for global EA institutions because they don’t think they have the proper skills to contribute or feel committed to local causes. Even though working on pressing issues in your own country may feel like the natural path to impact, there might be important reasons to consider working on global priorities, especially if you’re from an LMIC:

Potential considerations against this path:

So, how recommended is this path compared to other paths for EAs in LMICs? 

In the absence of very clear reasons to work on a local cause (e.g. significant personal fit and importance of local cause), you should probably work towards setting yourself up to contribute to global problems. By working on global causes, EAs from LMICs can add epistemic diversity that leads to better ideas and interventions. Working at some “nodal” EA or other global organizations can help you have significant impact, move the frontier of EA, and have ripple effects around the world. 

Actionable steps

General community building and awareness

You can also be an enabler for impact through community building–creating or strengthening local groups, introducing more people to EA, organizing events, and supporting a growing community. When done well, community building can have a strong multiplier effect by helping more people increase their own object-level impacts.. 

There are many existing resources for community builders and we strongly recommend building on global best practices since many efforts transfer well across regions. Here we will only add some considerations relevant for LMICs to think about the impact of community building: 

How should LMICs prioritize community building? 

Impact is only achieved through direct work (by doing things like saving lives or preventing suffering) so activities like community building and prioritization efforts are valuable only to the extent that they enable direct work. Community building is critical to setting the tone and culture of the movement, which further influences the movement’s longevity and people’s engagement. 

The balance between direct and meta work such as community building should be consistently revisited and critiqued, as many posts on the Forum have done (one, two, three, four). 

Here we will address some arguments in favor and against community building in LMICs in particular. 

Reasons to work on community building in LMICs

Potential considerations against this path:

So, how recommended is this path compared to other paths for EAs in LMICs? 

Community building in LMICs can directly increase EA’s diversity of talent, experience, opinion, and appearance. If you are a good fit for community building, it can be one of the most impactful activities in LMICs. Community builders in LMICs should also contextualize EA to new environments by experimenting with new formats, questioning ideas from first principles, and localizing efforts. 

However, community building can be higher risk and given that it has a lower entry point than most of the paths discussed in this post (e.g. organizing a reading group is “easier” than doing fundamental research), many people will feel qualified to do it without actually being a good fit. Potential community builders in LMICs should therefore talk to experienced community builders in EA as well as social organizers and non-profits in their own countries to understand the context, and how they can best contribute. 

Actionable steps 

Effective community building in LMICs may look quite different from existing approaches or even improve on them. These are aspects you can consider:

Local priorities research

The basic idea of local priorities research (LPR) is that EAs do research to figure out the most impactful cause areas, career pathways and organizations within their local context (though impact may not be locally constrained).

Reasons to do LPR in LMICs

LPR is especially valuable if it helps find blindspots in cause prioritization, or brings more attention to locally promising causes that might be previously neglected. From a community-building perspective, it also improves outreach by making it more targeted, improving the EA group’s credibility, and attracting more EA-aligned people in the local community. 

LPR is a catch-all term that encompasses many kinds of research, including cause prioritization, problem profile research, high-impact career pathways, public policy research, charity evaluation and more generally research into the local philanthropic landscape, and more. 

The key difference between LPR and global priorities research (GPR), aside from being more focused on helping EAs find local career pathways, is that LPR is more applied instead of philosophical / foundational (i.e. more “which cause areas should we prioritize in this region?” and less “what is the value of the far future?”). In this sense, LPR can be thought of as complementary to GPR. 

Potential considerations against this path:

Note that LPR is difficult to do well. One risk to avoid is low-quality research that gets used as motivated reasoning to justify working on “pet causes” that are not necessarily neglected, or where there is no good evidence for the tractability of existing interventions. Yi-Yang, a community builder from Malaysia, authored an excellent overview of LPR. He lists other risks as well, and suggests these criteria for evaluating whether EA groups are mature enough to do LPR: 

So, how recommended is this path compared to other paths for EAs in LMICs? 

Considering the difficulties and risks, we think this path should be followed only by groups who are mature enough to do it and where the country-context is particularly suitable. However, we think that the best versions of LPR could bring value to EA and could help spot promising causes that EA hasn’t identified yet. 

LPR might also be more valuable in large, low-income countries since there is a higher likelihood of important, currently neglected problems with high tractability existing. LPR in small, middle-income countries which don’t have a clear role in pressing global issues, is unlikely to uncover significantly impactful opportunities. 

Actionable steps

Jah Ying from Hong Kong, has written a Local Priorities Research Guide. It is a great one-stop guide to doing local priorities research. 80000 Hours’ problem profiles is also a good place to start. For more inspiration, here are some examples of LPR:

These examples and resources are not exhaustive. For more see the [EAs in LMICs] resource bank. Feel free to comment to the bank to contribute additional resources you have come across!

Local charity evaluations

Two of the most common questions from new EAs in LMICs are “What is the best local charity to donate to?” and “Should there be a local GiveWell to answer this question?” This makes local charity evaluation an especially salient subtopic of LPR. 

Reasons to do charity evaluations in LMICs

Potential considerations against this path:

Note that charity evaluation research is hard in a number of ways (this list is non-exhaustive):

So, how recommended is this path compared to other paths for EAs in LMICs?

Considering the difficulties, we think this path should be followed only by groups who are mature enough to do it and that new EAs in LMICs shouldn’t spend all of their scarce resources on this activity. We think it is unlikely that new EAs in LMICs will find comparable charities to existing GiveWell’s recommended charities, particularly in middle income countries. Existing charity evaluators are probably better suited to do this work. 

On the other hand, engaging in some charity evaluation efforts can be formative for some EAs to help them internalize cost effectiveness evaluation and prioritization. A possible recommended effort would be to evaluate the impact of current local evaluation efforts (see list below) to get more information on the potential value of this activity. 

Actionable steps

One way to work around the challenges, inspired by EA Philippines’ approach, is to look at lists of top charities as identified by top EA evaluators like GiveWell (more lists below), check whether these charities operate locally, connect with these charities to learn more about their local operations, and adapt the existing cost-effectiveness analysis for the local context (if it has not already been done). A good example of local charity evaluation using this approach resulting in the identification of a top local charity is their analysis of Vitamin Angels’ PH operations, which estimates that their vitamin A supplementation program is ~3.8x more cost-effective than GiveDirectly’s cash transfer program.

Here are some organizations working on local charity evaluations:

And here are some resources to get started on local charity evaluations:

Start a new charity or improve existing ones

There are many other charity-related activities you can consider doing, from working at top local charities to improve and scale them to starting new charities focused on working on neglected and cost-effective interventions.

Reasons to start or improve charities in LMICs

The arguments depend on the type of activity and the charities under consideration. 

Potential considerations against this path:

It is critical to pick high-potential charities to realize high impact. Simply improving the effectiveness of arbitrarily-chosen local charities (e.g. by applying Lean Six Sigma principles) is unlikely to be as high-impact as pre-screening for cost-effective programs and then finding charities that implement them. If intervention A is (say) 10x more cost-effective at reducing DALYs than intervention B, then it’s very unlikely that charity B running intervention B can be improved 10x to close the cost-effectiveness gap with charity A. This is why pre-screening for the most cost-effective programs has to be the first step.

So, how recommended is this path compared to other paths for EAs in LMICs? 

It depends on the location, the group’s skills and the potential interventions considered. In general, unless there are already defined cost-effective interventions or charities that can be realistically improved or created, then this is unlikely to be the best path to impact. 

Actionable steps

For some examples of these efforts in LMICs, see Charity Entrepreneurship incubated charities 

Local career advising

Current career advising focuses on jobs in high income countries like the US and UK, as most prominent EA and EA-aligned organizations are primarily based there, but it is difficult for EAs from LMICs to get these jobs due to strict immigration restrictions. In addition, there are other constraints preventing them from moving, such as lack of initial capital to finance migration, familial ties or other social obligations, or simply a desire to remain in their home country, which EA should respect and enable.

Another issue is that prevalent career advising (say from 80,000 Hours) assumes a Western educational background where people might have flexibility in choosing their course of study, which may not be universally true. For example, most university admissions in India are dictated by performance on entrance exams or final school leaving exams. Courses of study have varying “cut offs” based on the amount of applications and higher cut offs are often associated with higher prestige, so students are largely sorted into fields based on their marks over actual preference.

Local career advising solves for this by providing EAs in LMICs with more useful context-specific career advice that directs them to resources to upskill given their constraints and helps them pursue impactful careers globally and locally. By being plugged into the global EA network, such local career advising can further diversify the talent pool that traditional EA organizations draw from.

Reasons to do local career advising in LMICs

Potential considerations against this path

So, how recommended is this path compared to other paths for EAs in LMICs? 

Local career advising is an option for more mature EA groups with members who are good at LPR, so the same considerations apply: sufficient research capacity and comparative advantage in doing research to identify high-impact local career paths, EA knowledge, and being able to coordinate at national capacity.

Actionable steps

Conclusion

This post is an initial attempt at promoting conversations around LMIC-specific diversity in EA. An EA that is sensitive to global perspectives, concerns, and questions will be healthier and able to create more impact. 

This post has built on excellent work already done by several LMICs groups and community builders. We recommend checking this resource bank to learn about previous efforts and relevant frameworks to think about EA in LMICs. There are also a number of additional paths we did not explore in-depth, outlined briefly in the footnotes.[2] We hope to get feedback on this exercise so we can generate better advice and improve prioritization efforts. 


 

  1. ^

     Low- and middle-income countries (LMICs): All countries not considered to be high-income. Although there is no universally agreed-upon definition, the World Bank defines high-income countries as those with a gross national income per capita of $12,696 or more in 2020. Upper-middle, lower-middle, and low-income countries are classified as LMICs.

  2. ^

    Should LMICs groups think about general community building or community building for specific cause areas (e.g. animal welfare, AI safety)

    Broad-based, big tent community building can enable diversity by providing frameworks and tools for prioritization, but allowing local groups to apply these tools to their own contexts as they see fit. Cause-specific community building (such as AI safety community building) in a new region that doesn’t have an existing broad-based EA community or EA infrastructure, bears the potential risk of creating cultural clashes, promoting work done mostly by foreigners in LMICs, generating reputational risks and strengthening elitism in EA. The risks can be mitigated if locals are directly involved in foundational initiatives and activities. 

    EA’s current prioritization has a lot of uncertainty, and even experts in EA agree that current causes are only a best guess, not a final answer. Doing cause-specific community building assumes that the best guess is worth acting on now, and that might be reasonable in many scenarios, but should have a very high bar to be implemented as such. Starting with strong general infrastructure for cause prioritization in LMICs through community building and meta work by locals can help mitigate these risks.

  3. ^

    Here are other pathways that we think could be promising, most of these are subsets of larger paths outlined in the post above:

    1. Understand your country’s comparative advantages: Work on other research questions that address a region’s comparative advantage to face the world’s most pressing problems: 
      1. How can specific regions approach longtermist issues? (e.g. how can South America uniquely contribute to preventing / dealing with a nuclear winter?). This could fall both under existing global causes and LPR.
    2. Content creation: 
      1. Work on content creation/framings that are relevant to LMICs
      2. Work on translations or creating original content in a new language. 
      3. Explore culturally-relevant fiction as a tool for moral circle expansion or other ideas: local-context fiction might inspire people who are otherwise turned off by the usual philosophical arguments.
    3. Understand culture, both EA and beyond
      1. Study future-oriented beliefs in certain religions or groups (example questions)
      2. Studying our own community e.g. an ethnography of EA, perhaps especially relevantly done by non-global north EAs
Vaidehi Agarwalla @ 2022-12-15T15:45 (+23)

(thank you all for this post - I think this will be shared widely and be a really useful resource for many new EAs!)

Another reason against community building early in your career / doing global work first: I've noticed some (now) thriving communities outside traditional hubs often have a few people from that country who've gone on to do direct EA work, but are also then helping / advising  people in their countries to set up local EA national groups or just helping them to have more impact in their own careers. Sometimes not starting with community building can put you in a better position to help it later on. 

emmannaemeka @ 2022-12-16T03:24 (+17)

Thank you for sharing this. I am a professor and I reside in Nigeria. I've also interacted with a number of colleagues from my own nation. You'll see that many of them believe they can't compete with their Western colleagues. You may imagine that funders will believe that the person from the west will perform better and be more likely to receive funding if, for instance, someone from LMIC and the west propose wastewater surveillance as a technique to monitor the environment for important infections. So far I have had 100% rejection with EA funds and open philanthropy fellowships. The mentorship component appears to be fascinating. My opinion is this, EA should consider strengthening Mentorship for  LMICs to help solve the problem of capacity, or proposing ideas that look a good fit as well as solving problems of inferiority following a series of rejections.  

If you are interested in mentoring a faculty member from LMIC to pursue a cause that is global and relevant to the EA goals, kindly reach out via DM. I will be glad to talk with you. 

Zakariyau Yusuf @ 2023-02-03T21:35 (+7)

Curious to hear more about your thought and perfectives and your experience with the Nigerian context. Hopefully, we can chat. 

Jackson Wagner @ 2022-12-15T20:37 (+14)

I don't have much experience with starting charities or giving career advice, but I've often wondered if it might be very effective for people in LMIC to advocate for various institution-design innovations that are blocked by hostile regulations across most of the rich world.

Quoting from a comment of mine in response to the Forecasting Newsletter bemoaning the USA's failure to recognize the immense potential value of prediction markets:

Okay, so the USA has mostly dropped the ball on [allowing prediction markets that could inform national decisionmaking] for forty years.  But what about every other country?  China seems pretty ambitious and willing to make things happen in order to secure their place on the world stage -- where is the CCP-subsidized market hive-mind driving all the crucial central planning decisions?  Well, maybe a prediction market doesn't play well with wanting to exert lots of top-down control and suppress free speech.  Okay, what about countries in Europe?  What about Taiwan or Singapore?  Nobody has yet achieved some kind of Hansonian utopia, so what is the limiting factor?

...But maybe it's misleading to frame the question this way, as "why is EVERY COUNTRY failing in the SAME WAY", because most prediction market advocates have all been inside the USA/anglosphere, so other countries haven't really had a fair shot at being persuaded?  (In this case, maybe all that's necessary is to fund some prediction-market advocacy groups in Taiwan, Singapore, India, Dubai, South Korea, and other diverse locations until somebody finally takes the offer!  Then, once one country is doing it, that will make it easier for the innovation to spread elsewhere.

So it seems to me like it could be very impactful for a group of university students in LMIC to start advocating for greater adoption of prediction markets, since if the idea took off in just one country, their example might inspire many others.  And there are a variety of other issues, besides prediction markets, that seem to have this same structure:

All that is to say, that I would be super-excited to see some fellow effective altruists in India, or the Spanish-speaking world, or etc, set up an organization to advocate for whichever of the above ideas make the most sense in their local context.  And I think EA as a whole should consider providing more support to people in diverse countries who are helping humanity as a whole take more "shots on goal" when it comes to implementing ideas that might improve democratic governance, economic growth, or scientific progress.

Kirsten @ 2022-12-15T22:12 (+4)

Yes, I was surprised not to see policy work in LMICs on this list to be honest!

brb243 @ 2022-12-15T22:53 (+10)

Always remember that impact is achieved through direct work...

Even in emerging economies, impact needs funding. (Effective) donations are not mentioned in the post. However, they should be quite central, because of

1) Solidarity: Even little privileged people in EA in LMICs should keep solidarity with large donors: everyone is giving up some 'next level' comforts, compared to their norm. Whether that is the smaller Tesla or walking for the hour every day.

That personal commitment can make the community a yet more honorable place to be a part of.

2) Impact: Not only "[s]mall donors can sometimes beat large donors in terms of cost-effectiveness,[1]" for example by identifying the 1 in 10,000 children who would have died from malaria in a community with or without nets and buying them the $4 treatment, but also they can show/test paths for more cost-effective donations.

This will make dialogues with large donors very fruitful, as both parties[2] will be bringing their very significant comparative advantages.

3) Change leverage: People who are invested in finding yet better ways of caring for others whose issues they connect with should enjoy greater community approval than those who waited for instructions and received funding to advance others' solutions.

People who could be supported in scaling up programs will be the ones who sincerely care. This is necessary for a change to happen.

4) Solutions pressure: For many relatively privileged people in LMICs, it can be common to support many others. For example, it is possible to meet even 5 begging children trying to gain attention every day and donate to some. If one is spending others' funding, they may seek to just gain the $1,000 GiveDirectly transfer for each of them, which is unrealistic given the scale of poverty.

If one is spending their own funds, they may think twice about a sustainable yet affordable program that would make a decisive impact for the children.

We think it is unlikely that new EAs in LMICs will find comparable charities to existing GiveWell’s recommended charities, particularly in middle income countries. Existing charity evaluators are probably better suited to do this work.

On the other hand, engaging in some charity evaluation efforts can be formative for some EAs to help them internalize cost effectiveness evaluation and prioritization. 

The post suggests to start with values and methodologies used by prominent Western institutions[3] and conduct evaluations of local situations only after these values are internalized.

This can lead to value imposition.

Rather, one can start with local values or value systems and develop/refine/discuss methodologies for their measurement. This can enrich the discourse on the meaning(s) of 'good.'

Some resources on values presented by local scholars and their measurements include  this paper on measuring Ubuntu, this "Buddhist perspective on measuring wellbeing and happiness in sustainable development," and this page on broad values in Hinduism.[4]

The key can be to discern which values are truly held by the people vs. presented by a scholar but not held as well as which are internalized based on own decisions vs. based on conformation to a previous or an external standard.

  1. ^

    I interpret, here, small and large donor as an average-income person in a LIC and a HIC.

  2. ^

    I am imagining a person who had only $4 to donate in a month and someone who had $4,000 speaking about effective ways of saving lives. I am not stating a LMICs vs. HICs dichotomy.

  3. ^

    based on the presumed origin of the frameworks in the post and the resources sheet

  4. ^

    People in different contexts in LMICs (and HICs) can be better informed on various quality values-measurements resources.

Dylan_Balfour @ 2022-12-16T10:38 (+9)

This is a great post! It's really good to see some specific advice for people in LMICs - something sorely needed in EA.

Speaking as part of Probably Good, we're trying to fill some of this gap (to the extent we're able). On top of our profile on civil service careers in LMICs , we also recently released a profile on monitoring and evaluation careers, a path we note could be particularly promising for people based in LMICs. We'd be really keen to hear your thoughts on how we might do this more/better!

Zoe Williams @ 2022-12-15T23:50 (+9)

Post summary (feel free to suggest edits!):
The authors broadly recommend the following for EAs from low and middle income countries (LMICs):

They discuss pros, cons, and concrete next steps for each. Individuals can use the scale / neglectedness / tractability framework, marginal value, and personal fit to assess options. They suggest looking for local comparative advantage at global priorities, and taking the time to upskill and engage deeply with EA ideas before jumping into direct work.

(If you'd like to see more summaries of top EA and LW forum posts, check out the Weekly Summaries series.)

Berke @ 2022-12-15T16:32 (+9)

 EA career advice tailored for people in based in LMICs was urgently  needed, very glad to see this! 

People in countries with low-EA presence can be very well-positioned to have a lot of impact even in the very short-run, as the number of low hanging fruits(really neglected high-impact opportunities where even a single person can plausibly make a substantial difference) in most of the LMICs are considerably higher compared to Western European and American countries, this post will probably empower a lot of people have more impact, thank you for writing this great post!

weeatquince @ 2022-12-20T14:33 (+7)

This was an amazing post – well done!! :-)

Claudette Salinas @ 2022-12-15T22:48 (+5)

Thanks for writing this and broadening the conversion on LMIC :)

pmelchor @ 2022-12-15T17:35 (+4)

Fantastic work! Strongly upvoted.

Jesus de Sivar @ 2022-12-15T15:42 (+3)

Thank you for this wonderful post!

I think that this was certainly lacking in the EA community