Here’s what we know about the Gates Foundation’s agriculture program:

• Gates believes it’s suggestive that “Apart from a few states and small, oil-rich countries, no country has managed a rapid rise from poverty without increasing agricultural productivity. In the poorest countries, agriculture employs a majority of the people.”
• This isn’t a new argument or an undisputed one. See Peter Timmer on Green Revolution “optimists” vs. “pessimists”.
• Gates’s approach is “comprehensive,” targets “no single, simple solution”, and includes farmer training/support, irrigation initiatives, market access initiatives, and funding of agricultural research with a focus on gender empowerment.
• This isn’t a new approach or a historically successful one. The World Bank has focused on essentially the same set of interventions recently, with unclear results, and the previous “holistic” approach of “Integrated Rural Development” is widely considered to have failed. Details at our overview of agriculture aid.

In other words, the Gates Foundation approach – as described – appears to be neither a continuation of things that have worked before nor a fundamentally new approach to the problem. So what might be different this time around?

Lots of things. Better technology could make all the difference; so could a greater degree of commitment. And one way in which the Gates Foundation could really distinguish itself from past efforts would be by doing a superior job learning about what works and what doesn’t – past initiatives have suffered from poor evaluation and very little accessible information about how things have really worked out.

The Gates Foundation’s progress reports so far are extremely preliminary, looking at “inputs” such as “number of farmers organized into groups”. We find these measures wholly appropriate given how early it is in the initiative; and yet, we’ve seen too many programs that still haven’t moved beyond these measures even after claiming “success” and asking individuals to donate and help them scale up.

If the Gates Foundation moves to more rigorous and outcome-focused evaluation over time, we might learn more about what works and what doesn’t, and the “impatient optimism” could turn out to be justified. If not, the Gates Foundation will be making a very expensive gamble with very little information about its odds.

The Gates Foundation states that “Funders have sharply cut their international aid to agricultural development over the past few decades.” It is implied that this is a major reason for the failure to see a “Green Revolution in Africa.”

We have been unable to locate support for this claim.

Using data from OECD - the most reliable source of official aid flows as far as we know - we graphed the proportion of (disbursed) aid to Africa that was classified in the “agriculture” sector since the 1970s. It’s possible that the numbers are artificially depressed for early years due to less standardized reporting, but we see no trend of the type the Gates Foundation describes.

In addition, we previously looked at funding on some of the main vehicles credited with the original “Green Revolution” and found no substantial drop since the 1970s.

It’s frustrating that the Gates Foundation doesn’t provide a source for its claim. In general, the material on its website is at a very broad level and does not make it possible for people curious about its underlying reasoning to drill deeper. That means that any criticism or examination of its work has to be either very superficial or done offline (i.e., in direct communication with the Foundation, an opportunity few people seem to get easily or often).

Added 10/30/09: here’s our source data

With all the people and organizations out there who would like more money, there’s something remarkable about the fact that the Gates Foundation is specifically asking people NOT to give to it (PDF) - and still couldn’t keep away over $10 million in donations in 2008.

Why the Gates Foundation doesn’t want your money

First off, I have a lot of trouble understanding the Foundation’s stated reasoning (PDF):

From time to time, people generously offer to contribute money to the foundation. We prefer that people give directly to our grantee organizations rather than to the foundation if they want to help advance the causes we’re passionate about. We have the stable funds we need to help us fulfill our mission, but our grantees often do not.

It seems to me that there are a couple of problems here.

• Is it desirable that the Gates Foundation’s grantees should have more “stable funds” than they do now? If so, why doesn’t the Gates Foundation give them these “stable funds” in the form of unrestricted grants? Couldn’t it, at the very least, use its “extra money” (the money that comes in as individual donations) in this way?

  How does it make sense for the Foundation to ask people to fund something that that they choose not to fund themselves? More broadly, how does it make sense for an organization to that exists for the sole purpose of giving away money as well as possible to be discouraging people from giving to it?

• The Foundation directs people to its list of grantees - in the form of a database of (currently) over 5,000 grants. How is an individual donor to cut through this information and figure out the best fit?

Speaking as someone who personally tried to do exactly this about 3 years ago, I can tell you that the information the Gates Foundation is providing is nowhere near sufficient to figure out which nonprofits would most benefit from my donation. I’m honestly surprised that the Gates Foundation is pointing people to pages like this one (and the other pages it links to) for information. The Gates Foundation has a large and well-credentialed staff devoted to researching where to give out money, yet they’re asking individuals to make the decisions themselves based on profiles that read like fundraising brochures?

The bottom line is that I don’t think the Gates Foundation makes a compelling argument that you shouldn’t give to it (so perhaps it’s not surprising that so many people have chosen to). To me, the strongest part of its case is the implication that it actually considers pages like this one to provide all the information and analysis a donor needs. If that were the case (and I doubt that it is), I’d definitely prefer to use my own judgment.

What does $10 million mean?

Sean hypothesizes that “this is direct evidence of individual donors’ increasing interest in impact.” I’m inclined to agree.

We often hear that donors don’t really care about having the most impact possible; they care about attending benefits, or dispelling the guilt/cognitive dissonance raised by an appeal, or identifying with a cause. We respond that at least some donors are motivated primarily by wanting to make the world a better place; the question is how many of these are out there (because we know that the total pie is quite large). And we honestly don’t know the answer to that question - better research is needed.

But now we know that 2008 saw at least $10 million come from people who could not have been motivated by social events (the Gates Foundation holds none and doesn’t allow fundraisers on its behalf), in-the-moment emotions (the Gates Foundation conducts no appeals and doesn’t have a particularly cute namesake), or identification with a pet cause (the Gates Foundation’s work includes U.S. education, international aid and more, and it doesn’t allow people to earmark for a specific cause).

The only reasoning I can think of for giving to the Gates Foundation is, “They’ll do a better job with this [in terms of making the world a better place] than I can, and that’s what I want even if it doesn’t come with the donor perks of a traditional charity.” If you disagree and can think of a less altruism-based reason, please share in the comments.

Of course, that $10 million could all have come from 1-2 people for all we know (especially since only $1.6 million came in the year before). More on this below.

Will the Gates Foundation help us learn more about these donors?

Correction (added 6/11/09): Sean Stannard-Stockton has pointed out that the Gates Foundation will be releasing the names and amounts for all donors who gave more than $5000, as required by law. Assuming this is correct, the remainder of this post (from here until the end) should be disregarded.

There is growing interest improving donors’ access to quality information. In order to do this well, it would help greatly to know whom to target - in particular, whether the lion’s share of “impact-focused” charity is coming from tiny, medium, large, or mega donors. At this point we know so little about this question that having the breakdown of donation sizes from the Gates Foundation would, I believe, add a lot to our understanding.

I believe the Gates Foundation could be a good citizen and helpful to the cause of improving philanthropy by releasing information on how many donations it received of different sizes. Aggregating them by “buckets” (<$100, $100-500, etc.) and keeping all names confidential would allow this information sharing without compromising anyone’s privacy. Will they do it?

In his Annual Letter, Bill Gates describes the “Green Revolution”:

Almost every country that has become wealthy started with a huge increase in farming productivity. Chart 4 shows the increase in output per acre for various grains, including wheat, corn, and rice, in the United States, India, China, and Africa since 1961. This dramatic increase in output—more than three times—is often called the Green Revolution.

The Green Revolution, and the Rockefeller Foundation’s role in the research that enabled it, is frequently cited as one of philanthropy’s great success stories(1) and a huge contributor to enormous reductions in poverty.(2) Yet as Gates continues, “Africa jumps out as the only case where this [revolution] has not taken place.” Why?

To Gates, the answer appears to come down to insufficient investment:

African countries have widely varying climate conditions, and there hasn’t been the same investment in creating the seeds that fit those conditions. Because agriculture is an essential part of economic growth for most African countries, we are working with others to fund a “Green Revolution for Africa” and other areas that could benefit from this kind of investment.

Gates gives the impression that bringing the Green Revolution in Africa is mostly a matter of repeating what’s worked elsewhere, which would make it an excellent fit for our priorities. But from the rough analysis we’ve done, it appears that there has been at least as much effort to bring about a Green Revolution in Africa as elsewhere, and the obstacles in this area are specific and significant.

CGIAR funding

The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research appears to have been the main vehicle for philanthropic funding of relevant research.(3) Using data from its website, we put together the chart below showing how much has been spent at its centers in (sub-Saharan) Africa as opposed to its other centers. The proportion was consistently been between 25% and 30% from 1972-2003:(4)

For context, sub-Saharan Africa accounted for 20-30% of the world’s extremely poor in 2003, up from 14-19% in 1990.(5) It certainly seems from this rough cut that funding for relevant research in Africa was in line with funding for relevant research in the rest of the world.

Norman Borlaug

Norman Borlaug is often credited with (and won the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize for) a leading role in the research that made the Green Revolution possible.(6) The transcript of a 2006 Center for Global Development event implies the following about his relative efforts in different areas:

• He started working in Mexico in 1944 (pg 4); “By the late 1950s the cooperative program had made such a contribution to Mexico’s food production that … Borlaug had succeeded in working himself out of a job” (page 3).
• He entered India in 1967, and within 10 years India had gone from threats of famine to self-sufficiency (page 3; see also the account of the Green Revolution given by the Library of Congress’s Country Studies/Area Handbook Series).
• He has been working on bringing similar benefits to Africa since 1985 (pages 6-7) - far longer than he worked in either Mexico or India.

Comparable efforts; disappointing results

There are many factors that may make a Green Revolution in Africa difficult or impossible to bring about, including:(7)

• Agricultural prices have fallen drastically (in real terms) since the original Green Revolution. The benefits to increased crop production may therefore not be as great.
• Africa’s environment, with its high disease burden and difficult climate, presents special - and possibly greater - challenges compared to other environments.
• Much of Africa has low population density and extremely weak infrastructure (including railroads, irrigation and electricity).
• African governments are not providing the sorts of subsidies that Asian governments used to encourage agricultural output.

None of this means that bringing the Green Revolution to Africa is necessarily impossible, or that aiming funding at this goal is necessarily futile. But it’s important to recognize that this goal is a formidable challenge for which no strong precedent exists.

The prospect of an African Green Revolution is extremely appealing, but we don’t feel that this sort of investment can ultimately be counted as “proven and scalable,” and we don’t feel it’s as well-suited for individual donors as many health interventions (which are both proven and likely repeatable, and have simply not been funded enough to reach full coverage - more on this in a future post).

Aid Watch on questionable claims of success against malaria:

Real victories against malaria would be great, but false victories can mislead and distract critical malaria efforts. Alas, Mr. and Mrs. Gates are repeating numbers that have already been discredited. This story of irresponsible claims goes back to a big New York Times headline on February 1, 2008: “Nets and New Drug Make Inroads Against Malaria,” which quoted Dr. Arata Kochi, chief of malaria for the WHO, as reporting 50-60 percent reductions in deaths of children in Zambia, Ethiopia, and Rwanda, and so celebrated the victories of the anti-malaria campaign. Alas, Dr. Kochi had rushed to the press a dubious report. The report was never finalized by WHO, it promptly disappeared, and its specific claims were contradicted by WHO’s own September 2008 World Malaria Report, by which time Dr. Kochi was no longer WHO chief of malaria.

Video with the Gateses available here.

Antiretroviral treatment (ART) is one of the more well-publicized ways to help people in the developing world. The (RED) campaign puts it front and center, and the Gates Foundation places heavy emphasis on it as well. It seems at first glance like a fairly straightforward, if expensive, intervention: directly treat HIV-positive people with proven drugs to extend their lifespan and improve quality of life.

But the Copenhagen Consensus disease experts (also lead authors on the Disease Control Priorities report) make the case for caution (from pg 40 - emphasis mine):

• Poor implementation (low adherence, development of resistance, interruptions in drug supplies) is likely to lead to very limited health gains, even for individuals on therapy. (This outcome is unlike that of a weak immunization program in which health gains still exist in the fraction of the population that is immunized.) Poorly implemented antiretroviral drug delivery programs could divert substantial resources from prevention or from other high-payoff activities in the health sector. Even worse, they could lead to a false sense of complacency in affected populations: evidence from some countries suggests that treatment availability has led to riskier sexual behavior and increased HIV transmission. The injunction to “do no harm” holds particular salience.
• Unless systematic efforts are made to acquire hard knowledge about which approaches work and which do not, the likelihood exists that unsuccessful implementation efforts will be continued without the appropriate reallocation of resources to successful approaches. Learning what works will require major variations in approach and careful evaluation of effects. Failing to learn will lead to large numbers of needless deaths. Most efforts to scale up antiretroviral therapy unconscionably fail to commit the substantial resources required for evaluation of effects. Such evaluations are essential if ineffective programs are to be halted or effective ones are to receive more resources.
• Many programs rely exclusively on the cheapest possible drugs, thereby risking problems with toxicity, adherence, and drug resistance. From the outset a broader range of drug regimens needs to be tested.

An ART program needs to use the right drugs, ensure compliance, be there for the long haul, and deal with side effects (both medical and behavioral). None of these are a given, with the (RED) campaign’s beneficiaries or anyone else, until you see the evidence that the programs are working.

And ART costs can be in the range of $600 per patient treated per year. Compare with vaccinations, which are estimated as saving lives for as little as $200 apiece, have a strong track record of success, and in many ways introduce less potential for complications.