EA - What countries are worth funding? by Ariel Pontes

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: What countries are worth funding?, published by Ariel Pontes on December 28, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.I’m the founder of EA Romania and I applied for funds from the EAIF twice this year and got rejected both times without feedback. In the process of hunting for feedback after my first rejection, I kept hearing questions like “what’s the comparative advantage of Romania?” or “what particular groups or cause areas do you want to focus on?”. I was also told by a fund manager that Romania is “not exactly a hub” and therefore there’s a high opportunity cost in funding community building here unless the project is very creative.At some point during a recent EAGx, I met a Romanian who had been involved in EA for a while and I told her about my whole experience applying for funds. She seemed very empathetic and encouraging and said we should talk more later. The next day when we met her attitude had shifted completely and she started questioning why I wanted to do community building in Romania, and suggesting that if I want to work in this area maybe I could move somewhere with a more vibrant EA movement, where there are more opportunities. Eventually I confronted her about her change of attitude and she basically started saying that Romania is not ready for EA yet. I said that I felt Romania was being discriminated against and she said I had to understand the EA leadership because when Romania joined the EU a lot of uneducated, low-income immigrants flooded Western countries and now they have a bad impression of Romanians.I couldn’t help but have the impression that she talked to somebody in the EA leadership and concluded that Romania wouldn’t be funded any time soon.If some countries are unlikely to be funded in general because they’re low priority, I believe this should be public information, and I also think EAIF should be transparent about the criteria they use to prioritize countries. After attending 4 EAG(x)s, I would say that the perception of the average EA is that there are plenty of funds and if you start a new national group it should be very easy to get funded. This perception seems inaccurate, and if the reality was more transparent this would help founders of new national groups have more realistic expectations.To be clear, I’m not saying that the only or even the main reason why my applications were rejected was that they were coming from Romania. There are other reasons (as I have discussed here and here). It is of course possible that another person with another project would have been funded. It’s hard to know because, again, EAIF doesn’t give feedback. I think this is a big problem, but that’s a topic for another post. In any case, being in Romania was clearly one of the reasons why the application was rejected, as is illustrated by the stories above and as was confirmed in an exchange of emails I had with CEA. This whole experience has made me realize there is very little transparency regarding group funding and groups in general. There are many questions that I think should be easier to find an answer to, for example:Which countries are at the top of the priority list to be funded?Which ones are at the bottom?How much funding does each country get per year for community building?How much of this money is for salaries?How many paid community builders does each country have?How big is each national group?How old is each national group?How many applications come from each country?What percentage of applications is rejected for each country?Is this information public but buried in some long PDF report? Or is it not public at all? I know that CEA only funds a fixed list of countries that already have mature communities, but does anybody have any idea what criteria the EAIF uses to prioritize countries? Do you think some countries ...