Doing Good Better: Effective Altruism and a Radical New Way to Make a Difference

by William MacAskill

Over and over again, Kremer found that seemingly obvious programmes to improve education just weren’t working. But he persisted. He refused to believe there was simply no way to improve the education of children in Kenya. At that point a friend at the World Bank suggested he test deworming. Few people in developed countries know about intestinal worms: parasitic infections that affect more than a billion people worldwide. They aren’t as dramatic as AIDS or cancer or malaria because they don’t kill nearly as many people as those other conditions. But they do make children sick, and can be cured for pennies: off-patent drugs, developed in the fifties, can be distributed through schools and administered by teachers, and will cure children of intestinal worms for a year. Kremer did an experiment to see whether treating children for these intestinal worms had an impact on education. The results were striking. ‘We didn’t expect deworming to be as effective as it was,’ Kremer told me. ‘It turned out to be one of the most cost-effective ways of increasing school participation.’ Absenteeism is a chronic problem in schools in Kenya, and deworming reduced it by 25%. In fact, every child treated spent an extra two weeks in school, and every $100 spent on the programme provided a total of ten years of additional school attendance among all students. Enabling a child to spend an extra day in school therefore cost just 5¢. It wasn’t merely that deworming children ‘worked’ at getting chil...