I share some of these concerns. I was reading this book about the Congo recently: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06XCJ62YJ/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06XCJ62YJ/

I share some of these concerns. I was reading this book about the Congo recently: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06XCJ62YJ/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06XCJ62YJ/ It's a fascinating book for many reasons, but one relevant part is its interviews with many locals that complain about the influence of NGOs in central Africa. It seems quite difficult to measure the success of an NGO in a country that is run by a dictatorship. There are cases where an organization starts working on a particular charitable cause, so the government immediately routes its own funding for that cause elsewhere. Or the only way for an NGO to operate is to pay high taxes to a corrupt government. So your money to these charities can essentially end up in the pocket of dictators, funding genocide. I think about these when reading GiveWell's analyses of charity. Even things like mosquito nets - are we sure that these NGOs are really providing mosquito nets that wouldn't be provided otherwise? Or are they crowding out government spending, helping dictators free up more of their budget for other things? Or are mosquito nets simply the most appealing of many causes, the wealthy donors backing GiveWell could easily fund the entire demand for mosquito nets, and the cause is "kept alive" to enable GiveWell to raise more funds for other, less-obvious causes? It's hard to do much more analysis of charities whose actions are so remote. I wish there were a GiveWell equivalent but just focused on giving to help the poor in California, not because I think the poor in California are so much more deserving than the rest of the world, but because I think we would be more able to observe which entities were spending money effectively.