You never give me your money–The Beatles

Today, one good global health read and one good global health listen:

1) Paul Farmer writes this great article in Foreign Affairs called Partners in Help about why charity or foreign aid should be called accompaniment (via Karen Grepin’s Global Health Blog):

“Accompaniment” is an elastic term. It has a basic, everyday meaning. To accompany someone is to go somewhere with him or her, to break bread together, to be present on a journey with a beginning and an end. There’s an element of mystery, of openness, of trust, in accompaniment. The companion, the accompagnateur, says: “I’ll go with you and support you on your journey wherever it leads; I’ll share your fate for a while. And by ‘a while,’ I don’t mean a little while.” Accompaniment is about sticking with a task until it’s deemed completed, not by the accompagnateur but by the person being accompanied.

2) The Rationally Speaking podcast interviews Holden Karnofsky, former hedge fund manager who quit his job to start his nonprofit Give Well which evaluates charities. Surprisingly, or maybe unsurprisingly, only 2% of the charities they evaluate meet their standards on evidence of effectiveness, cost-effectiveness, transparency, funding gap and monitoring and evaluation. I discovered that two organizations I give to regularly, Partners in Health and Medecins Sans Frontieres don’t get Give Well’s top ranking although they do appear in the notable charities category for strength in one of the categories in which they were evaluated. Something I really admire is that Give Well has a Mistakes category right on their front page which lists all the shortcomings and mistakes they’ve made since their inception. That takes guts and shows that their emphasis on transparency isn’t just lip service.