Looking back at 2021
Thanks to Nikki Botha for their editing contributions.
2021 was our first full year of operations. During this period, we completed our six-month research phase, published three research reports, implemented our first pilot programme to support eight animal advocacy organisations across five African countries, and hired our first staff member from Nigeria.
The purpose of this review is to reflect on our work; and to live up to our values of transparency and accountability (amongst others). We hope this review will be useful to the following people:
Similar organisations in the animal advocacy and effective altruism communities - we hope that our successes (and failures) could provide useful insights to others;
Those interested in keeping up to date with AAA.
What we achieved in 2021
What we plan to do in 2022
Operational updates
Key bottlenecks and areas of improvement
How you can help
What we achieved in 2021
Our goal for 2021 was
To identify the most promising ways of strengthening the capacities of animal advocacy organisations (and individual animal advocates) in Africa; and
To assist with implementation thereof.
Research
To achieve our first goal, we conducted exploratory research to understand what is being done in the African animal advocacy movement; what are the barriers holding the movement back from developing; and what could be done to support individual advocates and organisations. While the primary purpose of our research is to inform our own decision-making, we hope that other organisations will find it useful as well.
Outcomes
We published three research reports:
We found:
A lack of funding is one of the largest bottlenecks for African animal advocacy organisations.
Funders indicated an interest in providing more funding to African animal advocacy work, but have reservations about the level of competency and effectiveness of animal advocacy organisations in Africa. There is also a general knowledge gap when it comes to understanding the most effective type of intervention in Africa.
Familiarity with effective altruism in Africa is low relative to other parts of the world.
Pilot implementation
Based on the above research findings, we ran a short pilot programme to help strengthen the funding capacities and effectiveness of African animal advocacy organisations. We supported eight African animal welfare organisations across five African countries - including those that do farmed animal welfare work.
Outcomes
We increased an average charity's awareness about relevant funding opportunities (from within and beyond the effective altruism movement) by ~40-50%. With increased awareness, charities have a larger pool of funding opportunities to apply for in the future.
We provided feedback on six grant applications before submission to funders. With better grant writing ability, charities will be able to apply this skill to future applications and increase their chances of securing funding over time.
We connected four volunteers with five organisations to help create and improve their web and social media presence for free. This included setting up technical financial infrastructure to enable them to receive online donations that were not accessible to them previously. With a better online presence, charities will be able to promote their work, increase their credibility as an organisation, and grow their scale by attracting more talent and funding over time.
We influenced organisations in their strategic, organisational, and fundraising plans. For example, we helped an organisation with financial planning so they were able to divert more resources across their public outreach efforts (humane education) to reach communities that were receiving less attention previously. With these structures and systems in place, charities will be able to prepare for growth, make better decisions, and focus on important work.
Capacity-building in the wider animal advocacy community
Outcomes
We created capacity-building databases consisting of information and resources relevant for African animal welfare organisations and advocates to pursue knowledge excellence The databases may also be useful to the wider animal advocacy community.
We premiered our webinar series to kickstart further discussion on animal advocacy in Africa.
We appeared as guests on two podcasts - Sentientism, Safe’s Animal Matters - and presented our work at several local Effective Altruism groups (e.g. EA Ireland, EA Toronto).
What we plan to do in 2022
Programme implementation
We learnt many valuable lessons from implementing our pilot programme and from feedback we received from organisations we supported. Based on these learnings and feedback, we are now offering improved versions of our programme with iterations, such as:
Helping organisations increase general organisational capacity and effectiveness. During our pilot, our main goal was to help organisations increase their capacity in fundraising. Over time, we learnt that several organisations lack fundamental aspects that impact their likelihood of success in fundraising. As an example, many have not considered the effectiveness of their intervention or their approach to impact evaluation. Our current programme will start leaning towards helping organisations develop these crucial aspects (strategy, communications, and operations) of an effective animal advocacy nonprofit so we can help them help animals as much as possible.
Providing different levels of support based on differing preferences of engagement. We discovered that there is no one-size-fits-all solution to engaging with organisations. Organisations tend to be at different growth stages and have a different capacity which affects their preferences for receiving support. In our current programme, we plan to trial three versions of providing support:
Open-ended model with little structure - depending on their needs, organisations are free to reach out to us over a longer, open-ended timeline on an ad hoc or project basis.
Consultancy model - we will be working closely with organisations as temporary ‘members’. We were interested in trialling this model in order to build a better rapport with organisations; and have a better understanding of how they operate and the challenges they face. This will enable us to to offer and and implement workable solutions to these challenges.
Intermediate model - this will fall between the above two models. Organisations will meet us approximately once every two weeks, tentatively over six months.
Offering stipends to cover low cost, high expected value items. Many organisations struggle with operational issues (physical equipment, web hosting, Internet connection) that if fixed, have seemingly high expected value. We have set aside a portion of our budget to help organisations solve these issues.
Running the programme over a longer timeline. We ran our pilot for four months between July and November 2021. We realised this timeframe was not sufficient in supporting organisations (and in collecting data for impact evaluation), as there is more we can do to assist. We are therefore running our current programme for six months, in the hope of extending should there be promise to scale up.
This year, we also plan to experiment with other ways of working depending on our funding. As an example, we are considering re-granting to African animal advocacy organisations, as we have built an understanding of the space (including who the organisations are and what they do), and have actually worked with a number of organisations through our programme. To collect more contextual data and improve our programme, we aim to visit these organisations in-person to shadow their work in the field; build rapport; understand the challenges they are facing from an objective point of view; and observe any changes in capacity due to our intervention. It will also allow us to be more involved in building the effective animal advocacy movement in Africa.
Research
We have a research project in the pipeline to compare farmed animal advocacy interventions across different regions of Africa. We are comparing four interventions (individual/public outreach, institutional outreach, capacity building, and direct help) with the purpose of informing practitioners and African animal advocacy organisations which intervention(s) seem best in helping farmed animals. We aim to publish this within the next two months.
Simultaneously, we are interested in scoping out the possibility of replicating our intervention in other Global South countries, starting with those in Asia. As such, we are conducting scoping research to determine whether our intervention is worth replicating in Asia. We are specifically looking at whether the problem is important, neglected, and similar enough to African animal advocacy organisations that our intervention should and can be implemented to support Asian animal advocacy organisations. If research findings suggest that the intervention has the potential to be highly impactful and useful for similar organisations in Asia, we will be piloting an implementation of our programme there.
Operational Updates
Key bottlenecks and areas of improvement
Monitoring and evaluating our impact
Although we track intermediate metrics (such as how satisfied organisations are with our support), we ultimately care about the number of animals affected by our work. It is difficult to ascertain the impact of our work with a high degree of certainty as our theory of change depends on the actions of other organisations.
Our work -> organisations’ work -> animals helped
Thus tracking our impact relies on our ability to predict and monitor the decision-making and behaviour of the organisations we support. We currently do not have any numbers to share about animals helped as our current approach of tracking impact (collecting anecdotal feedback and survey responses from organisations about our pilot programme) is, on its own, insufficient. The pilot has shown some early, promising signs of success, but there remains a degree of uncertainty about how the work translates into actual impact.
This similarly applies when considering counterfactual impact. It is difficult to know whether an outcome would have occurred without our support. It seems likely that organisations would have eventually discovered a resource or opportunity, made a connection, or carried out an action even if we did not exist. However, we likely did speed up the process by which these would have occurred.
We have several ideas to improve our approach to monitoring & evaluation:
Engaging funders to understand the counterfactuals (would they have provided grants to a specific organisation that did not receive our support), the quality of applications they have been receiving from African organisations, and whether our work has influenced their decision on providing more funding to organisations.
Collecting longitudinal data by providing support to organisations over a longer time frame and measuring the long-term effects of our support.
Contracting an external evaluator to assess our impact after one year of our programme.
Our impact evaluation determines our strategy and allows us to understand how our intervention can be sustainably implemented with maximum impact. If our evaluation proves otherwise, we are open to pivoting towards different ways in which we can continue to provide value and help African animal advocacy organisations and the whole movement develop towards effectiveness.
Hiring (more of) the right people
We set a high bar for the people we hire. Our ethos is to hire people who are better than our co-founders in areas that we are not (or have the potential to be better with some training). Finding talented advocates who are mission-aligned from African countries has been difficult for us. We would also like to be able to hire more people but cannot afford to, due to lack of funds.