What do the extreme poor actually want? Qualitative EA research in Rwanda and Uganda

In which an EA goes to Africa, asks a ton of questions, then writes about it.

Here’s a series of posts summarizing what I learned and experienced:

• Why you shouldn’t trust developing world surveys, including the one I did
• I asked the extreme poor about their experience with charities and this is what they said
• What’s it like living in a benevolent dictatorship? My experience in Rwanda
• “Do you eat cats in Canada?” and other interesting conversations I had in Rwanda
• How do the poor feel about infant mortality
• Do the poor prefer university or primary education?
  
• How much meat do the rural poor eat in Rwanda

If you don’t want to miss the next installments and want to stay up to date with my research in general, you can subscribe to my newsletter here, follow me on Twitter, Facebook, or my YouTube channel where I summarize what I’m reading and convert quality written content into video and audio format. 

Background

I spent a week living with a family in a rural village in Rwanda, living in their hut, working on the farm, and asking them a million strange (EA) questions, like:

• How satisfied are you with your life on a scale of one to ten?
• If you could save the life of one baby or give ten children an education, which would you do? How about one thousand children?
• Do you think pigs can feel pain?

I also spent a month and a half in Rwanda and Uganda more generally, visited a fish farm, and sat and watched a lot of pigs and chickens, much to the villagers’ bemusement. I did this ground research to get a more qualitative sense of the problems and how best to help from an EA perspective. 

Epistemic disclaimer: everything about this is incredibly uncertain. This was just me spending a month and a half in a small part of Africa. My very first post is about how very limited all of this information is. Personally, this whole trip brought me twenty steps closer to complete epistemic nihilism, but for those of you who still have hope, here it is.

I’ll tag all of the ones that refer to animal welfare so you can read or avoid those according to your preferences.