A Personal Evolution in Effective Altruism

My experience with Damayan Migrant Workers Association crystallized the belief that a better world must be informed by those negatively affected by today’s exploitative policies and practices. My role in this movement is to amplify the perspectives of marginalized people in the conversation about how to effectively make a better world. I definitely did not begin with this philosophy when I was first exposed to the plight of Filipina migrant domestic workers in Abu Dhabi. Over the course of the last decade, I have had to distance myself from the philosophy that underpins neoliberal global development and shaped my privileged upbringing.

My existence and perspective were formed by the same destabilizing force of global development that I plan to deconstruct in my career as a journalist. I grew up in Abu Dhabi, UAE thanks to my parents’ careers in international fiscal policy and trade. My peers from 50+ countries also came from families considered “elite” in their respective home country. Under the guise of effective altruism, our teachers hammered into us that capitalist global development was the world’s salvation and we were its rightful guides. In particular, our teachers instilled in us that global poverty and climate change would be solved if we realized the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Convinced, I carried this torch to the school’s administration and successful advocated for the inclusion of global citizenship the school’s mission statement.

In pursuit of fulfilling my duties as a global citizen I pursued sustainable development goal 6 (clean water and sanitation) and 12 (sustainable consumption and production) in high school. I collaborated with a migrant worker labor camp to install their first and only drinking water dispenser. The camp, on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi housed 400 women from the Philippines, India, Bangladesh and Pakistan who worked as janitors. The collaboration taught me more than it helped the women, as any initiative designed by an oppressor harmfully does. As a 16-year-old I learned that development forcibly displaced these women and worsened their health. It revealed the true underpinning of the UN sanctioned philosophy: exploitation of the global south is the righteous cost of increasing economic growth.

This was the first transformative reckoning I had with my philosophy of global citizenship. My formal and informal education of the last six years has focused on what philosophy and practices should society (myself included) embody to make a better world?