Ending world poverty efficiently

Reading Peter Singer's The Life You Can Save: acting now to end world poverty, I'm pleased to see that someone else recognises the importance of solving social problems as efficiently as possible. It's not a given: institutions - even the best run, most dedicated - have their own priorities, of which self-perpetuation is paramount. Efficiency, as measured by improvement in well-being per dollar spent, should be an end in itself, in that optimal efficiency maximises the benefits from our scarce resources. But it is, in my view, also a means to an end, in that efficient poverty relief programmes would encourage more people to contribute to them. To quote Dr Singer: '[A]s people become more confident of the cost-effectiveness of charities, they will become more willing to give.' I haven't finished reading his book but, in it, Dr Singer quotes William Easterly:

The West spent $2.3 trillion on foreign aid over the last five decades
and still had not managed to get twelve-cent medicines to children to
prevent half of all malaria deaths. The West spent $2.3 trillion and
still had not managed to get four-dollar bed nets to poor families. …
It’s a tragedy that so much well-meaning compassion did not bring
these results for needy people. William Easterly, The White Man’s Burden, 2007

In a Social Policy Bond regime, the most important feature would be the targeted outcome, not the institution. A bond regime could target long-term goals in ways that current organisations cannot. All activities would be subordinated to the efficient achievement of the targeted goal. Existing institutional involvement would not be taken as a given: efficient organisations would thrive under a bond regime, but the less efficient would see a drop in their funding. The long-term feature of the bonds means there would be ample time to try diverse, adaptive approaches, and promote the most promising of those while, importantly, terminating those that show themselves to be inefficient. Consistent with Dr Singer's thesis, the best approach would be to issue bonds that target global poverty, with resources being channelled to wherever in the world they can do most good, regardless of the nationality, ethnicity etc of beneficiaries. A starting point could be to issue bonds targeting improvement in some refinement of the Human Development Index. For reasons I've recently given, existing bodies are unlikely to fund such bonds. Philanthropists could, in theory, but I suspect they too would not want to relinquish the control and kudos that come with dispensing large sums of money to needy people. It's certainly, and understandably, difficult for ordinary people to make suggestions along those lines to wealthy individuals, though I try.