Follow the money

I have been.
For a while, I looked very carefully at how much came in, how much was swallowed up in sundry expenses, overheads, consultancy fees, and so on. And, how much in the end landed in the communities that needed aid. AND, how much of that actually was effective.

Some switch in my head flipped, and I stopped with most of my memberships and contributions after that. Now, I give money to the very small projects, and whenever possible I donate directly.

So much of the aid circus is a scam. Some of this, I have seen from a front row seat. It makes me quite furious.

This bit in an article on Haiti, reminded me again of the innate dishonesty that permeates so much of the NGO world. The only thing that keeps the system going, is the untrammeled idealism of so many hard working volunteers and fundraisers, who make sure it won't fail.

Haitians are now paying the price for this feeble and corrupt government structure because there is nobody to co-ordinate the most rudimentary relief and rescue efforts. Its weakness is exacerbated because aid has been funnelled through foreign NGOs. A justification for this is that less of the money is likely to be stolen, but this does not mean that much of it reaches the Haitian poor. A sour Haitian joke says that when a Haitian minister skims 15 per cent of aid money it is called "corruption" and when an NGO or aid agency takes 50 per cent it is called "overheads".

Many of the smaller government aid programmes and NGOs are run by able, energetic and selfless people, but others, often the larger ones, are little more than rackets, highly remunerative for those who run them. In Kabul and Baghdad it is astonishing how little the costly endeavours of American aid agencies have accomplished. "The wastage of aid is sky high," said a former World Bank director in Afghanistan. "There is real looting going on, mostly by private enterprises. It is a scandal." Foreign consultants in Kabul often receive $250,000 to $500,000 a year, in a country where 43 per cent of the population try to live on less than a dollar a day.

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