1450 words
I once had an application from an overseas aid fund cross my desk. A group of neighborhood people wanted to gather food, clothing, glasses, money and send it to a rural village in Senegal. It had come about because a charismatic young man who had emigrated from there became a well known identity in their community. He told people about the plight of his countrymen and the conditions there, so they were anxious to help. There seemed to be little planning at that time, other than to gather the goods and send them.
Among the documents they sent me to prove their worthiness were some pages of email correspondence between them and an Australian Department of Foreign Affairs official who one of them had a connection with and who knew something about Senegal. His advice to them was to be very careful because dumping things into the wrong hands (even things like old clothes, that have little or no value in a Western country) can cause violence and social disruption in a poor, isolated village. Despite that advice, they were determined to continue their efforts. I don’t know what became of that group.
One point the diplomat failed to note is the economic consequences of this kind of aid. What happens to the village dressmakers when everyone gets their clothes for free? What happens a few years later, when the flow of overseas donations stops and there is nobody in the village who sells cheap clothes? This destruction of local industry and commerce is magnified with the bigger aid projects.
One very big project is Jeffrey Sachs’ Millenium Villages initiative. Jeff Sachs, a former child prodigy, is an economist who had some success in helping to reform Bolivia’s economy, applied the same solution to a few countries in Eastern Europe after the collapse of the Iron Curtain and then attempted to apply the same solution in what is now Russia. It became clear that it was lucky circumstance, not universal principals that had allowed his cookie-cutter solutions to succeed. Despite this failure, Sachs’ previous success had given him some excellent connections. Perhaps it is because he had suffered his first major failure that he took on an even greater project: to cure Africa of poverty.