To aid or not to aid

Studying aid’s effectiveness yields surprising conclusions

In 2010, a devastating earthquake struck the island nation of Haiti, south of Cuba, and international organizations rushed in to give aid. Among other groups, the United Nations sent a force of UN peacekeepers to rebuild the country, but along with their aid, they also brought Cholera, causing an ongoing outbreak that has resulted in hundreds of thousands of cases and over 8,000 deaths (Archibold). Haiti is not Africa, but it is a reminder that aid, while often highly beneficial, can also go very wrong. New research suggests that basic changes in how aid is distributed and targeted could significantly improve its effectiveness. Understanding how to best make use of foreign aid is key to Africa’s development and the elimination of extreme poverty across the continent.

Frequently, aid organizations avoid working with governments, fearing that aid dollars would be lost to corruption or fraud. However, this can often be counterproductive. In an article in Foreign Affairs, Paul Farmer finds that aid programs that work with governments are less likely to lose money to fraud, not more(Farmer). In addition, working with institutions and not around them means solutions are far more likely to be sustainable, instead of unraveling once organizations withdraw their support. Yet aid organizations, either unaware of or unconvinced by this analysis, tend to stay away from collaborating with public institutions. This is the mistake many countries made in Haiti: international organizations bypassed the government, which meant that when peacekeepers unwittingly introduced Cholera, the country lacked functioning sanitation infrastructure that could limit the spread of the water-borne disease, leading to a vicious outbreak (Archibold).

Typically, organizations give in-kind donations of goods such as cattle or services such as job training, instead of simply giving the needy cash, yet tudies suggest that counterintuitively, direct cash donations are the most effective interventions. One reason is the overhead: the well-known charity Heifer International is widely known for giving cattle to needy families, a seemingly smart and targeted intervention. Yet Heifer’s own bookkeeping tells a different story: to donate a single $300 cow, it accrues overhead costs of $3000, money which cannot be used to help other families (Blattman). Furthermore, individuals know their needs better than organizations, and studies find that those given cash spend it effectively. When a program in Uganda began giving cash to individuals instead of job training, they paid for and took far fewer training classes, while growing their incomes by over 40 percent in five years, far more than most vocational programs’ success rates (Blattman). The perception that Western donors know best severely hampers development by denying poor families the agency to determine and meet their own vital needs.

It’s impossible to overstate how important aid is to diplomacy, development and growth, yet aid organizations have undercut the effectiveness of their own aid through failure to establish and follow best practices. As they become aware of their mistakes, the organizations are rapidly improving in effectiveness and transforming the aid sector as we know it.

Works Cited

Archibold, Randal C., and Somini Sengupta. "U.N. Struggles to Stem Haiti Cholera Epidemic." The New York Times. The New York Times, 19 Apr. 2014. Web. 13 Mar. 2015. This article is a NY Times article about the ongoing cholera problem in Haiti. As the Times, this source is credible, though it perhaps might be better if it was more recent. This source ends up being used for my introduction, as an illustration of how aid could go wrong.

Blattman, Christopher, and Paul Niehaus. "Show Them the Money." Foreign Affairs. N.p., May 2014. Web. 13 Mar. 2015. This article discusses in detail the research on direct cash transfers as a form of payment and finds they have promise. This article was key because it became one of my two main points, along with the one about institutions.

Farmer, Paul. "Rethinking Foreign Aid." Foreign Affairs. N.p., 12 Dec. 2013. Web. 13 Mar. 2015. This article discusses in-depth various techniques for foreign aid and their effectiveness. Its point about the need to work with instutions became my first main point, and is thus key to the article. I believe this source is credible because Foreign Affairs is a respected magazine.