9 million children die before their fifth birthday. A woman in sub-Sahara Africa has a one-in-thirty chance of dying while giving birth. There are 25 contries where the average person is expected to live no more that fifty-five years. In India alone, more than 50 million school-going children cannot read a very simple text. The problem seems too big to intractable. We feel overwhelmed by the magnitude of the problem. A experiment in the University of Pennsylvania showed that students were given a flyers and asked them to donate to children in Africa. One flyer had the story of little girl in Africa and the other one explained the problem of a natural disaster with numbers of the scale as global problem. People were more prone to give money the flyer of the girl and felt discouraged with the second one. People are more likely to donate when they identify victims. Encouraging student to think again prompted them to be less generous to the girl, but more generous with the flyer who was giving real aid.
Whom should we believe? Those who tell us that aid can solve the problem? Or those who say that it makes things worse? There is never a shortage of compelling anecdotes, and it is always possible to find at least one to support any position. For example, the data on a couple of hundred countries in the world show that those that received more aid did not grow faster than the rest. This is often interpreted as evidence that aid does not work, but in fact, in could also mean the opposite. Perhaps the aid helped them avoid a major disaster and things would have been worse without it. We simply do not know; we are speculating on a grand scale.
Aid is only a very small part of the money that is spent on the poor every year. Most programs targeted at the world´s poor are funded on of their country’s own resources. More important than the endless debates about the rights and wrongs of aid often obscure what really matters: not so much where the money comes from, but where it goes. This is a matter of choosing the right kind of project to fund.
Poverty leads to an intolerable waste of talent. Poverty is not just a lack of money; it is not having capability to realize one´s full potential as a human being. A poor girl from Africa will probably go to school for at most a few years even if she is brilliant, and most likely wont get the nutrition to be the world-class athlete she might have been, or the funds to start a business if she has a great idea. Talking about the problems of the world without talking about some solutions is the way to paralysis rather than progress. People need to pay full price? Will people use them if they are free? If they are subsidice are they in the future be willing to pay for the net for malaria? The shift from broad general question to, much narrower ones has another advantages. Verifiable evidence in a chimera, at best a distant fantasy, at worst a distraction.
Sometimes the best options will be to do nothing, but there is no general rule here, just as there is no general principle that spending money always works. Ideology, ignorance, and intertia are on the part of the expert, the aid worker, or the local policy maker, often explain why policies fail and why aid does not have the effect it should.
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