The point of charity is for those that are more fortunate than others to give a bit of their excess or to give up some of their own wealth or assets and have them go to those in poorer or third world countries that don’t have the same access to basic needs or resources as we do. However the human race has done what it does best and found a way for a few to pervert the system into a cash cow that will have them set for life. They do this through programs that ensure the people that they are supposedly ‘helping’ are kept poor and in need of support from these organizations which keeps them in business. While the person donating money or items may be doing so with good intentions it is through the work of these organizations that they actually end up hurting the people they desire to uplift.
Many companies, NGOs, and other non-profits will use the Marshall plan as an example for how what they are doing works and that they are helping the people in need. This fails to recognize the context of the Marshall plan and how the recipients of the aid under that policy had very different social, political, economic, and infrastructural situations than the countries that these companies are seeking to aid today. The countries that benefited from the Marshall plan already had developed industry, cities, and economies that were destroyed in world war two. The countries of today do not have the infrastructure that Europe had before the war. This is a subtle but extremely important difference in the solutions that need to be used for each of these. The only thing that Europe needed was supplies and materials to rebuild things that were destroyed before business owners could take back over in producing and working in the rebuilt areas. Many of those that lived through Europe knew how to do the jobs needed for the infrastructure and were able to reclaim their jobs as soon as the cities were rebuilt. This is different from a country like Haiti which does not have a fully developed infrastructure when the U.S. stepped in to give aid. The people did not have the education to work in a rapidly industrialized economy and were left to flounder without any support from their ‘benefactors’. This meant that as soon as the aid stopped coming they collapsed as they could not perform the same task that NGOs or other charities performed.
While it may be immediately gratifying to see that if you donate your t-shirt or an old pair of shoes they will go to a kid in need across the world, that is not the best way to help those people. While it may immediately help them in the case of emergency it is an extremely short term idea that ends up hurting the local economy in the long term. A solution to this problem would be to use money collected from donations to buy goods from local vendors and distribute them to the needy. This would still use your donations or funds meant to aid people to feed, clothe, and house those in poverty but would not destroy the local economy in the process. If there is not enough local supply you could buy what you can from the locals and then bring in enough extra from foreign exports to cover the gap of supply and demand. This would encourage the local producers to ramp up production which would increase the job supply of the local economy and improve the situation of the local population in the long term while also addressing the immediate humanitarian crises through aiding those struggling. In places looking to rebuild local companies could be hired and paid with U.S money and donations which injects cash into a struggling economy, keeps job security for those hit hardest, and allows for donators to feel good that they are still helping rebuild.
There are a few examples that do well with this tactic. One such organization is Kiva. Kiva is a non-profit that takes donations and uses them to give low or no interest loans to students and starting businesses to buy equipment and supplies needed to get off the ground. Then once the student or business starts to make money they repay the loan which goes to another beneficiary. They have done amazing in their campaign with a 98% repayment rate and the majority of their beneficiaries end up donating to the organization meaning the whole transaction was a net positive even if they charged zero percent interest in most cases. Another great case is a Christian organization that specializes in sending animals to farmers in impoverished or naturally destroyed areas after a disaster. This organization allows people to choose how much they want to donate and the corresponding amount could buy a pair of breeding animals like chickens or pigs that could be used to breed an entire stock. They could also send animals like cows that could supply milk and cheese to the local economy almost immediately. Both of these examples allowed people to donate money or assets to organizations and for it to actually help them both in the short term and long term.
