Charity is something that we are all pushed to give to, in life whether you are religious or not we are advised to give anywhere from 0.7-5% of our annual income to charity. Which is a reasonable ask because really that isn't a huge amount of overall earning and if everyone was to do so that would add up to vast sums of money.
There are tons of different charities out there that cover almost anything you could think of ranging from small local charities to large global organisations and when it comes to charity it can be really hard to decide who to give your money to and what cause you want to help. Personally I would be much more likely to give to a local charity to help the community of my country because I believe in helping yourself before helping others as if you help yourself first you will be more equipped to help others in the future however extreme natural disasters and similar events require a different outlook.
Within many charities you will find corrupt individuals using the veil of helping others to really only help themselves and one of the reasons I think this is so prolific, similarly to religion, is because charities are taxed differently.
A charity won't be taxed on the majority of income as long as it is used for charitable purposes, however you can claim a lot going toward charitable purposes because you can easily say you are using the money to fund yourself getting to 'x' location or you need money for something so you can be better prepared to help the cause, really you can claim a lot of things to be indirectly or directly needed to help the actual charitable cause when in actuality people can use the money for themselves.
Also in the UK we have gift aid which essentially means for every £1 you give to charity through gift aid the charity can gain an extra 25 pence. depending on the tax you pay, which is more money corrupt people could claim for themselves.
There are just a huge number of loopholes that people can take advantage of to gain more money for themselves which directly takes away from the original charitable cause.
It can also be very hard to find out how much of the money you give actually goes to the cause you want to help because we all know advertising can easily mislead people. It can be nigh on impossible to really find out what money is being used for and we can tell that something funny must be going on when millions if not billions are given for a certain cause and nothing actually changes.
The two most recent large examples I can think of are both to do with the Haiti earthquake in 2010. Both examples are relatively well documented now however blatantly things like this are still go one. The Red Cross one of the largest most highly regarded charities in the world were one of the front runners in aid relief to Haiti, or so we thought. It turns out that with the nearly half a billion dollars of donations they built 6 permanent homes in the five years after the earthquake even though they promised over 100 thousand, they did also provide a lot of other aid however not even close to what they should have done with the amount of money donated.
Another one of the largest charities in the world Oxfam continue to be in the news and have just been banned from Haiti due to a sexual misconduct scandal that I don't particularly want to go into detail about because there is now the information out there and I think what happened was awful. These are two of the biggest charities in the world that show wide spread corruption, misconduct and blatant greed.
To end extreme world poverty is something that seems unreachable however there is a lot of information to show that it is not only possible but that by now we should have made more progress. There are only estimates for how much it would cost annual to stop extreme poverty and it is somewhere in the range of under $200 billion, which at first sounds like a lot but in the bigger picture it is only a drop in the ocean.
It is estimated that around $400 billion is given to charity each year in recent years, now of course this goes to all sorts of causes not just ending poverty but even if under a quarter of this goes toward ending extreme poverty we should see more change than we do.
When you look at how much is given toward ending extreme poverty and how many people each year are actually helped to get out of extreme poverty you can see that a lot of money is not going to where it should go.
That is why I don't give to charity on a regular basis because when you look at the figures you can tell that the money people give often never reaches the cause they want to help and we should see less people in extreme poverty than we do. You also see many cases of people like Akon, a rapper, bringing electricity to millions of people in a relatively short amount of time and it just makes you think how are charities not making more of a difference?
I am not entirely opposed to giving to charity and I think it is an amazing thing to do but I just think that people need to be a lot more careful when choosing what organization they give money to because you don't want to be funding some already rich persons bank account rather than people, animals or environments in serious need of aid and if people are more careful with how they give money to we will likely see less corruption in these areas.
In the future I would like to get more involved with charity and work for/start my own organisation however I don't know what area I would like to get involved in or what cause I would want to help. Personally growing up in relatively rural areas I would like to do some environmental projects though it can be difficult to get the motivation to make a change.
