Norah cont.

It's pretty likely that if nothing else changes she'll be married off shortly after hitting puberty. The next school year starts in Jan, but I won't be able to be here and take care of her until she's finished school, so I can't by myself make sure she goes to school.

I thought about maybe enrolling her in some kind of program, like World Vision or something like that. But if world vision is the best option, what am I doing with Engineers without Borders?

It... See More’s a really tough issue because the resounding sentiment is that child sponsorship programs are bad development. From what I've heard the two big reasons Child Sponsorship isn’t good are these:

a) It's extremely paternalistic and they portray a very negative view of Africa: That it is full of starving kids with distended bellies, flies all over them, just sitting on the ground waiting for someone from the Developed World to rescue them. This is not productive to what needs to happen in the interaction between the West and Africa. My friend wrote about this on his now famous blog

b) A development worker driving around taking picture of children, handing out soccer balls, delivering and sending correspondence letters, etc. has absolutely nothing to do with the development of either Africa or that child. Yet a good portion of their time is spent doing this. Worse still, the performance indicators for the staff in this system are written around these activities: How many soccer balls did you distribute? Do you have recent photos of all of the children you’re responsible for etc.

So if I have major problems with Child Sponsorship on a large scale, why do I want to do it on a small scale myself?

Child Sponsorship and NGO's in general:

The other major factor is that these organizations are often simply not that well run. As far as I can tell, BRAC (Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee) is one of the best run NGO’s in the world, just so I’m not being totally negative :)

Here is the crux of it all. There are two problems at the core of this:... See More

1. We, in the Western world don’t care. We honestly don’t. When there is a national election, how big of a factor is policy on international development? It isn’t. Because of that, our politicians don’t care about it, and worse yet they know nothing about it. Worse still, we , average Canadians know nothing and are thus completely unable to hold anyone accountable. Fred Crowell said something that rang too true to me. “How do you spell love? T-I-M-E. You spend your time on what you love. Do you say you love your family? How much time do you spend with them? Do you say you don’t love TV? How much time do you spend watching TV?” Do we love Africans? How much time have we spent learning about how to be effective in our contribution to them?

2. Which leads me to the next point. We suck at international development. If we didn’t we would have some kind of results for the money and decades we’ve spent trying. The key motivations and feedback systems are backwards, and this extends far beyond Child Sponsorship programs. Here’s a healthy feedback system:
I buy a TV from SuperStore. I take it home and it works for a short time and then breaks. I return it to SuperStore, yell at the customer care person and get my money back. SuperStore get’s 60% of their TV’s from that company returned so they stop buying TV’s from that company. The company loses lots of business because of low quality products and improves the quality from this point on.

This is actually three healthy feedback systems. Consumer, retailer and producer and they all work.

Here’s an unhealthy feedback system:
Canadians (individuals and politicians) give money to an international charity. Canadians don’t know what good development work is, so we ask things like “How many cents out of every dollar go to the Africans? Is this sustainable or will this project still be doing the same thing in 10 years?” The charity is run by people who have never lived in a village and thus understand very little about the problems they’re trying to solve. They also don’t trust their field staff so they give them a checklist of things to accomplish to make sure they’re using the money well. “How many training sessions did you run? How many men attended? How many women? How long did it take you to give out the soccer balls you received? Did you hand out all the flyers on HIV/AIDS?” The field staff give out flyers written in english to illiterate people, run training sessions that don’t actually train anyone, give out fertilizer and seeds as incentives, give out soccer balls and check off their list that everything has been completed on time and give it back to the charity. The charity compiles all of this into a fancy flyer with pie charts about how little money they spend on anything other than training sessions and soccer balls and give it to Canadians (individuals and politicians) and get more donations. Had they spent any money on monitoring the effectiveness of their training programs instead of the attendance, they would know that they need to change and how. The problem is that there is no motivation build into the system for them to do this.

The reason they don’t monitor the effectiveness is because it doesn’t matter in this feedback loop. We aren’t asking for it, we’re asking for cents/dollar spent in Africa. It’s also a lot more complicated to measure if you actually taught someone something than to measure how many people attended.

When I got to Zambia (a few months after Christmas) I read an article in the paper about the cattle that World Vision gave out as Christmas gifts. Most of them died because the people they were given to were too poor to afford vaccinations and medications. Of course World Vision doesn’t report this to Canadians, and aren’t motivated to measure this, in fact, it’s in their best interest not to know this, because then they don’t have to tell us and lose donations in the future.

I would much rather see 10cents/dollar spent well on development than 90cents/dollar spent ineffectively.

It's frustrating because we only want to help children. There's nothing wrong with wanting to help children, they are completely innocent, but at what point (or age) do we stop caring about people like Norah and want to help the younger ones?

Like I said before, there is nothing ... See Morewrong with wanting to help children, the problem is with focusing help at children instead of adults. Children don't do anything, they aren't the economic force of the country, they don't care for other people, they are just kids, as they should be! Parents, care for children, have jobs and are the group that return the most out of an investment (or donation).

If you want to help kids, help their parents, they're the ones most motivated to care for them and in the best position to do so.

All that being said, if there was one direct thing worth giving money to it's schools. It sucks to meet someone, a child, teenager, parent in their 20's or 30's that want to go to school/university but can't because of fees! (Quality) Education makes a massive difference in everyday decisions!