Red Cross Raised Half a Billion Dollars for Haiti ­and Built Six Homes (2015)

I too heard that African farmers have been going bankrupt due to free rice from foreign aid after Live Aid and similar projects. Better to give locals money to buy rice from local farmers for a better price, and important food if that's not enough. Or use your foreign aid money to buy food from local farmers first, supplemented with foreign food if it's not enough, and distribute that. But keeping it as part of the local economy, rather than completely replacing the local economy, seems like a much better idea.

If you want to build houses in Haiti, hire locals to build those houses.

I agree that there can be a charity can cause a vicious cycle by damaging local industry. However, it is pointless to talk about charity in isolation without considering other factors such as the harm caused by trade policies of developed nations (to be fair, is in their national interest), "exploitation"[1] of resources by MNC with no meaningful value-addition in host country, as well as a general lack of accountability among African political leaders.

Cutting all aid seems like an easy solution, but it won't spur development of local farms or industries if they are undercut by subsidized goods from abroad. The 'difficult' solution, but more likely to work, would be overhauling leadership culture, and getting a fairer trade system in place (e.g. no farm subsidies) - sadly, I do not see any appetite for either due to self-interest among the actors.

1. scare-quotes because raw resources are extracted and paid for, but the value addition is done abroad. Ghana produces a huge chunk of the world's cocoa, but most of the profits are captured by European chocolateers.

- Has the most effect on QALY (quality-adjusted life year) per dollar. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-adjusted_life_year

- Whether the organization can effectively handle money given to it (i.e. it actually can quickly scale use of it - UBI-esque things like GiveDirectly seemingly fall on the higher end of scalability but effectiveness may still be up for debate)

- Givewell (when one donates to them for the discretionary grantmaking option) tries to allocate money for grants over time for what they see as the most effective grant based on their research / current needs of the organizations seeking funding. See https://www.givewell.org/about/FAQ/discretionary-grantmaking for more info. Also intriguing is their 2018 giving spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1EM0CCg9tvCCtEoY-QVAi...

This is my personal (and verry rough) take, honestly recommend reading the book - your local library probably has a copy in digital/audiobook formats. The book generally recommends against donating to disaster relief comparing the 2011 Japan earthquake to Haiti, though the point in that advice was largely that disasters in developed countries tend to attract more noise/news coverage than ones in other areas of the world.

If you're really lazy and just want to listen to some music in this vein, try https://lostboyevsky.bandcamp.com/album/existential-risk

US could send in fact send non military; engineers, etc, but it will viewed with local suspicion and may make things worst (assaults, sabotage by either side or third party). Even US is suspicious of foreigners building US infrastructure (ie Huawei).

When there's so much distrust of US by Haitians and US likewise doesn't trust Haitian government with funds, there are quasi government organisations such as UN: https://www.un.org/un70/en/content/70ways/index.html

Even they have had issues in Haiti.

You can always pay taxes.

And you start getting all kinds of perverse situations. What happens if they have funding to take $1 million in donations, but they get $2 million? Do they return donations?

What happens if they can't get enough admin donations? Do they stop work? Regardless of how much money they have in the bank, waiting to go to good causes?

Then there's the issue of splitting your fund raising efforts. Instead of telling everyone 5% of their donation is going to admin. You have to have a distinct team of admin fund raisers.

So to answer your question I would care if their admin spend was high. And the current set up obscures what that spend is.

I can understand “we genuinely wanted to help but we’re too incompetent to action on our promises”. That’s morally much better than “we intended to deceive from the outset and other people’s suffering is just the cover we need to line our own pockets”.

So, the U.S. has its own student loan bubble, that many economists believe is related to the increased availability of student loans AND/OR charitable donations to scholarship funds;

Is there evidence that covering 3rd world tuition doesn't create further class divide, and/or increase the cost of tuition in general? And that perceivably "bright" students are already often the best off.

Also realize that in many places in the world with $480/year tuition are receiving education from sources that get at least some of their funding or staff from NGOs; and that in many cases, "education" is in many cases separating children from their families -- and potentially (though the result dithers morally) decreasing the entire family's ability to be self sufficient by removing productive workers (in a culture where minimum, age of laborers in lower than the U.S. 16)