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Comment by onetimemanytime | Hacker News Reader

Instead of donating to feel good, wish it was easy for people in rich countries to buy someone a cow, change the roof, pay for a kid's school etc etc. Things that costs as little as a few hundred dollars but can change a life.

Red Cross should shunned by all, no TV time during emergencies.

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There is an organization that focuses on this which has been quite successful as far as I know.

https://www.kiva.org/

The idea is micro loans directly to people who want to do something like buy a cow.

"Kiva loans have a historical repayment rate of about 97% (this number fluctuates slightly so check Kiva's homepage for the current rate)"

When you receive the money back you can then make another micro loan to help someone else out.

Kiva has also seen some controversy.

Read http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/14/world/14microfinance.html and Kiva's response at https://pages.kiva.org/blog/new-york-times-article-on-microf...

Thanks for pointing this out to me! It's disappointing to hear that, but after reading through the Kiva's response I understand some of the difficulty. They're certainly not ideal but seem like a solid choice compared to most of the other organizations out there that are completely opaque as to what is actually done with the money.

easier said than done, but imagine the satisfaction of a US middle class person spending $480 to cover the yearly tuition to a poor but bright student in X country? Nothing goes to support a gazillion "charity" managers.

I understand that fraud, nepotism etc etc all get in the way.

> US middle class person spending $480 to cover the yearly tuition to a poor but bright student in X country?

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)

The concept of adopting someone in a poor country and sending them money was a thing at least 40-50 years ago, and if people (such as in this thread) no longer remember that it was a thing, I'm guessing it's because it became known as a large scale scam and people got disillusioned.

I think this is a really good idea and would probably make for a good small startup idea. For example, setup a charity where people directly donate to people and have the charity document everything with video/images and so on. People would definitely donate just so they can have the video/images of it (for social media) and for just overall feel good aspect of it. Just imagine how cool it would be if you could buy a goat for a rural impoverished African and get to see a picture of the goat and the person you helped. That would be pretty cool to me! I don't know why charities wouldn't already do this. Lots of people donate money out of personal benefit (the ego stimulation of knowing you're helping to make a difference in the world).

kiva.org

"Just imagine how cool it would be if you could buy a goat for a rural impoverished African and get to see a picture of the goat and the person you helped"

This was a thing at least two generations ago if not more. Have people utterly forgotten? Maybe it would be good to research why its popularity waned.

> wish it was easy for people in rich countries to buy someone a cow, change the roof, pay for a kid's school etc etc.

GiveDirectly does something very much like that. It's not quite a one-to-one link (there is a bit of planning involved so that they can do research on the effectiveness of their programs), but still, a very high percentage of what folks donate to them is paid directly to people living in extreme poverty, with little overhead. They have researched what the money is used for, and almost all of that is for either education or acquiring durable capital like you describe.

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