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Comment by na85 | Hacker News Reader

>and heard plenty of great first-hand accounts of how things actually work on the ground.

I'm interested: how do things actually work on the ground?

UN people are making $1000 USD per day, NGOs spend millions on a project that leaves a town worse off than before, foreigners come in and mess with the local economy in every way they possibly can.

Aid money buys foreign rice, floods the African market with it so the locals don't grow any next year, then the problem is worse and the dependence just grows every year.

I'll write at least a chapter on all these and more in the book I'm writing about my time around Africa.

It seems to me the most sensible way to provide aid, is to hire locals to do the work. By all means have some people there to check they're doing a good job, but certainly don't replace the work the locals are doing, or you're just creating unemployment.

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.

> It seems to me the most sensible way to provide aid, is to hire locals to do the work.

Absolutely, that's step number 1.

But of course, it has a ton of negative consequences too. Firstly, lots of these people are not used to having "jobs" or even any real money. So now some of them go to work all day, which means they are away from their families. They also get a lot of money relative to everyone else, so pretty soon they're buying motorbikes, beer and touch-screen cell phones.

So now you have this segment of the community that's "Living like Americans" while everyone else is still in a mud hut. The rich people's quality of life goes down - they don't get much time with their families, they drink too much, they eat badly, they're forced to buy food because they don't have time to grow and cook it, etc. - but paradoxically everyone else wants to be like them.

Basically you start to get all the problems of "Western Society" in a society that has never really had the concept of working for someone else or money.

Then later the work dries up (project finished or more likely runs out of money before complete) and now all these people are as screwed as Americans with no jobs. They're not growing their own food, they can't support their lifestyle (motorbikes, food, toys) and suddenly become very dependent.

In essence, we just turn them into the worst of Western Society, which, from what I saw, is horrible.

The thing is, this problem is extremely, extremely hard, and basically any suggestion solution has very, very real negative consequences. That's why I suggest spending some time and thinking really, really hard about if there is anything to "fix" in the first place. It's also why I think training and possibly some education is about the only things we should be "giving". It means the transition will be much slower than if we just built it for them (or paid them to build it) but in the long run the society will be stronger and better.

Join Kiva[1]. They do exactly as you say, and they are extremely successful.

[1]: https://www.kiva.org/

That's microcredits, isn't it? Definitely one of the bigger successes in supporting development in poor countries, all the more effective because they're loans that get paid back and can be loaned out again. But I'm not sure it's a great model for rebuilding after a disaster, which requires money that's not going to be paid back.

Or so it seems to me, at least. Maybe you know something I don't.

Yep, microcredit is not a donation, so it will not work for desperate situations, but you cannot hire locals in desperate situation too. If you want to hire locals and use other locals to check the work, then situation must be controllable, and locals must be rational and accountable. Banking system must work at least. In these conditions, Kiva provides very good "result achieved"/"money spent" ratio.

However, it's your money, so you can just throw them (donate) at refuges[1] or somebody who need a housing[2], if you want that, but it's doesn't work well for local economy.

[1]: https://www.kiva.org/lend/refugees-and-i-d-ps [2]: https://www.kiva.org/lend?sector=10

Why can't money be paid back after a disaster?

I suppose it could, but do you want to? I thought the issue here was that people donate money to be spent on housing, not to be loaned on housing and then paid back.

Microcredits are great in the long run because lots of small improvements really add up. The problem with big disasters is that you need more than small improvements to fix the problem, and to expect all of that to be paid back saddles poor people (or a poor country) with a lot of debt.

At least, that's what it seems like to me, but I'm no expert on this. They seem like two very different cases that require different solutions.

Please do! I'd be very interested in reading that. Will you announce that book in one of your links in your profile?

Yes, I will. I'm theroadchoseme.com

Not OP but I presume one of the root problems is how the aid is organized. You need lot of grass roots work to actually figure out what works locally. But that's not how you progress in a western organization. You need clear project plans, then you need a budget and follow ups on the project milestones. Which is all paperwork, and not directly related to the actual effect of the project on ground.

It's like a re-enactment of the Soviet Union. Big plans, big scopes ...

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