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Comment by fsckboy | Hacker News Reader

i have friends who did NGO aid work in Africa and they said their work developing potable water sources was often undone. build a village a clean watersource, a small dam or a well, and the rival next village over would get jealous, and some night they'd come over and destroy it. this was a couple decades ago.

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Dumb question but are there NGOs that also hand them AK-47 and show them how to defend themselves? You can't give people infrastructure in a place with no effective government and expect them to defend it with pleasant words. If you have nice things you have to also have a plan to defend nice things by the sword, if you do not you're actually inviting terrible things to happen. A lot of these NGO seem to focus on holistic approach, education, female empowerment but that's worth exactly 0 (actually, less than zero) if your community cannot defend itself and the next bumfuck warlord can just stroll into your now rather interesting town and rape everyone, off the men, and take all the shit.

Also I don't understand why, but your comment defaults to collapsed. That is a shame as it's highly relevant.

that is so evil.

That combined with the fact that there is no culture of maintaining things at a community level. People from first world countries come in and build bridges/wells/etc and then they break down due to misuse or just age and there is no effort to maintain them, due to the ingrained culture that's taught from birth.

The USA has spent billions of dollars in the last century on trying to help African countries, but all it's realistically really led to is just more people in need in Africa. What happens to all those people that have become dependant on the aid when the US economy crumbles and there is no more money to send overseas?

The HDI of African countries generally has gone up since the 90's (although not all countries):

https://statbase.org/datasets/indexes-and-ratings/human-deve...

Western people suggesting Africa is an un-helpable backwater has been common for decades. Bill Gates likes to talk about all the progress made, in fact.

I don't know if you've seen the USA in the past few decades but there's no culture of maintaining things at a community level here either. We've got infrastructure crumbling all over the place.

“My pothole takes a month to get fixed” != “My community has no power or drinking water”

In the US it's not potholes at issue, it's major bridges on crucial transport corridors being well past their use by dates and not being funded to replace / upgrade / maintain etc.

Please don't trivialise: https://infrastructurereportcard.org/ https://www.asce.org/publications-and-news/civil-engineering...

You're correct that this inability to upkeep infrastructure is in stark contrast to those many places about the globe that have never had electricity or water delivered to home dwellings.

Such places typically get by generation to generation and look after what they do have .. and are often removed as communities from what outsiders seeking local community resources see as necessary to support the take over of local community and imposition of third party extraction.

You're correct that China hires US PMC's to secure the take over of generational land rights and build roads to export "water" in the form of agricultural products, etc. You're correct that local communities see unsecured roads as a resource of good gravel, etc to be used.

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