Does charity in the developing world do more harm than good?

YES- Edd Aspbury

We are lead to believe that charity is a most noble and deeply humanitarian act. No-one can dispute the very real help that charity provides. But if we look how large scale, global charity functions and the motivations that prompt it, a less rosy image appears. Charity distorts the reality of the very situation it aims to alleviate and thus obscures the cause of the situation. Charity also often relieves the creators of the problem in the first place and those most able to alleviate it of any responsibility and transfers it onto the least responsible and those with the least means to contribute.

One of the first problems of charity is that its pitch to us is totally de-contextualised. The message is ‘Don’t think about the events and actions that led to these people being desperately poor. Don’t think!  Act!’ Here then, the dangerous question is why are these people poor in the first place? Why can’t their own governments provide for them in times of crisis, as ours can? ‘Well, they’re just poor, that’s they way it is. There’s no reason for it.’ Here we have to own up to our complicity in ‘Third World’ poverty. Land bought up to grow our coffee, to build a factory that makes our fashionable clothes, to drill for oil that powers our expensive cars and so on, deprives these countries of the ability to subsist. Much of the profit made by exploiting cheap land and labour goes straight out of the country and a fraction goes into the back pockets of the government and officials. Little or none finds its way to the people at the bottom. With crippling debts owed to us in the West, no financial reserves, weak, corrupt or fantastically inefficient or inadequate governments, no ability to be subsist; it only takes a minor problem to become a catastrophe in many of these countries. Charity is a temporary treatment, not the cure.

Many large companies ostentatiously give to charity or run charities. Companies like Wal-Mart and Microsoft, who are themselves complicit in the focusing of more and more of the world’s wealth onto fewer and fewer people and maintaining the ruthlessness of globalisation, give prodigiously. Again, before we laud them for this as the ‘human face of capitalism’ let us ask a question: companies are supposed to be profit-making machines, why do their investors permit them to throw money away on charity without consulting them? To enhance their image. And poor kids in Africa getting a well for their village enhances one’s image better than housing American homeless or providing pensions and healthcare plans for employees.

Well, enough about these companies lest we begin to demonise them for simply doing what they should be doing. What about us? Surely we give for good motives? There are two negative sentiments that giving to charity provokes. First, it can often seem like the problem has been solved – ‘we raised enough money; they’ve got a well now. Job done.’ Unfortunately though, this is rarely the case. Second, our contribution seemingly entitles us not to think about the problem. We buy out of having to think about it – a box on a moral CV has been ticked and we can move on.

Aside from corporate image enhancement, the burden of charity often falls to those with the least means available to alleviate it, the richer someone is the less they are likely give. There are companies that turn over billions in profit each year and people who earn so much they can live off the interest. Yet the burden of global charity often falls to those lower down on the economic ladder. And when not enough money is raised, whose fault is it? The fault of the ridiculously wealthy who didn’t give? The fault of the pharmaceutical companies which sell Aids medicine at a lower price to Europe that they do to sub-Saharan Africa? No, the fault lies with those who didn’t give enough, with those who could have given. That is, you.

What these countries need is not Bob Geldof handing out sweets but infrastructure: an infrastructure that will make it possible for these countries to deal efficiently with their problems and create self-sufficient economies, rather than having to rely on handouts from large corporations seeking to enhance their image or from guilt-tripped average Joes. For this to happen, global charity needs to be depoliticized and de-moralized. In the fantastic novel The Notebook by Agota Kristoff, the two boys feed a starving deserter from the war. When he praises them for their kindness they reply that they weren’t being kind, they did it because he absolutely needed it. This is where true charity lies. Without political, marketing or moral beneficial ‘side-effects’; simply giving because it is absolutely needed.

NO- Laura Styles and Alice Anderson-Gough

You know that horrible sick feeling that you get in your stomach when you’re nervous? When you feel like at any moment you might have to whip out a paper bag and start hyperventilating into it? Well that’s how I felt on my first day as a teaching assistant with Tenteleni. I thought that perhaps I had made some terrible mistake, that perhaps volunteering abroad wasn’t for me. By the end of my two-month stay in the rural township of Komatipoort however, I practically had to be strapped into the bus home.

You hear ‘Volunteering in Africa’ and you might think:  gap year, holiday, rip-off, or Angelina Jolie. It might make you think of unequal power relation, exploitation and unsustainability. Volunteering abroad has come under lots of attack of late, largely due to the expansion of money-making gap year companies. Tenteleni, you’ll be glad to know, is none of the above. Neither is it a type of pasta, or an exotic travel agent. What it is however, is a UK-based charity which sends university students to act as teaching assistants in sub-Saharan Africa.

It sounds incredibly cheesy but volunteering overseas really does give you a new perspective on the world. I for one will never again look at a chicken in the same way after being served its feet on a plate for lunch one day. The teachers seemed to think it was hilarious that I was so unsure about how to approach this meal, and as I tentatively poked the limp claws they let out roars of laughter.

Going abroad to volunteer means that you get the chance to engage with a unique culture that you might not otherwise experience at home. Tenteleni, meaning ‘do it yourself’ in SiSwati, for instance, places a huge emphasis on cultural exchange, where both the volunteers and the educators learn from each other. It is about the sharing of skills, not about trying to take over the school! Of course some may cry out that this is suggesting that the skills volunteers possess are more worthy, as it were, than those of the educators. However what Tenteleni stresses, and what is constantly drummed into the volunteers, is that they are to work alongside the teachers, in partnership, not in conflict. We don’t seek to impose our views on them merely to offer support, friendship and enthusiasm.

Volunteer organisations have worked hard to build up stable relations with local people, which a volunteer might find it hard to establish if they were ‘going it alone’. Those places that need help the most are likely to be underdeveloped and therefore travelling with an organisation means that all placements are already set up, and your role as a volunteer is already clearly defined meaning that both you are your hosts can get the most out of your time.

Another question that looms ominously when it comes to charity and volunteering is where the money actually goes. How do you know that your cash, painstakingly raised through hours spent baking cakes to sell outside the Students’ Union or attempting to organise a successful band night are not going to some executive living it up in an office somewhere? In 2003 a scandal rocked the media when it emerged that of all donations to Breast Cancer Relief only 10p in every pound was going towards fighting the disease. If an organisation or charity has any paid members of staff then it’s inevitable that some of your project fee is going to go to these people. At Tenteleni however, nobody who works for the charity gets paid. Everybody from the committee members to the director is a volunteer, balancing a paid ‘day’ job with running a charity. Therefore when you had over your project fee you know exactly where it’s going.

Ok, now we get to the big one, the catch 22, as it were, the issue of sustainability. So we’ve seen that volunteering abroad has its positives, for both the volunteers and those they are working with. But what happens to those the volunteers leave behind after a few months? I for one felt incredibly guilty leaving the children that I had been teaching and building up relationships with for the past two months.  Sustainability is a prickly issue. It is simply unfeasible for charities such as Tenteleni to send volunteers all year round, simply because of the fact that the organisation is solely aimed at university students. Yet, projects such as shiriki, where volunteers from the UK are paired with those from the country in which they are volunteering, are trying to ensure the sustainable nature of the work volunteers undertake. The emphasis on the sharing of skills and advice is pivotal. Volunteers are imparting knowledge, which is something that can be carried for a long time. The aim of volunteers is to share experiences, know how, ideas and even family photos, firstly with educators and then pupils, in a shared goal to simply learn more. Even if they are only able to do this for a short time, isn’t this better than nothing?

Ultimately you cannot volunteer and expect to change the world or save starving African children but if you can make a difference to just one person’s life, even for a few hours, then this is what matters.

Tenteleni will be holding information evenings this week in the Students’ Union, look out for our posters