Year after year and decade after decade, our television screens have shown pictures of malnourished, sick or disabled children, accompanied by voice-overs begging for money to alleviate the suffering. Organisations such as Oxfam and Action Aid, UNICEF and Lord knows how many others regularly pluck at the heart strings of viewers who have, collectively, contributed billions of pounds in aid. At the same time, our government has provided many more billions through its foreign aid budget while foreign governments and their people have also made similar donations. Taken together, there must by now have been many hundreds of billions of pounds, dollars, yen, marks, franks, Euros and almost every other currency known to man thrown into what is little more than a bottomless pit.
How can it be that, after so many years of such vast financial support, nothing seems to have changed ? We are still chastised for failing to provide healthcare, clean water and food for the poor, mostly in Africa but also elsewhere. Campaigners demand that we provide funds for them to protect young girls from abuse and to ensure that they receive a decent education. In truth, charity has become big, even gigantic, business from which many from wealthy countries have made a very nice living, thank you. Some of the providers of supposed aid have even been caught carrying out various abuses of their own, using their status and power as bargaining chips to obtain 'favours' from those whom they are notionally helping.
Where has all the money gone ? Clearly much of it has been stolen by the tyrants who have ruled many of the affected countries - Mugabe, Bokassa, Amin and many more, all of whom enriched themselves at the expense of their people - but much more seems to have simply vanished into the African landscape. If the pictures shown to us night after night are true, then the vast resources poured into assorted charitable causes have achieved nothing over a period of many years and one has to wonder what will be achieved by throwing yet more money down this drain. However, if progress is being made, why are we continuing to be shown pictures of such misery and suffering, which must then be a gross misrepresentation of the true situation.
Seeing people living in squaid circumstances and suffering from an assortment of ills is uncomfortable viewing but clearly the solution is not simply to throw money at the problem. Medieval societies, for that is what many of these populations are, live with tribal and cultural issues which are almost incomprehensible to those in the modern Westernised world. However, as recently as 2 or 3 hundred years ago, the majority of the population of Britain lived in similar style to that of the poor in today's 'Third World' nations. People survived for as long as they could as subsistence farmers with no health care worthy of the name, no clean water, little food and minimal housing; they were controlled by their landlords and the church and faced a legal system that was barbaric by any standards. Then came the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, which swept through Europe bringing new ideas and technologies, not imposed with foreign money but growing from within.
That is the secret, if there is one, to solving the problem of 'Third World' poverty. The answer has to come from within, from the people of those nations chnging things for themselves and as long as Western societies continue to pour in money, they won't do it. Charity produces nothing but demands for more charity; out of adversity comes innovation and change.
Far from giving more to foreign aid, our government should have the courage to call a halt to all but the most highly targeted aid for specific issues; no more blank cheques to the likes of Oxfam or UNICEF. If the 'Third World' is ever to prosper, it must do it by itself. It must have its own Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, not have Western values and cultural ideas imposed upon it.
Sadly, that seems very unlikely to happen and the charitable black hole will continue to suck in as much Western cash as it can, while giving almost nothing back. The only winners will continue to be the workers employed by the charities concerned; the poor will stay poor, uneducated, sick and hungry.
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