From The Daily Caller:
[Steve] Corbett and [Brian] Fikkert are proponents of “asset-based” aid. Instead of
funneling money into impoverished communities as many aid agencies have
done for decades, the two advocate developing a community’s ability to
help itself. “Many western churches adopt a western worldview as to what
is the nature of poverty and poverty alleviation,” Fikkert said. “The
western worldview has said that poverty is rooted in a lack of material
things. So the solutions that the west has tired to provide are material
in nature: Pumping in more capitol, pumping in more technology.” Link to full article.
West Africa is littered with the wreckage of well-intentioned foreign aid projects. Some "developed" nation sweeps in, drops millions of dollars, and flies out to great international acclaim. The built project lasts for a few years before falling apart due to lack of funds for maintenance, lack of training for the people who were supposed to run or administer it, or due to the fact that it was completely idiotic thing to build in an impoverished, barely-functioning nation to begin with.
In Liberia someone had built a hydroelectric dam on the St Paul River. Sounds like a great idea, right? I think the people who planned the project had only been in Liberia in June when rainfall totals for the month can exceed two and a half feet.
In the dry season, though, the water levels behind the hydroelectric dam fell low enough that the plant stopped producing power. I think there were supposed to be fuel-powered generation for the dry season, but whether that happened or not was completely random and arbitrary, and so was the capital city's power supply.
I remember laughing my guts out at Jesse Jackson's trip to Africa with then-president Clinton. The two of them spoke eloquently about getting laptops to African school children - school children who had to share pencils, books, and even benches and chairs with two, three, or four other students. Forget laptops, Mr. President and Mr. "I'm So African" Jackson. How about chalk, pencils, and globes?
An awful lot of Western ideas of "help" are completely colored by our own bias and not founded on real long-term needs on the ground. Here's yet another example. Several years ago I heard a radio documentary about factory conditions in China. The narrator expressed horror at the little metal coal stoves used by the workers to cook their lunches. Oh, please. A huge portion of the world uses little stoves like that, often welded together out of #10 steel cans, or cast from scrap metal. In Liberia, they're called coal-pots. There's nothing horrifying about them except that they're not propane or natural gas. In fact, a coal-pot uses charcoal made of local scrap wood, locally available labor, and locally available empty cans or other scavenged and recycled metal sources -- all things that would make the coal-pot trendy and "green" in the United States or Europe. Yet I'll occasionally hear Americans horrified that poor Africans and Chinese have to cook on such primitive stoves.
Here's a positive example of foreign help. In Monrovia, there were some ladies that made lovely appliqued quilts and sold them for good money. My mom has one hanging on her living room wall. They were in bright colors, but the patterns were adapted from Baltimore Album appliqued quilt patterns. Someone, an aid worker or a missionary, at some point, had taught these Liberian women how to make these quilts and by doing so, given them a craft and a skill that ensured not only their ability to earn a living, but their daughter's, too, as the moms could teach their girls the same skills. All they needed was needle and thread, and scrap fabric -- something widely available in Liberia.
Go ahead and do good work overseas. Just make sure that when you are helping, you are actually helping. Don't insult people with your charitable acts. Human dignity is universal. Even the poorest wish to work with their own two hands to support their families.
