I have had numerous friends and family members who have come to me raving about service trips they have done to different countries. The tasks they have completed have ranged from building houses to cleaning up habitats to bringing a pop-up Red Cross tents to rural areas. There are some programs where going abroad to do service are more beneficial than others, but these programs are more about satisfying peoples personal need to feel as if they have “gotten their hands dirty” and helped. All of these trips are organized in a way that charges you around $3,000 where up they will take care of everything from lodging to the materials to build the houses. Now stop and think. $3,000 in a country like Costa Rica or Thailand can go a very long way. But the communities these volunteers are going to are not getting $3,000 they are getting substantially less plus a probably untrained manual laborer. There is an underlying problem with how the western countries view giving aid to those less developed nations.
Now, I am not only picking on the service trips the general public participates in but also this extends to the United Nations. In one case, there still seems to be the idea that we can go fix whatever is wrong with the developing countries without putting a demand on the indigenous country and people. The UN meanwhile has all these programs that are great in intention but fall short on execution. You can’t just throw money at the problem or rather items and expect it to be resolved. There has been a movement towards making aid programs accountable to their donors by being able to quantify the improvements that their aid has accomplished. Giving countries a blank check to help with certain issues they are facing is not a good policy either.
When aid truly helps is when it is used to empower the people of these countries to make the changes themselves. In Africa especially there has been a new wave of thought and practice of supporting grassroots organizations in the home countries that actually know what type of aid will best benefit the country. It also cuts out the middle man of going through the governments of said country, eliminating the opportunity for corrupt governments getting their hands on money meant to aid the people. We do not want to provide aid in a way that makes these countries dependent on foreign help, instead aid should help these countries become independent. Instead of providing mosquito nets its much more beneficial to teach natives how to make their own mosquito nets. In general giving aid in the form of a skill is just as helpful as providing capital.
I believe there is still an underlying sense of the “white man’s burden” that is guiding the policies that western countries make regarding Africa especially. We need to realize that there is not a one size fits all method for aid; each country is radically different and will require different types of aid as well as different implementation. These aid trips realistically are not helping over all and some are actually doing harm.
