The Road to Hell: The Ravaging Effects of Foreign Aid and International Charity
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1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
Unintended Consequence of Foreign Aid May 17, 2008 The Road To Hell has a simple and precise theme: "Blood and guts ... attracting the great whites (sharks) to the warm unprotected shore...". Foreign Aid and International Charity Money will attract more and more "sharks" and hurt those "warm unprotected people". This book is a great read for all development economists and people who want to help the African . Good intension is not enough for good consequence.
Chris Tam
Hong Kong
7 of 15 found the following review helpful:
The rest of the story Mar 04, 2008 Don't throw the baby out with the bath water. Somalia is a failed state and a war zone. International aid in a context like that can not be compared with for example, building a well in the desert of Niger or providing school feeding rations in Laos. Yes some international aid is diverted to war lords or Government fat cats. Yes some projects are ineffective. Yes some people are dishonest.
However, this book does a grave injustice to totality of humanitarian aid. I have been an aid worker in Africa for 13 years and I have seen success stories and peoples lives changed for the good. I have seen children who will die of malnutrition without the help of international organizations.
And by the way before we get too on our high horse about all of the US money that is being wasted, please remember that the US Government gives less foreign aid, as a percentage of GNP than almost any other industrialized nation. In 2006, the US gave just 0.17% of our GNP. Most EU contries give five times that. (It is also interesting to note that total U.S. aid to Israel is approximately one-third of the American foreign-aid budget, even though Israel comprises just .001 percent of the world's population and already has one of the world's higher per capita incomes.)
5 of 11 found the following review helpful:
How trustworthy Mar 19, 2007 I got through the first chapter of this book and then realized there are no sources or citations for the information in this book. I did not bother to finish it because I can hear a million opinions on foreign aid but a good argument is built upon facts/sources.
4 of 6 found the following review helpful:
wow! eye-opener Jan 20, 2007 Some years ago I had been wanting to go work in third world countries and was studying nonprofit management. This book seriously counter-balanced my idealism with a powerful real look of what aid and nonprofit work all too often really look like. Some of its images have stuck with me, like I will never see a Land Rover in quite the same way as I did before reading this book. I seriously recommend this book to anyone contemplating any kind of aid work. In my case, this book helped me decide to not leave a lucrative occupation to go work in the nonprofit sector but instead encouraged me to keep my job so that I could continue to do volunteer work in own time. After reading this book I did research into international volunteer work and my son and I both went on to have some great memorable international volunteer experiences (however my son was most recently a long-term volunteer worker in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina--I never knew it would one day feel so much like a third-country in my own USA). Anyway, sorry I digressed, the point is, there are good and bad aspects to providing foreign aid and until one figures out where they really stand on foreign aid (I still have a lot of ambivalence), they may want to do volunteer work in such a way that it is not their principal livelihood. Having said all that, I would not want to discourage anyone from entering the aid industry. Its just that there a lot of things one should first consider. At the least, one should know that its a subject with intertwining complex implications.
10 of 11 found the following review helpful:
A Good Look at Problems on the Inside of Aid May 09, 2005 This book has its flaws. As other reviewers have noted, it is rambling and disjointed. While I believe that his facts are mostly right, there are points where he may have come to the wrong conclusion because of a lack of familiarity with aid processes. Certainly, he over-generalizes based on anecdotal evidence. Aid in Somalia is probably not exactly the same thing as aid in Chile. The existence of some venal people in an organization does not mean that everyone in an organization is venal.
Maren is too quick to dismiss people as acting only in their own self-interest, even to the point of being internally inconsistent. He spends a lot of time passing out blame, and not always where it belongs. While he is pretty sure that NGOs should be blamed for carrying out bad projects, he doesn't seem to realize that they are under contract with USAID. USAID can terminate projects unilaterally; NGO sub-contractors can't, both legally and practically. On the one hand, he steams about patronizing attitudes towards Africans, and, on the other hand, says that it was "not their fault" that recipients stole aid funds in massive amounts, but the fault of those who made aid available to them. (What could be more patronizing than assuming that adults can't be held responsible for their own behavior?) Does the fact that aid workers have to convince Congress to give them funding by pointing out the advantages to the U.S. and legislators' constituents really mean that the aid workers were never serious about their humanitarian goals?
The fact that it sometimes reads more like angry blurting than balanced or reasoned scholarship is a shame, because there is a lot of good material here and good points being made. But it is important to read, particularly now, where there is renewed clamoring for more funds for aid to meet the Millennium Development Goals. Maren clearly, accessibly and authoritatively explains why more money does not equal more development; worse, can be destructive. These points are made elsewhere by others, but are usually buried in dry academic papers that speak in euphemisms. Anyone who wants to work in development should read this book. Maren can be forgiven for being angry.
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Unintended Consequence of Foreign Aid May 17, 2008
The rest of the story Mar 04, 2008
How trustworthy Mar 19, 2007
