What Your $3,000 Bought In Haiti

[Recursion]

From NPR's Planet Money

Transcript and audio available here:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2010/11/30/131705055/the-tuesday-podcast-what-your-3-000-bought-in-haiti

Earlier this year, we reported on l'Artibonite, a rice-growing region in Haiti. The people there were suffering because an influx of free rice from foreign aid groups destroyed the market for their crop.

Listeners responded, donating some $3,000 to support a school that figured prominently in the story. That's about 10 years of wages for the average Haitian.

The school doesn't have a building; classes are held in a small, one-room church, where blackboards are leaned up against the wall. The principal, Enselm Simpliste, thought he could use the $3,000 to build a schoolhouse.

We recently visited the school to see how things were coming along. The news is bad: All the money has been spent, and all there is to show for it is what's in the photo above — a foundation, some concrete blocks and some rock and sand.

This is a very difficult dilemma that they go on to explain the other side of. While sending the money through an NGO would have probably result in its being managed better, NGOs come with absurd amounts of red tape, delays, arbitrary rules, and a paternalistic attitude that often works against what you're trying to do.

[Poll_Blind]

1. As bad as it is, kudos to NPR for being honest about it. They could have just brushed it under...

...the rug. Good, bad, it's what's real that's important.

PB

[stray cat]

2. NGOs should not be lumped together but analyzed individually

Send it to Partners in Health

[Recursion]

3. I'm sure there are NGOs that are less byzantine than others

But even so that gets to the paternalism problem: you're basically telling the guy who wants to build that school that we don't trust him to be able to do it. Which, in this case, turned out to be a justified mistrust, but it's still not building local capabilities.