Module 1: Detriments of Traditional Charity

The international community is coming to realize that the habit of governments, politicians, celebrities, and non-profits to pinpoint aid, or traditional charity, as the solution to global poverty is simply not working. Many involved in the field of development are chiming in to the growing clamor concerning what needs to change.

• The non-profit venture Acumen Fund operates under the principles of “patient capital,” a philosophy that incorporates both the compassion behind philanthropy and the efficiency of market-based strategies. On their website, they state that:

  “Poor people seek dignity, not dependence. Traditional charity often meets immediate needs but too often fails to enable people to solve their own problems over the long term. Market-based approaches have the potential to grow when charitable dollars run out, and they must be a part of the solution to the big problem of poverty.”(1)

• Dambisa Moyo, author of Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa, discussed her perspectives on the ineffectiveness of charity in The Wall Street Journal :

  “Giving alms to Africa remains one of the biggest ideas of our time—millions march for it, governments are judged by it, celebrities proselytize for it. Calls for more aid to Africa are growing louder, with advocates pushing for doubling the roughly $50 billion of international assistance that already goes to Africa each year. Yet evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that aid to Africa has made the poor poorer, and the growth slower. The insidious aid culture has left African countries more debt-laden, more inflation-prone, more vulnerable to the vagaries of the currency markets and more unattractive to higher-quality investment … Aid is an unmitigated political, economic and humanitarian disaster.”(2)

• In a 2006 interview, Ode magazine explored how Muhammad Yunus, a Nobel Peace Prize recipient for his microfinance initiative of Grameen Bank, views aid. Two quotations of his are particularly poignant in illustrating the detriments of traditional charity.

  “What all these pop stars and politicians want, is the usual recipe: charity. But charity is not the way to help people in need; it is not a healthy basis for a relationship between people. If you want to solve poverty, you have to put people in a position to build their own life. Unfortunately, this is not how the aid industry works. Western governments and development organizations think they need to offer permanent charity. As a result, they keep entire economies in poverty and families in an inhuman situation.”(3)

  In addition, “[t]his approach to poverty is thwarted by our fixed convictions. Poor people are helpless, unhealthy, illiterate and thus stupid, they have nothing, they know nothing, we must take care of them, we must give them food … It is completely wrong to think like this. I am convinced that poor people are just as human as anyone else. They have just as much potential as anyone. They are simply shoved into a box marked POOR! And it’s written in giant letters so that everyone simply treats them the way poor people are treated, because we think this is the way we should treat them. This means it isn’t easy to get out of the box.”(4)

• This approach has also been shown to result in cycles of dependency where, as a result of constant handouts, local communities come to view themselves as inferior and incapable of helping themselves. Authors Corbett and Fikkert explain this in their book When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor and Yourself stating:

  “One of the biggest problems in many poverty-alleviation efforts is that their design and implementation exacerbates the poverty of being of the economically rich–their god-complexes–and the poverty of being of the economically poor–their feelings of  inferiority and shame.”(5)

As Moyo reminds us, there sometimes is “a clear moral imperative for humanitarian and charity-based aid to step in when necessary” (such as, for example, during the 2004 tsunami in Asia). As the opinions of seasoned development professionals above demonstrate, however, “development aid”—different from “humanitarian aid,” which provides support in acute situations of war, famine, and natural disaster—is sometimes neither empowering nor sustainable. The more promising, ground-level practices of Asset-Based Community Development could help in overcoming some of the deficiencies of traditional charity.

Footnotes

(1) “Using Patient Capital to Build Transformative Businesses.” Acumen Fund. http://www.innovationamerica.us/innovation-daily/1852-acumen-fund-using-patient-capital-to-build-transformative-businesses.

(2) Moyo, D. “Why Foreign Aid Is Hurting Africa.” The Wall Street Journal. 21 March 2009.

(3) Visscher, M. “The World Champ of Poverty Fighters.” Ode Magazine. December 2006.

(4) Ibid.

(5) Corbett, S. & Fikkert, B. When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor-- and Yourself. Chicago, IL: Moody Publishers, 2012.