I haven’t done any research on this so there are probably a lot of factors that I haven’t considered. Just genuinely intrigued as the charity adverts you see on TV imply that it doesn’t take a lot of money to feed one child or buy a blanket etc.
In: Economics
Problems lie deeper than just giving a child a blanket. Unless something drastic changes in their society, poverty will always remain present. Corruption, crime, etc. keep them poor.
Also, it takes a TON of money to do anything on a large scale. Feeding one child is relatively cheap. Feeding a million is not.
While it doesn’t take that much to feed a child one meal, even millions of dollars only covers some basic food for a short period of time.
Say a country has 10 million people in need. 10 cents is one meal, so $1million feeds everybody 1 meal. On one day. $100million is about enough for 3 meals for a month.
Most of those charities aren’t raising $100million/month, or anywhere close to that. And that’s just a basic meal of rice or corn gruel… not much in way of veggies or protein.
And then there are things like providing clean water, shelter, clothing, education… you’re talking billions of dollars annually, for one country.
There are two big problems.
The first is just that even with the sums raised by regular events like comic relief, while the numbers seem huge in isolation, when you compare them to the cost of making all the required changes they are only a small percentage of what is needed.
Raising millions of pounds sounds brilliant, but when Ethiopia contains over a hundred million people on its own, that money doesn’t stretch far.
The other big question is how this money is used – in particular balancing immediate and long term help. Ideally we want to help by providing long term, sustainable aid that can help provide for people for generations – providing ways to generate future food and water, like building wells and providing tools and teaching to farm more sustainably. The problem is that these take time, and in a famine it isn’t much use organising for a well to be built next year if the village that needs it will have died out from as lack of water by the end of the current year. So we also need to provide immediate said in the form of single use supplies of food, water and medicines to help people survive in the short term.
The big challenge is in choosing how to distribute the limited funds we have available, and make the best user of that money.
The one other big factor in a lot of charity work is politics and the local response – ultimately the first world can throw as much money and help at a nation as they want, but it needs to be used and distributed appropriately on a local level. This needs the help and cooperation of local governments and people – something that seems simple when you are used to European politics, but in places with unstable government, dictatorships and widespread corruption, getting sustainable aid out to people and keeping it working can become a much, much harder task.
Almost every acre of land suitable for agriculture is currently being used – in the entire world. Meanwhile, the population continues to grow and will surpass 10 billion people before the turn of the century.
In this grand game of musical chairs, it stands to reason that a certain portion of the population is going to starve to death. All the charity in the world isn’t going to change the laws of nature.
The resources that they have are generally sold to wealthier countries. This is frequently done corruptly or corruption appears further down the line.
Much of the wealth generated by first world countries is layered, one layer of value adding on another. The process to say supply Starbucks with coffee beans will have multiple entities making a profit off each transaction. The coffee grower only gets to sell his beans once.
Australia, for example, their iron gets exported as ore, its processed, smelted, milled and then turned into products by another country. This annoys many Australians
Charities tend to just focus on providing essential and immediate supplies for those in need. Systematic, long-term, sustainable improvement takes much longer and is very costly. Even then, many problems faced in poorer countries require more than money.
It looks like Comic Relief has raised ~$1B since 1988 (kind of impressive, really).
Currently, ~1.3B people live in extreme poverty. So, if you took every $ that has been raised in over 30 years by Comic Relief, you’d have 76 cents per person to spend, to feed them for 30 years.
While there are many charitable groups raising money for the poor around the world, the need vastly outpaces the donations.
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