Why are poor countries still poor with all the money that yearly events generate? E.g. Comic Relief.

Question

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

Answer 1

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.