People both do not often interact with charities or do not realize that they are being helped by one. One of my questions while I was in Rwanda and Uganda was to ask people whether they’d ever been helped by a charity, and if so, ask them more about what they liked and didn’t like about the experience. However, probably only about 5% of people said they ever had. I even often made the question broader by asking whether they or anybody else they knew had interacted with a charity, still with the answer being no. I think the reason for this is twofold:
- Charities are not as big as they think they are. All of the aid in Africa amounts to a very small amount per person. I can’t find the number, but it’s in the range of less than $10 per person per year. Given this paltry amount and that it is unevenly distributed, most people will never have been privy to being helped by a charity. It’s easy to forget this when you’re in the NGO bubble, but keep in mind, business and government are massively bigger than the charity sector.
- It’s not obvious when you’re being helped by a charity. For example, I saw an advertisement that looked like it was just selling condoms. However, when I looked closer I saw that it was funded by USAID and other donors. Most people would not know that this is a charitable intervention. Likewise, many people I had met had been refugees due to the genocide and they didn’t realize that receiving food and shelter in refugee camps during those times was from aid.
This is part of a series where I write about my stay in Rwanda and Uganda and what I learned that might be helpful from an EA perspective.
You can see the full list of articles here, which I will add to as they come out.
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