October 14, 2010 | Read Time: 3 minutes
There’s a new addition to the expanding library of books that question the effectiveness of international aid: The Crisis Caravan: What’s Wrong with Humanitarian Aid?
The book, by the journalist Linda Polman, argues that providing humanitarian assistance in war zones often adds to people’s suffering.
One of the most striking examples offered by Ms. Polman, and discussed in a lengthy New Yorker review of the book, is Sierra Leone. Ms. Polman suggests that rebels escalated their attacks during the country’s civil war of the 1990s, cutting off people’s limbs by the thousands, in part because they knew those atrocities would draw attention and money from donors seeking to help in a way that other kinds of violence would not.
After the war, a new economy was created around all that international aid. People found jobs with the nonprofit organizations that flooded the country. So many charities were interested in helping amputees that it grew to a point where people who had lost limbs had piles of prostheses but still “went around with their stubs exposed to satisfy the demands of the press and NGO photographers, who brought yet more money and more aid,” Philip Gourevitch writes in his New Yorker review. He continues: “Officers of the new Sierra Leone government had only to put out a hand to catch some of the cascading aid money.”
Sierra Leone is just one example. Ms. Polman says money for famine relief in the 1980s in Ethiopia helped pay for the government’s relocation of dissident peasants against their will. She says nonprofit programs to buy the freedom of slaves in Sudan drove up demand for slaves, leading their captors to seize more people. During the Rwandan genocide, she says, perpetrators were given food and shelter by refugee camps in Eastern Congo, enabling them to continue their campaign of rape and violence.
Though many of the arguments in Ms. Polman’s book aren’t new, her story is nevertheless a searing indictment of humanitarianism.
The Overseas Development Institute, a think tank in London that studies international development and humanitarianism, says it agrees with some parts of Ms. Polman’s analysis but finds fault with others.
Among the points of agreement: that relief aid is big business, involving a lot of money and jobs, and that “aid has had perverse and at times catastrophic effects,” in part because competition among nonprofits leads groups to go where the money is and not where they are most needed. The think tank also raises other issues that Ms. Polman doesn’t focus on, such as the lack of knowledge about what works in fighting poverty and a cultural insensitivity that can lead to poorly designed projects.
But the think tank, in its policy brief, says it disagrees with Ms. Polman’s argument that one key reason for aid groups’ failings is their insistence on remaining neutral. Ms. Polman says that aid workers use neutrality and independence to sidestep responsibility for any negative effects of aid. The think tank disagrees that a commitment to neutrality fosters a climate in which aid workers think they can behave as they like.
The Overseas Development Institute also disagrees with Ms. Polman’s claim that aid groups are unwilling to admit failures and seek to improve problems they see, for fear of losing money from donors. The think tank notes that humanitarian groups conducted evaluations of their responses to the crises Ms. Polman discusses, and improvements to the system have come about as a result. “Aid programs are now routinely evaluated and the impacts assessed, and the sector is more professional and managerial in its approach,” says the Overseas Development Institute.
What do you think of Ms. Polman’s arguments? Do you agree that humanitarianism, despite its best intentions, often does more harm than good?
