It's unfortunate that he had to use such a link-bait headline on an otherwise very insightful essay. A more accurate title would have been "Don't give money to only Haiti".
I agree. I was reluctant to change the author's headline, but I've just edited it to include [restricted to]. It does seem like an important story to anyone looking at donating.
I've been doing aid/development work for several years. The process of disaster giving right now is unfortunately deeply flawed.
Most aid workers are already on Facebook, and there are a lot of them. A guided social-giving application which allowed people to find personal connections to development workers within degrees of their actual social network would be more efficient. Money would flow based on degrees of trust, not hearsay or marketing.
An app allowing people direct access to professionals their friends trust would increase accountability and help people personally engage with and fund projects over time, regardless of the size of the organization.
I agree with the unrestricted donation part. My money went MSF primarily because they had a staff of more than 700 people before the earth quake struck and knew how to help the country.
For me, MSF's draw has always been their great accountability, much lower overhead and coverage that extends beyond those 50/100/200-year natural disasters.
"Médecins Sans Frontières [Doctors Without Borders] is an international, independent, medical humanitarian organisation that delivers emergency aid to people affected by armed conflict, epidemics, healthcare exclusion and natural or man-made disasters."
Alternatively, if you'd like to help Haiti specifically don't give money to large international charities. They are the McDonald's of humanitarian assistance: big, generic, and predictable, but not necessarily the best available.
My family has friends who lived in Haiti for many years, and they are holding back on donating to the large charities on the basis that the real need for funds will be at native Haitian organizations, which will take a few months to get back on their feet and be able to accept donations.
If you'd like to help Haiti specifically, that's still an admirable impulse, but your money will be better spent if you give it to actual Haitians (and it will require some effort to work out which ones).
Charity isn't always about being as "effective" as possible. People there are literally dying from not having food, water, and medical care. I hate to say this on hacker news, but not everything is a numbers game. Haiti is in a humanitarian crisis right now. Yes, you could logically say to yourself that X dollars would be more "effective" elsewhere and that Haiti will never become a flourishing country, but that largely misses the point. It also presumes that you have the balls to say who should live and who should die. People there need help. Now.
A good charity I donated to is Partners in Health which was founded in Haiti (by an American) and has always been in Haiti. You can read more about them in "Mountains Beyond Mountains" which coincidentally and topically was written by Tracy Kidder who also wrote "Soul of a new Machine".
The point being made is that possibly the aid organisations have been given enough to cope with the next few months of needed humanitarian aid. Stepping back and assessing the need can't be a bad thing at this stage - surely?
Sure a mass donation spree in the first few days is a good idea - but we should probably wind it down now till it's needed again.
A much better way is probably to convince charities to run "disaster" funds. That way you could donate to the fund and unused money would still be effective for the next super urgent case.
I don't think this is about "more effective"; just about addressing the situation logically to help the Haitians recover more quickly.
> People there are literally dying from not having food, water, and medical care
If you read the article the point is that potentially no amount of donation at this stage is going to affect that situation. The current barriers are more practical in nature (I have friends literally on the ground at the moment there and I assure you this is the case).
"""People there are literally dying from not having food, water, and medical care."""
Like tens of thousands of people around the world every day. This is different in the media attention it has, and possibly in the geographic concentration of suffering but not in the numbers of suffering people or the type of suffering. People in Haiti were so poor they were eating mud to prolong their lives not long ago.
People need help now, but they also needed help then when nobody was listening. It's not horrible and callous to point this out, it doesn't mean I think helping in Haiti now is a bad thing and it doesn't mean I don't feel unhappy at the level of suffering in Haiti, but ->
"""I hate to say this on hacker news, but not everything is a numbers game [..] but that largely misses the point."""
If the point is not "help as many people as possible" then what is it? I don't want to put words in your mouth, but it can't be "help the most talked about issue of the moment", or "help whatever makes you feel most guilty", can it?
It's not a game, but it is a numbers thing - if what the article says is accurate then a considered response where you give to MSF instead of Yele might be helping more people. If you want to ignore things like this in your hurry then who is helped?. But if you want to help Haiti 'now now now' then giving to MSF who 'have enough for their Haiti operations for a decade' will not have any immediate effect. If more money isn't going to help, that's an incredibly important thing to consider if all you can do is give money from a long way away.
A considered action is not inherently worse than an ill considered action and the conflicts you present between thinking vs acting, wanting to help vs choosing who lives and who dies and being human vs considering are false, unhelpful.
"""It also presumes that you have the balls to say who should live and who should die."""
Humans make the live/die decision a lot, medical treatments have it implicitly, all changes to building codes to make buildings safer, all policies on water cleanliness, all women and children first habits. By choosing to help Haiti you are making the live/die decision for all the others you don't help.
Ignoring it doesn't make it go away, and thinking about it does not make a horrible callous person who is trying to play God.
Your over-analyzing makes your post seem very cold and callous. Yes it's getting a lot of media attention and people are pouring in money...so what..the alternative would be to simply ignore everything like the rest of the world suffering year-round.
"""Your over-analyzing makes your post seem very cold and callous."""
It does, but it shouldn't (or maybe it should and I am?). The parent post was exhorting me to act without thinking, and that sets off my skeptical spidey sense and makes me ask what's in it for them? It's a pressure tactic that people selling things use to get me to make a worse decision than I would otherwise make. In the case of helping people, making a worse decision is, well, worse.
A read of the article suggests that donating to some cause would be of no particular help, donating elsewhere might go to a celebrity's recording studio fees, and doing it one way might lead to it sitting in a bank account for five years being unable to help anyone. How far is over-analyzing and how far merely analyzing?
"""Yes it's getting a lot of media attention and people are pouring in money...so what"""
So the need for me to act immediately is less. So it's presenting a distorted and unbalanced view of problems in the world with the potential of over assigning to one cause and at the same time increasing suffering elsewhere because resources are reduced. So the media has a habit of turning everything into extremely opposed black and white views and a huge media fuss makes it more difficult to sift out accurate and detailed information on a topic. So a huge media fuss increases social pressure to 'donate now' without thinking and without regard for whether lack of cash is a main bottleneck or not.
"""the alternative would be to simply ignore everything like the rest of the world suffering year-round"""
That's another issue. Why is it that we happily go about our lives every day doing just that, but it's not OK to do that now? Isn't that part of the media fuss generating social pressure so that people act to be seen to be donating rather than for any other reason? Very much an 'ends justify the means' approach?
I think you misses the author's point. His main point was simple: don't give earmarked charity. Let the people who understand the problem direct the money where it needs to go.
