Ultimately this can all be boiled down to the idea if working smarter not harder. Unfortunately mankinds definition of smart varies as as wildly as their actual intelligence
Not even. I think it's more about, what to work towards - i.e. the goal. I mean, feeding hungry people is definitely a worthwhile goal, but... you have to do it again, tomorrow. It's not a scalable solution.
What if feeding hungry people today is what it takes for them to feed themselves tomorrow? Africa currently has millions of entrepreneurs, and half the rare earth minerals in your computer's chips and a plurality of the beans for the daily cup of Starbucks you need to do your vastly more lucrative job with it come from there. Not only is the people of Africa not dying (or dying less fast) something that can pay dividends in the future, you directly benefit from it. (Most of the aid we send to Africa is not even remotely altruism, effective or not, although most of it is also not very effective.)
I think the goals of NGOs working in that space are generally in the right place. It's true that they seldom do anything scalable in the sense of transformational research or marked improvement in processes, but the structure (of funding) somewhat prevents them to. I think the most scalable thing we can do for poor countries right now is make information, education and food and essential medication as available and as cheap as possible for as much of their population as possible, and let these children's children save themselves.
The point I was trying to make is that the order of operations matters. But we can only judge the outcomes of our efforts based on their effects not their original intent
