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Loading... The Road to Hell: The Ravaging Effects of Foreign Aid and International Charityby Michael Maren
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Lots of thoughtful analysis with an intelligent writing style. his is far more than a one-sided point of view....governments and the ngo community really do not have much support if even a third of this is true. Even though the primary subject is Somalia and even though the subject is 20-30 years old, the book was excellent and exceedingly worth the time to read. no reviews | add a review
Michael Maren has spent much of the last twenty years in Africa, first as an aid worker, later as a journalist. He witnessed at close range a harrowing series of wars, famines, and natural disasters. In The Road to Hell he tells how CARE unwittingly assisted a Somali dictator in building a political and economic powerbase. How the UN, Save the Children, and many other nongovernmental organizations provided raw materials for ethnic factions who subsequently threatened genocidal massacres in Rwanda and Burundi. He brings firsthand reports of African farmers, Western aid workers, and corrupt politicians from many countries, joined together in a vicious circle of self-interest. Above all, he heralds an important truth: humanitarian intervention and foreign aid activity is necessarily political. It gets hijacked by powerful charities and agricultural interests. It is cynically manipulated by local strongmen to control rebellious populations. And it is the last refuge of Western colonialism. We all want to end the suffering. But our desire to alleviate suffering often stands in the way of the truth. If you think your charitable giving is making the Third World a better place, think again. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)338.9Social sciences Economics Production Economic Development And GrowthLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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religion, as a self-serving system that sacrifices its own practitioners and
intended beneficiaries in order that it may survive and grow. Much of this
book is centered in Somalia, but it draws on the author's experiences with aid
organizations over nineteen years around Africa: in places such as Kenya,
burkina Faso, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sudan, and Ethiopia.