issues from the beginning, or they soon become aware. “To be honest, I have never really felt like I truly helped anyone,” writes Alexia Nestora, a former employee of the voluntourism company I-to-I, who blogs as Voluntourism Gal.19 In almost every case, it would be better to stay at home and send money instead.
The individualist responses of voluntourists or Invisible Children make for easy targets. However, the same issues come up in the larger, more professional organizations like the Red Cross. The relief industry is filled with people, however well meaning, who are seeking easy solutions to systemic problems.
As Tracy Kidder wrote after the 2010 earthquake devastated Haiti, “At least 10,000 private organizations perform supposedly humanitarian missions in Haiti, yet it remains one of the world’s poorest countries.”20 And in the midst of this poverty, the aid workers always seem to live in the most comfort. One could be forgiven for coming to the conclusion that the more aid groups are active in a country, the worse things become. At the very least, they do not seem to work with the aim of realizing a world in which they are no longer necessary.
Haiti today is the perfect illustration of the twin legacies of colonialism and neoliberalism. The Nation magazine described it as “the NGO Republic of Haiti,” a country where nongovernmental organizations have far more wealth and power than the government.
Ever since the Haitian people freed themselves from slavery and French rule in 1791–1804, they have faced economic exploitation from colonial powers. In 1825 French King Charles X demanded that Haiti pay an “independence debt” equal to ten times the country’s GDP, a debt they spent over one hundred years repaying. This was followed by U.S. support for brutal dictatorships in the twentieth century, International Monetary Fund and World Bank loans that demanded neoliberal restructuring of the economy, and “gifts” from funds like the Clinton Foundation, which encouraged more sweatshops.
Hillary Clinton’s State Department worked hard to overturn a 2009 law passed by the Haitian Parliament that raised the minimum wage to sixty-two cents per hour. According to State Department documents released by Wikileaks, Clinton’s State Department worked with USAID and private corporations like Levis and Hanes to cut that wage in half for garment workers.21 Both Bill Clinton (representing the Clinton Foundation) and Hillary Clinton (still at the State Department) later pushed for an industrial park in which most workers took home less than two dollars a day.22
The 2010 Haiti earthquake could have been an opportunity for wealthy nations to right historical wrongs. Instead it was a chance for further profit and exploitation by business and aid groups. “Between 2005 and 2009, aid in Haiti ranged from approximately 113 to 130 percent of the total revenue available to the government,” wrote Kathie Klarreich and Linda Polman. “After the earthquake, the flow of relief and recovery aid significantly exceeded—by more than a factor of four—the government’s internal revenue.”
“Our priorities are not the same as theirs, but theirs are executed. In theory, NGOs come with something, but not with what the population needs,” Joseph Philippe, a Haitian government worker told the Nation. “We have no choice but to accept what they bring us. But then, when it doesn’t work and it’s not what we need, the state is blamed, not the NGOs.”23
The representative of one of the largest UN organizations in Haiti was asked by Nation reporters whether the local government of Haiti has ever told them what to spend donor money on. He replied anonymously, “Never. They are not in the position, because they are financially dependent. Recently, there was a government press conference. There was nothing ‘government’ about it; we organized it and told them what to say.”24
In a scathing June 2015 report, Propublica wrote that the Red Cross had raised half a billion dollars for Haiti relief, and all that the money had produced was six houses. Progress by the Red Cross was held back by a reliance on U.S. employees who not only did not have the expertise to do more, they could not even speak the language. “Going to meetings with the community when you don’t speak the language is not productive,” complained one Haitian development professional.25 But people from the United States always see themselves as experts with something to bring, even if they cannot communicate with the people they are claiming to help.
Somali poet Ali Dhux beautifully described the way aid recipients view aid workers:
A man tries hard to help you find your lost camels.
He works more tirelessly than even you,
But in truth he does not want you to find them, ever.26
In other words, when your job is international aid, you have an interest in your job continuing forever and a disincentive to pursue systemic solutions. The United Nations, USAID, Red Cross, and Invisible Children are very different organizations, and the people working there come from a wide range of backgrounds but share (let’s assume) altruistic motivations. This is not about any one organization or any one incident or any individual doing that work. Any aid that is not accountable to the community it seeks to serve, and does not address the fundamental systemic issues behind the problems it claims to address, will only reinforce an unjust system.
Another popular innovation from philanthropist-saviors is the microloan. This capitalist innovation was supposed to make money available for poor communities, erase gender disparities, and encourage small local businesses to thrive. Bangladeshi banker Muhammad Yunus won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for inventing the modern microloan.
But studies show that these loans are not as effective in the streets as they are in the minds of people in corporate boardrooms and university economics departments.27 Instead of heralding a novel way of addressing systemic poverty, microloans are an innovation that give the rich a new way to exploit the very poor, ensnaring communities in a debt economy where none existed before, making more of the world subject to the dictates and violence of finance capital, and making the life of the very poor even more hopeless. In just a few months in 2012, in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, more than two hundred victims of a microloan scheme committed suicide. An Associated Press report on the deaths reported, “Originally developed as a nonprofit effort to lift society’s most downtrodden, microfinance has increasingly become a for-profit enterprise that serves investors as well as the poor.”28
So what is the answer? If it’s not troops on the ground or humanitarian aid or loans, how can we help people in need? The answer is to support organizations based in the affected area that are accountable to the people they serve. This takes more time than giving to Red Cross or counting on USAID to step in, but it is more likely to achieve results. If we are not challenging our colonial relationships to the so-called developing world, all our charitable efforts just make for a kinder colonialism.
The Palestine liberation struggle offers a political case study of the problems of international aid. While Palestine and Haiti are very different, both are examples of anticolonial rebellions crushed by the false generosity of aid. Billions of dollars have been spent on aid to Palestine since the mid-1990s. Much of that money came from donors, like the United States and Saudi Arabia, which are politically opposed to an independent Palestinian state. In fact, the United States at the same time sent tens of billions of dollars in direct military aid to the Israeli state. Palestinians say that their problems come from the root cause of occupation. Massive amounts of money are spent with the goal of not addressing this root cause, and in fact pacifying Palestinians to get them to accept Israeli occupation, and the result is an endless continuation of the bloody and devastating status quo.
In 2009 in Gaza City, I met Dr. Haidar Eid, an associate professor of postcolonial and postmodern literature at Gaza’s al-Aqsa University and a leader of the global boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement. As we drove through a city still recovering from massacres and bombings during Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in the winter of 2008–2009, Eid told me he saw many Westerners who come to Palestine to
