Dec
28
Adventure Capitalist, reviewed by Alston Mabry
December 28, 2007 |
Listening to Jim Rogers's Adventure Capitalist lately in the car. He has funny stories about NGOs in Africa, like how a guy worked a Swiss NGO for $20M by "buying" his friends and relatives out of "slavery" in Sudan and then "freeing" them for the NGO's benefit (after they had memorized a suitably heart-rending story of their plight). I think it was Ethiopia where he talked about the guy soaking NGOs by running an "orphanage" where he would bring in kids from local villages when the NGO staff would visit to check on the "orphans." Then, after the NGO people left, the kids would get paid and go back home. And the scam of collecting clothing and other items at churches across the US, as donations to help poor Africans, after which they are shipped through consolidators to Africa and sold off to wholesalers who sell them in markets. Hey, at least that stuff is actually getting there!
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Something very similar was in the news in France recently. A little known French NGO planned to “save orphans from Darfur” and bring them to France. They went to Africa and were able to get middlemen to refer 103 small children to them for a fee. But it later turned out that they were not orphans from Darfur but children from a neighboring region of Chad who lived with their parents. The foolish White Man had been fooled again.
I haven't listened to or read Adventure Capitalist yet. Maybe I should. As someone who has worked for NGOs in africa, in Zimbabwe, Rwanda, Uganda, and DRC (Zaire), on issues ranging from refugees to IDPs to irrigation and electrification projects, I can say unequivocally that the picture here is in no way the norm. (I'm currently in the military, which has also taken it in the shorts recently. But are we ready to condemn the entire institution? Well, maybe some of us are…) NGOs have gotten a bad rap. Some of them deservedly. But let's be fair. We don't throw out an entire industry when talking about an unscrupulous junk bond speculator. We don't overthrow a democratic regime after being lied to by a President. Right?