AfricaIs aCountry

A new scheme to end poverty

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

A new scheme to end poverty

By
Caitlin L Chandler

This is so cynical: let people in poor countries send money to nonprofits in rich countries.

School children in Mathare, Kenya in 2004 (Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, via Flickr).

I know many readers believe that addressing global poverty is a fairly complex issue. Well, I’m delighted to inform you that you’re wrong! Apparently, the solution is simple – let people in poor countries send money to nonprofits in rich countries, and through the joy of giving a thousand crops will bloom.

At least that is the gist of an article called “Bob Goff Turns the Idea of Charity Upside Down,” about an organization called Restore International that is apparently raising money with Ugandan school children to donate to a youth nonprofit in Oregon in the United States called The Mentoring Project. Little can be found about Restore International on their website other than a breaking news item that they are “rescuing Ugandan children out of forced prostitution.”

To be honest, when I first read this article I thought it was a brilliant spoof of the international NGO scene – but I think they’re serious. Writes Justin Zoradi of the Mentoring Project on the idea of cross-cultural giving in the article:

Remember the parable Jesus told about the widow who gave her last coin to the poor in Mark 12? In the same vein, let’s not take away the opportunity for the boys from Uganda to be blessed by God and experience the joy of giving…And, maybe if we gave the global south more opportunities to experience the joys of giving, they’d be more likely to pull their own countries out of poverty.

Right.

 

Further Reading

The people want to breathe

In Tunisia’s coastal city of Gabès, residents live in the shadow of the phosphate industry. As pollution deepens and repression returns, a new generation revives the struggle for life itself.

After Paul Biya

Cameroon’s president has ruled for over four decades by silence and survival. Now, with dynastic succession looming and no clear exit strategy, the country teeters between inertia and implosion.

Leapfrogging literacy?

In outsourcing the act of writing to machines trained on Western language and thought, we risk reinforcing the very hierarchies that decolonization sought to undo.

Repoliticizing a generation

Thirty-eight years after Thomas Sankara’s assassination, the struggle for justice and self-determination endures—from stalled archives and unfulfilled verdicts to new calls for pan-African renewal and a 21st-century anti-imperialist front.

The king of Kinshasa

Across five decades, Chéri Samba has chronicled the politics and poetry of everyday Congolese life, insisting that art belongs to the people who live it.

Drip is temporary

The apparel brand Drip was meant to prove that South Africa’s townships could inspire global style. Instead, it revealed how easily black success stories are consumed and undone by the contradictions of neoliberal aspiration.