[nchmy]

I strongly agree that it's incomparably more important to teach a man/village how to fish/build a bike than to give them one. Unfortunately most people who focus on "helping" are grossly incompetent and have largely misaligned incentives (and oversight).

As for local innovation, it think it very much depends on where. I've visited and lived in many communities in developing nations in Latin America and there's a distinct dearth of not just innovative solutions, but even just basic and seemingly obvious ones. Upon seeing and feeling this 7 years ago, I decided to dedicate my life to it. I'm hopeful that in the coming year I'll finally be ready to share what I've been working on to facilitate it in a more scalable way...

[jvanderbot]

When I went to South Africa last, we went through a few slums.

It was comical to see the celebrity "assistance" in the form of e.g., a music production studio + school set up by skrillex, neighboring areas where people lived in shipping crates with stolen electricity jumpered directly from main, and with water tapped off city lines and bucketted in.

They dont need djs, they need plubmbers, carpenters, and electricians first! Fires and water loss were endemic. Almost everyone lived off government assistance, stole / smuggled resources, and blocked traffic/protested when the illegal resource taps were shut down or a government job didn't manifest. The people who made money where they lived usually washed cars or sold trinkets to tourists or brewed bucket beer.

[nephihaha]

Music, much like sport, is seen by many working class people as a way to make some money, so not completely senseless. Art to a lesser extent.

Carpenters/joiners are a good half-way house, as they can provide both practical assistance to the community as well as selling collectibles/souvenirs or whatever.

The problem is the minute some of these people pick up skills or money, they leave the slums behind. The plumbers and electricians may make better money rigging up office blocks than from fitting out the slums.

[mschuster91]

> I strongly agree that it's incomparably more important to teach a man/village how to fish/build a bike than to give them one. Unfortunately most people who focus on "helping" are grossly incompetent and have largely misaligned incentives (and oversight).

It goes deeper than that if you ask me. It's rarely about "helping" in a lot of cases in the first place, and there's no incompetence at play either.

Just look at food aid to Africa. You know, the campaigns with banners of emaciated African children holding empty food bowls. These aren't primarily about helping African children, but about diverting European (or American) oversupply towards Africa to stabilize prices in the domestic markets - and they all but wiped out African food industry. Simbabwe was known as the "corn chamber of Africa" but lost that in a matter of decades as the cheap food from Europe was cheaper than they could produce. Or clothing donations, these ended up as "mitumba" in Africa, and wrecked local supply chains so hard that, by the time the Chinese came around, there was nothing left to fight.

[debo_]

The White Man's Burden by William Easterly covered this in some detail quite a few years ago.

[nephihaha]

Apart from the obvious disclaimer that some parts of Africa function much better than others...

Zimbabwe's agricultural sector was wrecked by handing farms to Mugabe loyalists who didn't know what to do with them. His government didn't just go for whites, but also some of the black farm workers who would have known how to use them.

Likewise, the famine in Ethiopia was not helped by either Mengistu's Marxist government (who used Live Aid money for arms) or the previous set up under Emperor Haile Selassie which was based on clientism.

[mschuster91]

Yeah, a bunch of Africa's problems were entirely self-inflicted. But... Western nations just dumping their surplus on Africa under the guise of "donations" certainly didn't help.

[WillAdams]

That is why Heifer International is such an important charity:

https://www.heifer.org/our-work/approach

[mghackerlady]

I think, largely, both options should be used in tandem. Give the hungry some fish, they need it, but while you're there teach them how to fish

[bloqs]

I had never really considered the _competence_ of help before. It makes a huge amount of sense and is a strong argument for intelligent younger folk looking for a meaningful career. Instead of engineering for the pocket lining of your chosen billionaire, why not use those incredible skills to use in frugal or humanitarian engineering

[Geezus_42]

> why not use those incredible skills to use in frugal or humanitarian engineering

Because no one is willing to pay them for it and they have bills to pay.

[cwmoore]

This is the reason we won’t tax the bots for UBI, they have bills to pay too.

[ipsod]

Check out David Malawey's work: https://www.youtube.com/@davidmalawey

He's teaching proper engineering with commodity parts and accessible technologies.

[nchmy]

In my fairly extensive experience, non-profit organizations are not just full of and run by grossly incompetent people, but deeply arrogant and/or deluded ones as well. I have NEVER found an organization that has a genuine desire to seek truth, efficacy etc. They often go with whatever their first (inevitably insufficient) idea was, and not only reject all criticism but respond with indignity, etc...

There's no meaningful/competent oversight. It's all just about feels and optics. And thus no real progress has or will be made.

Anyway, yes, I agree that competent and genuine people (who are extremely rare) ought to try to make a meaningful impact in the world. But there's generally more money in something else.

(one rare exception that comes to mind, though i haven't visited them, is The Ocean Cleanup project. They seem to be experimenting and succeeding towards the worthwhile goal of making effective engineering interventions for cleaning up waterways and oceans)

[ForHackernews]

The Carter Center has nearly eliminated the Guinea Worm: https://www.cartercenter.org/programs/guinea-worm/

I'm sure there's plenty of incompetent nonprofits out there, but there's plenty of incompetent for-profits as well.

[nchmy]

The difference is that the non-profits come with the expectation that they're genuine, well-run, accountable etc. For profits don't really have any moral expectation

[swiftcoder]

To some extent, one doesn't even see the competent non-profits. They don't market aggressively, they don't scale up rapidly, they just stick to their niche and quietly hammer away at it for decades on end (often on things that have no feasible exit, like schools that will need to be externally funded forever)

[fragmede]

That seems like a simple money regulations issue. If the school has a $100 million endowment, but doesn't spend into it, the school would exist forever. If we say 10% returns a year, that's $10 million to spend on students in the form of teachers and classrooms and housing and books and everything. Unfortunately, that only teaches N students per year. But it would last ~forever. If, however, you get greedy with wanting to teach more than N students per year, then you get into the treadmill of needing external funding forever, but on the face of it, I don't accept that external funding is required forever.

[swiftcoder]

A 100 million endowment is effectively "forever funding" from the perspective of a school that takes in maybe 200k/year of donations. You don't get 100 million endowments without the scale and marketing, unfortunately

[WillAdams]

The vast majority of the chicken flocks in South Korea are descended from chicks donated by Heifer International during and shortly after the Korean War.

https://www.heifer.org/blog/historic-gift-from-south-korea-a...

[idiotsecant]

There are plenty of nonprofits making a difference, your cynicism aside.

[cwmoore]

How is that difference measured, in general?

Setting aside cynicism is one thing but what answers are there for skepticism besides the very common moralizing personal attacks?

When I see a lot of nonprofit leadership improving their own lot much more reliably than the people “they serve”, I wonder if the handouts are just being politically diverted to the best and most politically valuable promoters.

If UBI is off the table, competition for gatekeeping resources becomes a dark market.

[ForHackernews]

https://www.cartercenter.org/programs/guinea-worm/#by-the-nu...

> Since our efforts began in 1986, the incidence of Guinea worm has fallen by more than 99.99% to 10* human cases in 2025

[cwmoore]

Notice I am not asking for an example. Anecdata of one, and for sure there are many, in isolation is—demonstrably—mostly PR.

[idiotsecant]

So your honest position that you're arguing here is that literally every nonprofit is not making a difference? Every one of them? What are we even talking about here?

[cwmoore]

>How is that difference measured?

So it is personal attacks? Are you joking?

Is there no gatekeeping of pools of money?

[bratbag]

Because i would rather solve the problems close to home, the problems involving those billionaires.

Im not going to put effort into turning those other people in another country into a new cash crop for billionaires.

[fragmede]

Who's taking care of me when I'm old and my body and mind are failing? Billionaires aren't gonna, but the money they pay me can be used to trade for goods and services, so hopefully when it's my time, it's less shitty.

[idiotsecant]

We spend 60 years of our lives being miserable so that the last 10 will be slightly less miserable. How does that make sense?