Word: aid
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...even the staunchest advocates of aid, though, deny its many problems. One of the most glaring has been the intractable misery of Africa despite more than 20 years of intensive foreign assistance. A recent study by the 24-nation Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found "virtually no progress in per-capita income over the past two decades" in countries south of the Sahara Desert. Worse yet, said the report, sub-Saharan Africa now produces less food per person than it did in 1960, despite the tens of billions of aid dollars spent on rural development. Among reasons for this...
Recent famines have spotlighted Africa's woes and the difficulty of providing help. When pictures of starving Ethiopian and Sudanese children appeared around the world, there was an outpouring of aid. Rock Musician Geldof was among the first to become involved in raising money, followed by USA for Africa, an American outfit that produced We Are the World, the smash- hit record...
...raising money often proved the easy part. In Ethiopia, the Marxist government of Mengistu Haile Mariam, which is battling guerrillas in the country's northern provinces, promptly turned aid into a political tool. Government troops seized a food-laden ship to keep supplies from reaching the rebel-held north, where the famine was most severe. In Sudan, guerrillas battling Prime Minister Sadiq al-Mahdi's regime shot down a passenger plane last August, killing 60 people, and threatened to shoot any relief aircraft that tried to land in the south, where some 2 million Sudanese needed food...
...their good intentions, aid donors often find themselves at odds with the very people they seek to help. One common complaint is that some relief workers live in a style that contrasts vividly -- and insultingly -- with the poverty around them. In Mozambique, where about 40 Western agencies have offices, high-ranking aid workers can rent colonial villas staffed by servants and still save large chunks of salaries that may exceed $80,000 a year. That is a sum past reckoning in a country in which the average annual income is about $300. Such imported luxuries as Cuban cigars, French perfumes...
...those who provide assistance, of course, lead comfortable lives. Volunteers working for such private charitable organizations as Catholic Relief Services, Band Aid or Oxfam often live in spartan quarters and work exhaustingly long hours. In Khartoum, Alastair Scott-Villiers, 26, supervises the distribution of $22 million in Band Aid relief from a dingy hotel room that lacks a toilet or bath. His annual salary is about $14,000. Outside the capital, Liz Hughes, 25, shares a hut in the crumbling village of Mayo with two other Irish nurses. The threesome, who each receive $60 a month from Goal, an Irish...