No Good Organizations (NGOs)

The CEO of Red Cross makes $500,000 dollars. Who knew helping the poor was so lucrative? Sad thing is, it truly is a bountiful business. Factoring in the salaries of Red Cross’s top executives, a large portion of every dollar donated never actually makes it to the people it’s intended for.

While it is easy to reprimand an organization for paying its executives so much, the Red Cross is one of the largest non-profit organizations in the world. It requires qualified and effective leadership.

If I had these qualifications I sure wouldn’t be interested in running such a vast network without a competitive salary. Arguably, no one else would either. Compared to the salaries of other CEO’s, $500,000 can seem like chum change. 

But even if this line of thought justifies the salary, it really only absolves the tip of the iceberg. Taking a closer look, there are technicalities behind many of these non-profits that are less obvious and even more vile.

 Long story short – non-profits are marred by money mongering like any other business sector. And the consequences are much worse.

 One of the best examples involves non-profits working to bring foodstuffs to the impoverished in Africa. These organizations get their funding from developed governments based on statistics rather than efficacy. The more food they give out, regardless of where, the more funding they get.

 In the competitive market of getting grants, many non-profits end up giving out an actual excess of food to places that are already overflowing with aid. This way they can report inflated numbers. They’ll literally give out an extra thousand pounds of food just to get more funding.

What’s wrong with more food? Sometime too much can be more damaging than too little.

For one, in order to distribute a large amount of food, many of these organizations have to rely on effective public transportation, including paved roads and highways. This limits their ability and desire to go into the more rural regions where their help is needed most.

As such, a major “food dump” occurs in the urban areas. This poses a massive problem for the rural, agrarian population that composes the vast majority of Africa’s underserved.

These people already struggle to meet ends meet by selling their foodstuffs against more competitive corporate farmers. With NGO’s giving out free food to their urbanite customers, these farmers find themselves in an even more desperate situation. They lose customers and they lose money.

            It’s a vicious cycle.

The need becomes greater as the farmers become poorer. More NGOs arrive to give out more food, and the farmers become even poorer. Money is continuously thrown into Africa to fund more food, and all the while the continent starves beneath a pile of potatoes and dollars.

The death of the African farmland and the increasing urban sprawl is a direct result. Poor farmers are forced to flock to urban cities, giving up on their traditional way of life

These urban centers don’t have enough jobs to support the influx, and soon underdeveloped cities become overpopulated. The result? Massive super-slums where disease and poverty reach new heights. It’s genocide in the indirect degree.

Sadly, this issue doesn’t end with food relief. When I did a case competition on Haitian disaster relief, the same issue became very clear. After the earthquake over a thousand NGOs began operating in the country. The most NGO presence to occur per square mile, ever!

Yet the situation in Haiti remained dire for years. It came down to wasted spending by NGOs who were overlapping, providing two times the aid in areas that had already received care.

 It was a massive lack of collaboration and hundreds of thousands of donations were put to waste. NGOs used the number of people they’ve serviced as an advertisement for more donations.

 But what donors didn’t know was that several of these NGOs were counting these same people twice, and many NGOs were counting the same people as other NGOs. The numbers sounded nice, but they meant little. In fact, they were false.

So while the Red Cross is getting so much heat, in reality, paying an executive an extra hundred thousand is relatively miniscule in a system that causes more damage than repair. A system that wastes sums of money ten times greater than a mere $500,000, through loopholes and inefficiency.

 NGO reputations are based on the amount of funds they receive. Funds based on numbers. And as such, it is no surprise that NGOs spend much of their marketing and publicity on making sure these numbers remain high. Without funding, they cease to exist. And to prevent their own demise, they let those they’re helping die instead.