A fiver in the collecting tin

There's been quite a lot about foreign aid in the news recently thanks to CallMeDave's commitment to ring-fence 0.7% of GDP on dishing out handouts to, well, basically anyone it seems including China who are building themselves an aircraft carrier when we have just had to scrap ours and borrow one from the Frenchies because we're broke and rather "amusingly" handing money hand over fist to India who are happy to pocket development aid and spend it on a manned space programme.

Now I've nothing against space exploration but when that nice Mr Osborne comes along and rapes my wallet every month I'd like to think that any space exploration is being done employing British engineers, scientists and astronauts and not a Mr Patel from the Mumbai Space Lab whilst, not 5km from Mr Patel's gaff, some baby is starving to death in a gutter.

And don't even get me started on Africa.

So what to do. The problem here is, I feel, money, Or rather "cash". It's easy to stick your hand in your pocket and shove a fiver into a collection tin - makes you feel a bit better about yourself and that you're "doing something" and not really caring that maybe up to 80% of that fiver has gone on "admin" or "paying the people who run the charity a big fat salary and renting those prime offices in the middle of London and of course those Herman Miller Aeron chairs don't buy themselves darling", for that is what "admin" actually means. So it is with governments. CallMeDave and every other fuckwit politico can look all big and generous on the world stage, a great philanthropist (with other people's money though - ours) and he really could not give a crap that 80% of this is going to end up in President Mwombawomba's "I need a new jet because the Lear-45 is so last year" fund and Mrs Ouagadougou and her four kids are still going to be living in the same mud hut with no sanitation or running water in five years from now.

No. What we should send is not money, but people. We have a lot of those, some of them quite clever and well educated. Instead of sending out a metric fuckton of cash why not send out accountants, bankers and policemen to help sort out corruption and the money supply, send some more bankers (see they are useful for something) to teach the locals how to set up credit unions and microfinance, teachers to raise literacy and educate especially women (something proven to reduce poverty), geologists and engineers to show the locals how to drill for water and run an electricity grid that works more than 4 hours a day.

Sure it costs money but look at all those kids coming out of university with all those newfound skills and a shedload of debt. How about HM Gov. saying "OK you go out to Durkadurkastan for two years, we pay off your student loan and tuition fees and pay you minimum wage for the duration - now go help build a sewage plant and teach the locals how to run it."

That way I see it, everyone wins, the folk of Durkadurkastan get clean water and learn how to run the infrastructure so they can make more, our raw graduates get shedloads of practical experience they can use when they come back and CallMeDave still gets to strut around the world stage like some superannuated peacock. The only people who lose out are the President Mwombawombas of the world which is no bad thing. Hey we even get to spread some of our culture around the world - well if it's OK for the rest of the world to bring their culture here then it must be fine for that traffic to flow the other way, right?

But it's all a bit harder than metaphorically sticking your hand in your wallet and stuffing a fiver in the tin. So it'll never happen.