Slow and Steady

It's been at least 2500 years since Aesop told his fable to his Greek friends and family about the tortoise and the hare.  Slow and steady wins the race, we say today.  The story came to mind recently reading about the trouble with Haiti earthquake relief.  In the social service sector, we talk about "emotive giving."  People give money, and large amounts of money, when they are emotionally charged.  Estimates are that $9 billion was given after the catastrophic earthquake devastated the already-impoverished island nation.  Questions abound in the whole situation, but one thing I do know is that the days and years after a crisis are not the most effective time to spend money.  It's absolutely necessary to spend whatever necessary on emergency relief, but I can't help but think about that $9bn.

A quick check on the USAID website shows that from 2001-2009, US foreign aid to Haiti averaged $162 million per year (that's a total of $1.5bn).  At this point, it deserves to be mentioned that I'm very suspicious of foreign aid and its purported benefits, but it's entirely necessary.  My guess is that it takes $10 of official aid to equal the impact of $5 of private giving to better organizations.  Problem is, private donors still can't afford aid in that scale.  Hard to say what the private giving toward Haiti projects was over that time period, but I'd bet it doesn't add up to much.  I'm curious what progress could have been made in Haiti over that time period with $1bn per year rather than $162 million.  How much stronger would have the nation been and better prepared to deal with it?  USAID disaster preparedness giving to Haiti didn't begin until 2007 and in 3 years added to less than $10 million.

Everyone knows an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.  We're all guilty of this kind of emotive giving.  We'd rather write a $10,000 check at a big fundraising event than find a cause we believe in and pledge $1000 per month over the long haul.  We're swayed by fundraising appeals that hit our emotions rather than well-researched and professionally presented strategies for progress.  We'd rather have booming 10% market growth for a few years followed by recession than a century of steady 6% growth.  None of these are rational thought processes - in each case we're choosing the option that is neither best for us nor for anyone else.  Let's get back to the original point - when it comes to the developing nations in our midst, will the world get serious proactively working for development, or spend another century responding to expensive crises?