This post is not about the process of the debate- that will follow. Instead what I want to write about here are some of the key questions that we should consider when we are judging bids:
Should we fund an individual or a village project?
We have traditionally done a mixture of the two above, but some have argued that we should not be funding the individual students because a village project has the power to help more people.
Actually it is a bit more complicated than that- the students that we fund, tend to be training to work in medicine or schools so we are actually investing in the health and education of many Gambians over the next forty or more years.
Also, there is some research that suggests that giving money to individual poor people is a highly efficient way of doing good. My friend Sana is a good example- the investment that we have made in his education will allow him to earn a salary which will soon support his family compound of 50+.
There is a charity in Africa which entirely works to fund individuals- they look on Google maps to see which houses in a village have straw roofs (as opposed to the more expensive corrugated metal) and then visit the village and give $1,000 to the occupant- without any further research into who they are, but just based on the deduction that the owner must be one of the poorest people in the village. The scheme has been independently accredited as one of the most effective in the continent at improving the quality of life in the villages.
Should we buy food, medicine, or pay for a project?
This returns us to the debate about sustainable development which I touched on briefly in my earlier post- are we really helping?
If we buy food or particularly medicine, we may actually be saving lives this year.
If that is all we ever do, we are not helping the villagers to move out of the crippling poverty which leads them to get ill or hungry in the first place.
It generally is better to spend our money on a sustainable project like the maize mill in Genieri. This will allow the villagers to work and eat more efficiently and also possibly earn money by renting it out to other villages.
The village of Kolior, for example, made the smart decision to bid over several years for the money to build a shop by the side of the road- we will see it when we drive past as indeed does everyone who drives through the country. It is a good investment, but it meant that for the two years we paid for it in installments, we funded little else there.
The sustainability vs crisis management debate is again more complicated than I’ve suggested. Investing in drugs that save lives is also a sustainable thing to do because a living human is actually a pretty big investment in the future of the community. Similarly, food for a village will generally be for the school. It tends to be that the kids won’t go to the school if they don’t get fed, so again this is an investment in the future.
Which villages should we give more to?
This last bit is a set of questions which we need to think about without necessarily giving answers yet.
- The village of Kolior has got a lot of money from us over the years because their leaders are really good at asking for things that we think are sustainable, but should we be investing more in them because of this or actually trying to give more money to communities who are poorer because they aren’t so well led?
- Should we buy medicine for a village or instead give more to the big hospitals in Kaiaf and Kwinella which between them cover most of our area?
- How much attention should we pay to the geography of the area- should we fund a project in one village precisely because the inhabitants of other villagers are near there and can get to them easily?
- Should we ever pull out of a village because we have helped them enough and there are other nearby villages we have never been to?
The locations of all our villages are marked on this Google map, but so are others that we have never visited and indeed if you zoom in on the maps site, there are even more.
Should we move around?
Take a look at where Sibito is- they are out on their own, really close to the border with Senegal.
Do they deserve more?
Beacon in the Gambia 