Comment by em-bee
3 years ago
i am not sure, i feel that helping individuals remotely is sort of like giving people fish instead of teaching them to fish. i'd focus on projects that actually have an impact on a community by helping the community to develop themselves. the best i can think of to help an individual is to offer them a job, but other help ought to be more community oriented. unless you have the ability to actually move to those places and help through building friendship. but that is much harder to achieve.
Dropping the incidence of malaria in a community is helping the community develop themselves. It's harder to improve your lot in life when your family is sick with malaria.
There is nothing you can teach for people to avoid malaria at night - mosquitos enter the house and bite you.
Importantly, consider the costs involved: $3 protects 2 people for 4 years. Can you think of a "teach them something" intervention that would provide as much good for the same amount of money?
thank you, yes, that is a good point. i didn't consider vaccinations. there is really nothing that can replace those, no matter how self-sufficient i'd like people to be. even if a country can make their own vaccinations, that's such a specialized task that the average citizen can't really contribute to that anyways, especially not while they are still busy fighting the disease.