Comment by xp84
2 days ago
Two main takeaways:
1. Never underestimate developing countries' governments' willingness to absolutely bend their people over to extract tax revenue (and then their corrupt representatives extract bribes on top of it)
2. Django's gratitude and positivity in the face of all of it is an inspiration. I suspect I and most everyone I know would be in tears and would have given up in exasperation halfway through his quest. We are so spoiled in the West.
This is unfortunately also one of the biggest problems with donating to NGOs that operate in many foreign countries. Much of the aid money gets stolen by corrupt officials and local criminals. Donors have to check carefully that NGOs are legitimately benefiting the intended recipients.
"much" is an unqualified and unjustified word here. It definitely happens but this would at most affect a tiny fraction of donor money.
Many of the NGOs have strict no-bribery policies, else they would not receive support from bodies like the EU (which is the biggest humanitarian donor on the planet).
In some cases the choice may be between "letting people starve" and "feeding people but the local warlord extracts some benefits" but these are rare and only the worst crisis contexts (think South Sudan, DRC).
>a tiny fraction of donor money.
that is not what happened for example in Gaza. UNRWA sent billions to Gaza where that aid was hijacked by HAMAS, and even when the aid was distributed to people outside of HAMAS, HAMAS directly controlled the distribution of that aid. And i don't see UN operating any different at the other places too.
Or like Rubio said:
https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2025/10/24/unrwa-is-subsidiary-...
"U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio accused the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) of being “a subsidiary of Hamas” "
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Yes, but it's important to note that just because a lot of aid is ineffective doesn't mean it all is. If you want to give to very poor people and be confident most (85%+) actually gets to them I encourage you to take a look at https://www.givedirectly.org/. Full disclosure, I'm an unpaid trustee of the UK sister charity
I do some work in Africa and that's not what i've seen. The NGOs have their own separate supply chains and are quite resistant to corrupt officials and local criminals. The problem with NGOs is that they're mostly regular business masquerading as 'aid' and out competing local businesses who dont have access to their infrastructure and subsidies. There's actually much more demand for NGOs from the West than from their recipients. African governments are trying to clamp down on NGOs, but there's a lot of pressure from the west for the status quo.
If the implication is true…
Shouldn’t people stop helping further entrench these shady practices?
If Ugandan decision makers know the people will effectively always be underwritten to receive some bread and water… no matter what happens…
Then what exactly is stopping them from piling on more and more nonsense?
The boundary on this is kind of fuzzy. You obviously wouldn't donate if 100% of it was stolen, but also if you wait until the world is in a perfected state before helping anyone you'll never help anyone.
I don't pretend to have all the answers, but what I've decided works for me personally is supporting a handful of hyper-focused charities that run very lean in terms of western staff and employ local skilled labour.
One example is the Canadian charity One4Another which performs surgeries to reverse some common birth defects in kids and babies in Uganda. They're not trying to feed the world, they're not interfering with the local economy; in fact they're employing doctors and nurses to perform a one-time intervention that changes the life of thousands of kids a year in the catchment area of their facility.
Obviously there are things that a group like this can't do but a massive NGO can, and that's great too, but for what I have to give, I feel very good about the impact per dollar of this.
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Better 20% of your money reaches a starving child than 0%.
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You are right, the downvotes people gave this comment are wrong, the replies to you are wrong. Feeding evil in the hopes you will also feed a little good is not only bad morally, but bad practically, bad in a utilitarian calculus, and just dumb.
Which is why, naturally, the American Red Cross is the gold standard for NGO donation efficiency.
You're joking about this right? An old colleague did a lot of work with them and he told me how incredibly corrupt they are and to stay away.
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They can’t even operate efficiently in the USA was that intended as sarcasm
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Do you mean the ICRC?
A polished website and audited reports don't always tell you whether aid is reaching people effectively on the ground
> 1. Never underestimate developing countries' governments' willingness to absolutely bend their people over to extract tax revenue (and then their corrupt representatives extract bribes on top of it)
As a Brazilian with a love for electronics and DIY, I feel this pain every day.
the 80% tax on electronics since the 80s was because brazil had a few chip foundries.
two of them started cloning cpus designs (8080 and 68k iirc). they sold well all over the (1st and 2nd) world (still no local market). until one company did a publicity stunt lying they had a full mac clone (it was an actual mac, but they did have something else).
then apple and others pressured the US state department, which pressured the brazilian gov with tarifs on oranges (most of the new elite created in the millitary coups were now big land owners and orange was the cash crop). They were so afraid of the tarifs that they closed both factories as requested, and added the import tax as a good will gesture on top!
and many (30%) brazilians today think another military coup will sort things out
I was going to snidely ask what Argentina's excuse was for its import tax on electronics, but it's been a decade since I lived there, and it appears they dropped the tariff to zero at the start of this year (2026). Really, talk about holding your economy back for the wrong reasons: Making it wildly expensive for people to get the tools they need to bring money into the local economy. Besides, all it did was open a black market.
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Forgive me, I'm unclear on one thing -- the import tax was added as a goodwill gesture? To whom? I mean, who was this done to placate? Not the US companies, and not the closed factories, right?
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In regard to number 1, it really is such a hard problem to get money and aid to those that need it. Autocrats and every person with power along the way is happy to pocket it.
It seems like GiveDirectly has figured it out somehow?
> Never underestimate developing countries' governments' willingness to absolutely bend their people over to extract tax revenue (and then their corrupt representatives extract bribes on top of it)
being a developing country or not is orthogonal to what you have described. The top developed nations have one or more of these issues.
Developed countries may have exorbitant taxes and fees, but generally not bribes.
Someone may say "a tax or fee is just a legalized bribe to the state!"
Which, sure, you could look at it that way, but it's codified and predictable and that lack of surprise is extremely valuable.
Man, I am a native Spaniard and even with Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Bilbao and industrial powerhouses we can't compete with furthern North Italy/Germany/Netherlands in some areas, but I've heard horror stories from Latin America that wouldn't happen in Spain without making the news.
All governments.
And if you bypass their abuse, you're a "smuggler", shamed on by the press.
It’s crazy that it’s magnitudes cheaper for me from the EU to go to a poor country with non existing administration, than the people from there to come to the EU. And magnitudes more convenient. Just to get a passport; for me, it’s a nuance and it basically costs nothing; for a lot of people in those countries, it’s impossible to get one legally, and one costs 100s or 1000s of dollars illegally. And that’s just the passport, not the traveling itself.
To me that doesn't sound crazy, it's just about the fact that even being homeless in Amsterdam or something is a much easier life than what's available to a commoner in a good portion of sub-Saharan Africa. If it was incredibly simple to get a "tourist visa" for people from developing countries, Europe would have even more people just showing up and never leaving than they already do today.
Whatever one thinks about the overall subject of migrants, I think one can at least agree with these two things:
1. We won't fix poverty and corruption in the developing world by everyone there just jumping to the nearest 'rich' country.
2. Once migrants are in the 'rich' country, it's more controversial and difficult to force them to go back home than it is to not enable them to come in the first place.
> We are so spoiled in the West.
This can happen in the West too.
I volunteered at a homeless shelter, and we helped those who had lost everything get important documents like their Social Security card and s state ID, and the bureaucracy was atrocious. Sometimes we literally had to beg a senator's office to help.
At least they didn't ask for bribes, but I wonder if that would've made things easier.
I was once asked to look at some letters by a reasonably fresh immigrant coworker. (He learned the language and found a job in a few months which to me should be all we needed from him) He brought a 1980 style stack of paper 30cm thick and it was all in legalese mixed with gibberish. Apparently some entities missed their deadline, triggered an investigation and a fine in a process that also missed it's deadline which triggered a different process looking for someone to blame. Other stuff was going on too, like a half finished immigration process in a different EU country.
I asked another Dutch co-worker to help look at it. We pretty much couldn't make sense of the last letters. No idea what he had to do next. We joked that if we got that much corospondence we would flee the country.
A few months later he moved to Canada.
I agree with the second point especially. What stood out to me was not just that Django endured the bureaucracy, but that he remained grateful and composed through it
>Never underestimate developing countries' governments' willingness to absolutely bend their people over to extract tax revenue
If there is anything characteristic of developing countries’ taxing systems, it would be how short reaching and inadequate it is. Many of these countries’ governments are corrupt, sure, but these small revenue extracting schemes are about the only way they can collect “taxes” at all.
“Never underestimate developing countries' governments' willingness to absolutely bend their people over to extract tax revenue” Democratic Party city and state governments in the US: “HOLD MY BEER”
Sources:
1. Virginia Democratic governor less than 24 hours after becoming governor: https://factually.co/fact-checks/politics/virginia-new-gover...
2: Seattle collectivist “my parents still pay for my cell plan since I have never had a real job” mayor: https://townhall.com/tipsheet/amy-curtis/2025/11/14/seattle-...
3: NY new socialist wannabe Palestinian liberator mayor: https://nypost.com/2026/04/10/us-news/mamdani-pushed-combine...
4: California “I hate liars” liar and “Free 10x cost Diapers for everyone” Newsom government proposals: https://nypost.com/2026/02/12/us-news/californians-have-just...
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What does this reddit-esque whataboutism add..?
EU just implemented a new customs tax law that will be coming to member states on july 1st.
Until now, items below 150eur (bought by private citizens) were not a subject to customs, and some time ago not even for VAT if below 22eur. From july 1st, it's becoming painful, in slovenia for example, 3eur per TARIC code + customs fee + vat.
So, for example you go on alixpress, you buy a silicone phone case for 1eur, a screen protector/foil for 1eur, a phone "sock" for 1eur and a stylus for 1 eur (+whatever shipping, often free).
A few years ago, you'd pay 4eur and get the package. Then they implemented IOSS, so aliexpress has to report the 4eur order to EU, and they charge you 22% VAT on that, so you'd pay 4.88eur directly to aliexpress and they'd pay the tax. Ok, a bit more expensive but doable, unless you want to go outside of eu and order the stuff there and just bring it in with you.
And now? Since they're 4 different items, that's 4 TARIC codes, and that's 3eur per each separate item, so that makes 4eur for items themselves, 4x3eur for customs (16eur together with the item price), then you pay VAT on the full price (including customs!), that makes it 19.52eur + whatever the post office decides to charge for "processing" (used to be ~4-5euros, but usually avoided by aliexpress shippers).
So, instead of 4euros, you'll pay 20-25euros for the same thing, the government taking 20 euros of tax on 4euros of items (even less total worth, aliexpress + chinese shipping has to earn their share too).
I mean sure, they want you to buy locally from dropshippers, but it's still cheaper than that, or from amazon, which will probably be the biggest winner here, and it's not even a european company.
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Most African countries were decolonized at the same time as Singapore.
How long will the white man be blamed for every single thing happening in Africa today? Will a century be enough? 200 years? More?
Aren't Africans adults with agency who are ultimately responsible for the state of their countries?
Are you under the impression that western activity in Africa ceased with the end of colonialism? No fomented coups, conflicts, revolutions, arms and funding for rebel groups, continuous bribes and support to corrupt government officials to secure the flow of oil, minerals, etc. out of those countries into western hands? No proxy wars between the west and the USSR?
Read more about the history of the continent.
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Woah, nobody was talking about race here, why are you suddenly bringing it up?
Oh, interesting, because you're treating time and ethnicity, as the only factors in economic development. If you take a country full of Ugandans, and a country full of Singaporeans (the countries in your theory are the same of course), and terminate "colonization" (which is the same thing everywhere) at roughly the same time, if the Singaporeans do better, that means the Ugandans are... stupider? Less good at capitalism? What's your full, stated theory here? Can you please say it outright?
Anyway, you're ignoring a lot of other relevant factors. The two countries decolonized at roughly the same time, however Singapore is a tiny maritime city-state, whereas Uganda is a large, landlocked, agrarian country, and its agrarian economy completely taken over by cash crops.
Btw it's also a bit bizarre that you're just saying, "Africans." Africa is a huge continent with wildly different ecologies and economies across it. Regardless, Ugandans do indeed have agency, and that agency is the same as anyone's agency: operating within the constraints into which they were born.
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What's the solution?
Arguably, just to leave them alone, neither exploiting nor trying to "help". It sucks and it hurts, but outside interference does not seem to help a society heal itself. This has been argued by more informed people than myself-- https://www.uvm.edu/~jashman/CDAE195_ESCI375/To%20Hell%20wit...
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