Comment by maeln
8 hours ago
> It's one thing to build and ship 1000 bicycles to a poor village, but it's another to teach a village how to make bicycles
Buying and shipping X amount of Y to <country> is easy to calculate the cost. And it's a fixed one time cost. Perfect for PR OP, and humanitarian operation with limited budget and/or available work hours.
Teaching takes the most valuable resources of all: Time. And it's harder to predict how long (and therefor how much $$) it will take before having sustainable results. And it requires on-premise staff and usually to setup some building for the staff, for the teaching grounds, etc.
Tl;DR teaching can easily be 10X the time and money budget of a quick 'send stuff' operation. This is why these are usually big operation handled by big non-profit.
There are game-theoretically aligned ways.
See for example https://oneacrefund.org/ [0] where they have a revolving loan fund.
OAF lends materials and teachers to farmers to make the more productive, by the end of the program they got productive enough to pay back the loan and OAF can lend the same money to someone else.
It's super capillary, with many boots on grounds and quality problems.
Embedded into this there's a good feedback channel: farmers who don't think are getting a good service stop paying back the loan. This allows OAF to go and audit what's failing there.
[0] The person who started also appeared in a podcast where they explained the basics https://foreveron.com/podcast/episode-035/