Big charity

The aid business has grown fat. It’s time there was proper scrutiny

Such a simple question: should Oxfam spend a couple of hundred pounds a month opening up the swimming pool at its guesthouse in one of the nicer parts of Nairobi? It was posed by Duncan Green, the group’s head of research, on his blog, and provoked a revealing bout of navel-gazing in the aid industry.

The pool was shut, Mr Green disclosed, on the orders of the charity’s head office, which feared a scandal after an advert for a pool attendant appeared on its website. The post went viral, sparking a far bigger response than Mr Green’s usual musings on poverty. Some comments were satirical, such as the suggestion Oxfam open a golf course for staff in Kenya. Others were superbly sanctimonious, such as the humanitarian worker who wrote: ‘We all agonise that we are not Gandhi.’ One respondent alleged that a major charity recently held a big management meeting at a luxury game lodge in South Africa, where rooms are £150 a night. This is not the sort of thing mentioned in fund-raising leaflets. Aid workers admitted to delight at swapping rented flats in Europe for big houses in hot climates with maids. There was talk of ‘doing very nicely financially while fighting poverty’ and of a ‘good friend who has become a millionaire from the poverty industry’ thanks to the generosity of the Department for International Development (Dfid) and the World Bank.

Successive governments, dazzled by celebrity campaigners, have ramped up aid donations and promoted topical causes. These days, Britain even forces aid down the throats of nations that do not want it. Our government gives £280 million a year to India, which distributes foreign aid itself and in a decade will have a bigger economy than ours. The Indians asked to stop taking ‘peanuts’ from the British but, we have learned, Dfid insisted it would be too embarrassing to change course.