Ugandan Aid-A Fool and their Money..

Purple said:
There are poster campaigns in Uganda to promote the use of condoms due to the spread of HIV/AIDS.
The main resistance to this is from fundamentalist Christians, financed by parent Churches in the USA and Europe.
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Posters aren't enough - the Ugandian government has no family planning strategy, isn't interested in creating one and the population is exploding. The rate of growth is unsustainable and Uganda's population is expected to rise to 150m by 2050.

Family planning facilities need to be located in all the clinics where free vaccinations are currently on offer.

From my experience of Africa, I would imagine that a lot of African women who are in dire circumstances would avail of these services if they were promoted / available in their local area.

Some of the largest interantional NGO's have religion at the top of their agenda and this is a major problem when it comes to birth control. They are some of the world's most important providers, but need to look at population growth for the good of the people they are trying to help.
 

I agree completely. Irish Aid doesn't have religion as an agenda and even Irish NGO's like Concern that do have a religious tradition are very practical on the ground.
The best cure for population growth is 1) wealth; rich families don't have lots of kids and 2) Education; well educated women don't have lots of kids.
 
blueband said:
charity begins at home, oh wait this is ireland....... we help everyone except our own!
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Let's remember that the World Bank and IMF were set up to help the poorest countries in the world and instead of lending money to stop people starving they are lending it to us, one of the richest countries in the world.

When we remover the trade barriers that trap tens of millions in absolute poverty, when we remove the agricultural subsidies that do the same thing and when we stop sucking up funds that are meant to keep people from starving, then and only then should we stop throwing a few crumbs back. In the mean time we should feel shame and disgust at how little we give and how utterly unjust the structures are that we avidly support.

It makes me sick when I see Irish people protesting against wars in Iraq and Afghanistan while they see no problems with the CAP or the protectionist trade structures that see us trample all over a billion people on this planet. At best they are hypocrites and fools.
 
ah now purple its hardly what you could call a few crumbs!! we have plenty of homeless people sleeping rough in this country, but very few seem to care about them. i give what little i can afford to charities but for me it begins at home.
 
blueband said:
ah now purple its hardly what you could call a few crumbs!! we have plenty of homeless people sleeping rough in this country, but very few seem to care about them. i give what little i can afford to charities but for me it begins at home.
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You're missing the point.
We are massive net recipients of a system that keeps them poor. When we behave in a fair and just way then the conversation about aid should start. As long as we propagate suffering and death in order to stay in the top billion on the planet we should at least maintain the pretence that we care. We are no better than the gentry in Europe who lived off slave plantations in the Indies but never visited them so they never had to experience the suffering that spawned their wealth.
 
they way i look at it, poverty is something that will always be with us, there has been poverty since the world began, throwing truckloads of money at these countries might help a little short term, but long term we will still have poor countries. in order for some countries to be rich others have to be poor, thats just how the world works, one ecomony rises while another one falls. im not against giving forgin aid as such! if we had the money to spare! but to borrow the money ourselves to give it away just seems crazy.
 
That makes no sense.
If more people are well off then the market for goods and services increases and so everyone benefits.

25 years ago there were a billion rich people in the world and the rest were poor. Now there are one billion rich, 4 billion in the middle and one billion poor. Aid didn’t change things, trade and economic development did. The solution to poverty is education, good governance and trade, trade that is fair. The development of Asian economies has made it much harder for African countries to escape from the poverty traps they are in because there is no economic incentive for Western companies to invest there. The Chinese are investing there but they don’t insist on the ethical standards that Western companies insist on (or are forced to insist on by their governments).
It simply makes no sense for us to leave a billion people in perpetual poverty. The situation in Mali and small West African states where states are being overthrown by Central American drug lords so that they have better access to Europe is a case in point (the cocaine supply into Europe have increased by 350% over the last 10 years because of this). The fact that extremist Islamist groups are involved in the trafficking and are using the income from this to fund terrorism is also very relevant. more


The spread of AIDS, the flow of refugees, the spawning grounds for terrorism, etc; even if you don’t care at a human level that a billion people are in needless poverty it is in our own long term economic and social interest to change things.
 
yes it is a good post, but it still do noting to address the problem pointed out at the start of this thread, WE ARE STONE BROKE!!!
 
blueband said:
yes it is a good post, but it still do noting to address the problem pointed out at the start of this thread, WE ARE STONE BROKE!!!
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We are not stone broke; we have a functioning economy with good tax revenue. What we are doing is spending far more money than we take in from taxation. Rather than reduce our expenditure and living with lower incomes and reduced services we have chosen to borrow money to fund things that we cannot afford. We are taking money that should be going to people who are really poor.
 

I am not entirely sure you have a good grasp of the situation we are in,we are actually considerably more than broke and are in debt for well over 130 billion with an interest rate that just keeps on giving,have a look at the Debt clock.

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Your suggestion that our only raison d'etre as a State should be to fund third world development?and to achieve this we must cut our salaries and services even further?

I would give us about 2 month of that carry on before Ethiopia actually starts sending us aid trucks.

I am glad you are not holding the purse strings.
 
Knuttell said:
I am not entirely sure you have a good grasp of the situation we are in,we are actually considerably more than broke and are in debt for well over 130 billion with an interest rate that just keeps on giving,have a look at the Debt clock.
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I am well aware of the situation we are in. Our debt clock is mounting because we are choosing to pay ourselves more in wages and welfare than most of the countries that are bailing us out are paying themselves.
There is no scenario in which we end up anywhere near as poor as the people we are giving aid to.

Knuttell said:
Your suggestion that our only raison d'etre as a State should be to fund third world development?and to achieve this we must cut our salaries and services even further?
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Where did I say that? I am suggesting that anyone who thinks there any comparison between what we are facing and what they face is talking utter rubbish.
We are borrowing money which is meant for people who need it far more than us and benefiting from a system that keeps then poor. We are like a fat man who is hungry taking bread that is meant for a man who is starving and then complaining because we have to give him a slice.

Knuttell said:
I would give us about 2 month of that carry on before Ethiopia actually starts sending us aid trucks.
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Really?
 
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