When you make charity donations you hope that the money goes to a good cause. For whatever reason, perhaps your conscience has been pricked by something, maybe you crave the warm feeling of knowing that you have helped in some way, you make a donation. You donate some of your hard earned, hard stolen or easily given money to some charity. What happens then?

Well assuming it is a genuine charity and not a scam, the first people to take a cut are the charities themselves. Large international charities like Oxfam have to spend a proportion of all the donations and funds raised for their charity on administration, marketing and so forth. That is, you might say, a fact of life for any organization of that size and complexity. That would be a fair point.

If you accept that some of your charity donation goes to administering the charity, keeping it running, the next question you may be asking yourself is how the remainder of the donation is going to be used. You would hope, for good. Of course it is not just individuals making donations to charity that transfer funds to the ‘Third World’ – government aid donations are substantial.

A story I read today illustrates that the money that goes to help out in famine relief and other projects is not always spent in a way that the people who make the donations would like. Food, medicine, infrastructure, education, these are the things that we like to think our aid donations pay for. The truth it seems is that they go to much less altruistic causes indeed.

Is this what your charity donations pay for?

It seems that aid money directed towards Ethiopia was in fact spent on weapons. The money in question was raised for the famine of ’85-’84. Instead of being spent on famine relief, it was misdirected to pay for weapons to continue the bloody civil conflict that has dogged the East African nation for decades.

Corruption in Africa is endemic, some aid money and charity donations are bound to go astray. Some however have raised the wider question as to whether aid is, in the greater scheme of things, helping at all. For instance the unintended effect of providing food aid in some situations has been local farmer abandoning food production as there is no longer a living to be earned from it. It is a thorny issue, but it is one that needs to be addressed in order that we can be sure that our charity donations and tax money do good, and not evil.