News: International Aid

Reuters reports that Sri Lanka has decided it needs to tax inappropriate aid that has been sent to them in order to discourage them. Among those items were winter jackets.

COLOMBO (Reuters) - Tropical Sri Lanka is grateful for a deluge of tsunami aid
but said on Friday it drew the line at used winter jackets, blankets and other
second-hand clothes and would tax unsuitable aid to discourage it.
[...]

"I think they have been sent with good intention. Maybe they
thought Sri Lanka was on the South Pole,"

Just a week ago, there was another article in Reuters talking about the inefficiency of international aid.

LONDON (Reuters) - Red tape, inefficiency and nepotism mean that only one
fifth of international aid actually gets to the people who need it, aid agencies
said Monday.
Not only that, but 40 percent of international aid is spent
buying overpriced goods and services from the donors' own countries

[...] "First and foremost, they need to spend aid where it is needed -- on
poverty reduction -- rather than channel it to their own consultancy and
infrastructure industries and geopolitical allies," the report said.

[...]"Donors tend to be more concerned about the success and visibility of
their project or program than the success of a country's development plan," it
said.

It reminds me of charities where wealthy people donate with a flourish to gain positive publicity. Granted, somebody did benefit from the generous sum. But the current international aid system is a bucket with holes; nations are choosing to plug their favorite holes at the front of the bucket while leaving the ones behind neglected.

This scenario also mirrors the case of the National Kidney Foundation (NKF) in Singapore. NKF is the charity with the highest visiblility in the island (what with its charity show etc) and the amount of donations they procured represents a significant portion of total donations whereas smaller charities are barely eking by.