Ignorant Good Intentions

There are times when we in the "West" hear about some plight somewhere and jump in with good intentions.  However, many times we jump in to solve a problem without truly understanding the problem or the solutions currently being employed.  Many times we believe throwing money at the problem will solve it and many of those times it makes the problem worse.

Here is one small example of what I'm calling "Ignorant Good Intentions".  In the village I visited a couple days ago the biggest problem is access to water.  The Garden of Joy had a well dug and installed a solar-powered pump to pump water into a storage unit for the orphanage.  The long term plan is to build a very large water storage unit for the entire village with the necessary infrastructure which would allow each home to have running water.  To collect enough money to build the storage unit and the necessary infrastructure, the Garden of Joy allows villagers to purchase water from them. They in turn are saving the money to be used on the long-term project.

A church heard of the problem of the lack of water and decided they would solve the problem.  So they collected money to dig wells.  They dug a couple wells and installed hand pumps so that the villagers could get water.  Now the village has three wells, two of them require manual pumping and the third is the one at the Garden of Joy (which costs money to get water from).

So here is the problem.  Now villagers can go pump their own water and not pay the Garden of Joy for their water.  A good thing, right? No. Because now, it is harder to collect money for the large storage unit and infrastructure.  If the church had talked with the local people about the problem and tried to understand it better, they would have given money for the large water storage unit and infrastructure instead of the wells.  If they had done that, all the villagers would now have running water in their homes instead of having to walk to either pay for water or pump it on their own.

It is always better to check with the people involved before jumping in to solve the problem.  Finding the right people to talk with is also a problem.  I can imagine that the church had talked with someone who would rather pump water for free then used that information on which to based their decision. Unfortunately many times we think we know best and attempt to solve problems without all the information. 

The people managing the Garden of Joy had a conversation with the church that dug the wells trying to help them understand the long term plan and not the immediate fix.  The church is sorry they built the wells, but what's done is done.