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More Than Altruism: The Politics of Private Foreign Aid

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In this book, Brian Smith wrote about the motives of International NGOs from the US, Europe, and Canada which have been active in trying to help Third World countries to stand on their feet. It also contains a history on how these motives have evolved from the 1940s to the present. The conclusion of the book is that quite often, NGOs real motives are often differ from their "official" statements - while most NGOs stated that they are concentrating on meeting the immediate needs of their clients, in reality many are working more on long term projects that do not have immediate impacts, but might have one in the future, which in itself is not a bad thing. Some of the more troubling findings of the book are that many NGOs are afraid of challenging the status quo and the economic orders in the developing countries they are involved with, for fearing that doing so would intimidate both the host country and their own government(s), since most NGOs relied heavily from their governments' assistance to survive. Also, many NGOs failed to fully disclose their real mission in the developing world, which could create lack of transparency and could result in demands of more accountability and tighter enforcements from their home country's constituents. Overall, an excellent book. Perhaps it should be updated soon, given many changes that have occured in the pasy decade since the book was published (e.g., the end of Cold War, globalization, shift of development strategy from planning to market, reduction in foreign aid due to tigher budget of the Western countries, etc.).