Just Stay Home, Failure and International Aid, included:

            Volunteering: a supererogatory act.

International Aid: the penultimate in going above and beyond…helping out those that one has no direct ties to, no apparent ulterior motives to be found, no duty to help, and therefore no responsibility to be held accountable when things don’t go as planned. And when working across cultural boundaries, when organizing large sums of money and varying amounts of volunteers, things rarely go as planned — even when a plan was at all conceived.
           
International Aid: the most selfish way to give back to one’s global community. No ties, no expectations. When one has a ‘we ought to give to them’{the underprivileged, the challenged, the third world, the destitute, the un-lucky} mentality, aid becomes a  White Man’s Burden, an ethnocentrically fueled ego trip wherein We, the Western, have an ability to help Those, the Southern, the Eastern, assuming they have little to no ability to help themselves. Not only does international aid, in the conventional paradigm, assume a lack of ability on the part of the third world, it assumes a ‘right’ direction—that is, a progressive, Western-resembling forward movement of increased capital, technology and, by some transitive property, social and environmental equity.

International Aid: the new colonialism. But, it doesn’t have to be so bad. Is there a way to utilize the resources of developed nations to collaborate with transnational interests? What is a new international aid model? It includes reciprocity, appropriate origin, holistic management, local autonomy, complicity in Western intentions. It is a catalyst, a partnership, rather than a superficial influx of goods and services.

Volunteering: a duty to give back in the most effective way possible, unless something of comparable moral worth is sacrificed (Singer).

Learn More:
Easterly, William “The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good”