The real difficulty facing humanity is not the "eradication of extreme poverty", it's the eradication of extreme wealth.

Just wondered, Marie, is anyone stopping you from giving money to those poorest of the poor?

It seems that you find it pretty acceptable to dip your hand in other people's pockets and fetch the money from there...

These articles on foreign aid really make me laugh. Any money spent on foreign aid will have to be borrowed by the government. Any foreign exchange spent will have to be borrowed from the Chinese. Why should we have to borrow money from the Chinese to give to the third world? The thought of spending money to get a seat at the UN really sends me into hysterics. It is almost as good as reading human rights reports on Australia penned by such distinguished UN members as North Korea, Syria and Lybia.

As mentioned by others, the world population explosion nullifies any portion of aid not already siphoned off by the dictators.

Hopefully the republicans will win the presidential election and pull the US out of the UN, and by cutting off its funding send it into bankruptcy. The thought of all those UN fat cats in a soup kitchen queue really turns me on. The coming world depression (entirely the work of the european political elite) will help us sort out all these spoungers and return to some sort of reality.

The author might have nice motives but ignores that poverty is spiritual and physical. Billions have been poured into indigenous projects in Australia and yet communities still live worse than many South African shanties. More money as a mantra is also used to improve education, health services etc etc. Unfortunately it ain't that simple.

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=13635#236097

We are, here's us here.
http://help-cambodia.blogspot.com/

We fund all of our expenses from our savings and only use the donations (from friends, anyone want to be a "friend") to help out.

I would hope I can speak with some credence as we are here, doing the business, not advocating Government throw money at it. I can readily assure many that a lot of the Aid money Governments spend is a COMPLETE waste.

I think this is where Government should be looking, "ferreting" out via their Embassies (if they ever stepped out of their air-conditioned Lexus that are endemic with Government and NGO workers here) and helping out some of the superb work many local ex-pats (with their indigenous helpers) in the developing countries do, apply a modicum of fiscal propriety to where the money goes and that's it. We can't even collect our mail without being extorted to hand over a bribe before we get it, how much of the Millions in Government Aid goes to lifestyle funding by the corrupt locals here ?

Welfare can be extremely dangerous and corrupting, both in the developed World and in the developing World, so we give nothing away for free, it has to be worked for. We know that not everyone is equal, so we try and identify those we can help and help them, that is, those who want to help themselves but lack the means, we don't want money to help everyone as everyone can't be helped, something some people refuse to recognise.

No, we're not a registered charity, the Aus. Governments crazy bureaucracy makes it near impossible, so we may run foul of the law. We hope by being completely open and allowing every one to follow every donation and view where it is spent we will win the day (cough). It is always ironic to us that the Corby family can raise Millions from the public (and be secret about the funds) to help an Aussie drug mule and yet deserving people segregated by a geopolitical boundary are not helped and barely survive.

Western countries have already wasted enough money trying in vain to lift the Third World, mainly Africa, out of its abject poverty. If it was not for the West's enduring sense of white guilt, we Westerners would have come to the conclusion long ago that pumping billions into Africa and other Third World basketcases in an effort to eliminate poverty is a largely futile exercise.

Whether we like it or not, national wealth - as measured by GDP per capita - is strongly influenced by the attributes of a country's population, namely intelligence. There is a definite correlation between a nation's GDP per capita and its national average IQ. And as long as there are significant differences in average IQ between different nations and peoples, there will continue to be global inequality.

As Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen found in their book "IQ and Global Inequality", higher national IQ correlates significantly with a number of factors, such as higher GDP per capita, higher adult literacy rate, higher gross tertiary education enrollment ratio, higher life expectancy at birth, higher level of democratization, higher Human Development Index, higher Gender-related Development Index, higher economic growth rate, lower Gini index of inequality in income or consumption, lower population below the $2 a day international poverty line, lower measures of undernourishment, lower maternal mortality ratio, lower infant mortality rate, higher Corruption Perceptions Index, higher Economic Freedom of the World ratings, higher Index of Economic Freedom ratings, and more narrow population pyramid (MU Index).

The take home message here - as harsh as it sounds - is that we must face the fact of differences in potential for development; differences that are unlikely to ever disappear completely. The gap between the rich and poor nations will not be erased easily, and no amount of Western aid will ever be enough to totally eradicate poverty.