# The Road to Hell, The Ravaging Effects of Foreign Aid and International Charity

- Link: https://fundraising.co.uk/books/the-road-to-hell-the-ravaging-effects-of-foreign-aid-and-international-charity/
- Published: 1998-04-20T17:21:00+01:00
- Author: Howard Lake

**Michael Maren has spent much of the last twenty years in Africa, first as an aid
worker, later as a journalist. He witnessed at close range a harrowing series of
wars, famines, and natural disasters. **

In The Road to Hell he tells how CARE unwittingly assisted a Somali dictator in 
building a political and economic powerbase. How the UN, Save the Children, and 
many other nongovernmental organisations provided raw materials for ethnic factions
who subsequently threatened genocidal massacres in Rwanda and Burundi.

He brings firsthand reports of African farmers, Western aid workers, and corrupt
politicians from many countries, joined together in a vicious circle of self-interest.

Above all, he heralds an important truth: humanitarian intervention and foreign 
aid activity is necessarily political. It gets hijacked by powerful charities and
agricultural interests. It is cynically manipulated by local strongmen to control
rebellious populations. And it is the last refuge of Western colonialism.

We all want to end the suffering. But our desire to alleviate suffering often stands
in the way of the truth. If you think your charitable giving is making the Third
World a better place, think again.

## Reviews

“A devastating portrayal of aid agencies drunk on government largesse and indifferent
to actual needs and to the impact of their assistance.”
**London Review of Books**

 * **[Raising money, but for what?](https://fundraising.co.uk/1998/10/03/raising-money-what/)(
   3 October 1998)**