But for an increasing number of people, the financial gains are not worth the problems that are being thrown up. Canadian professor Kathy Nolan, who is head of mathematics at the University of Regina and also works on social justice and equality issues, has been researching this topic for nearly a decade and wrote a paper called Moving beyond child sponsorship.
“Child sponsorship is simply another legacy of colonialism,” she says. “We feel we know what is best for these children, but we don’t.”
Nolan is uncomfortable with the practice on a number of levels. “It makes people feel good and therefore they feel let off the hook and can continue with their privileged lives. What we don’t realise is that many of the benefits we have in the global north are due to structural issues that have caused the children these people are sponsoring to be suffering.”
Better that we all struggle against capitalist patriarchy than that we feed the hungry child.
Or, alternatively, Professor Nolan is a cunt who can go fuck herself.
As I’ve mentioned occasionally I write a column for a paper in Dhaka. The weekly cash from which (£25 or so) goes to a feed the street kiddies charity. About 20 pence into the charity ends up as a gut busting bowl of rice, veggies and eggs fed to a hungry child.
Best paid piece of work I’ve ever had and I see not a penny of it.
To remind, Professor Nolan is a cunt who can go fuck herself
She is also Canadian and, as has been proved yet again this morning, the majority of Canadians are really thick.
I agree with this bit
“It makes people feel good and therefore they feel let off the hook and can continue with their privileged lives. ”
I rail constantly against bourgeois smugness at protecting the environment, feeding the poor, saving puppies etc. There is a lot to be said for the white saviour theory amongst middle class liberals.
Instead they should see charity as their Christian duty. The problem that we now have in the modern world, is that charity is often a grift and that so much is spent on admin, marketing and CEO salaries that bugger all ends up in the rice bowl.
The classic examples recently being the late Ms Batmanjellyroll and that woman with the made up Nigerian name accusing a lady in waiting of being a racist. Both running highly dubious charities.
After my missus died, I was going to do some volunteering for Marie Curie, but they were so aggressive that I told them to sod off.
ps OT How can anyone not see through Mark Carney ? The man’s a fucking idiot. How does he do it ?
John
I just read your comment after I posted mine.
My Dutch niece went to Vancouver. I asked her if it was a bit rough these days.
“Lots of druggies, there, but being Canadians they’re really slow and pretty harmless.”
So, I guess she’s applied for a grant/job to one of these “sponsor a child” charities and been turned down?
“let’s them off the hook” . What the effort were they on the hook for?
ps OT How can anyone not see through Mark Carney ? The man’s a fucking educated idiot. How does he do it ?
FTFY
Just about every article I’ve read about him and the elections never fails to slip in that he was educated at Harvard and Oxford
Bongo
It’s very bizarre – apparently your ‘privilege’ (such as it may be) should really go to someone in the DR Congo or Tanzania or some other such place. That’s my take on it.
As the masterful Ottokring identifies, it’s quite a religious impulse. It’s just that progressivism
Acts in the place of Christianity. I’d be interested to examine Professor Nolan’s lifestyle and perhaps have here head to a convent before I accepted her dubious hypothesis.
Alternatively we could just agree with our host’s entirely accurate conclusion that Professor Nolan is a cunt.
Otto
Did you ever watch SCTV? It was a superior Canadian forerunner of SNL (which shamelessly copied many of its ideas and even sketches) with an ensemble cast including the likes of Eugene Levy, Joe Flaherty, John Candy, Dave Thomas and Rick Moranis.
Even back in the 1980s the Canadian government couldn’t resist interfering and pressurised them to include more representative (yet another word whose meaning has changed dramatically in recent decades) content.
The response was to create what quickly became the two most popular characters, the slow-witted but harmless quintessentially Canadian brothers Bob and Doug Mackenzie. As wiki puts it:-
Although created originally as filler to both satisfy and mock network Canadian content demands, the duo became a pop culture phenomenon in both Canada and the United States.
Otto,
“The problem that we now have in the modern world, is that charity is often a grift and that so much is spent on admin, marketing and CEO salaries that bugger all ends up in the rice bowl.”
The funny thing with my career is how I completely switched my view of which were the good and evil sectors out there. I used to think charities were the nice people, government fairly nice, and capitalist enterprises were evil bastards. And look, there are great charities run by people who care, but the larger ones, the ones I worked in were massively overstaffed, nepotistic and wasteful. I’d rather invest money in someone making satellite broadband who yes, will get very fucking rich if it works, but also, bring massive improvements to inland areas of the world.
“Sponsoring an African child is now frowned upon. Critics say it’s a ‘legacy of colonialism’”
Quite right. It’s better to let them grow up a bit and come over to the UK. Then everyone has to sponsor them whether they want to or not.
@Otto
I also have a poor opinion of the Marie Curie charity after they refused a request to admit my MIL to one of their hospices because “she’s not poorly enough “. She passed away less than 48 hours later.
“Sponsoring an African child is now frowned upon. Critics say it’s a ‘legacy of colonialism’”
“Dahling, adopting little African children is so 2016. Everyone who’s anyone in Hollywood is (statistically impossibly) having transchildren now. Do try and keep up.”
Bongo- “let’s them off the hook” . What the effort were they on the hook for?
Being white. We know, from Two Tier, British judges, various police forces, the RAF etc. that white men aren’t wanted and have no human rights. Instead, they carry a species of blood guilt that can only be mitigated through infinite brown immigration, taking away their vestigial rights to freedom of speech, confiscating their property and culturally cleansing UK media of white faces.
This is the settled judgement of Clown World, a religion where you’re cast into Hell for the colour of your skin and there’s no possibility of redemption.
“Sponsoring an African child is now frowned upon. Critics say it’s a ‘legacy of colonialism’”
Blimey. Forcing African children to work down diamond mines for nothing was wrong; now giving African children money for doing nothing is wrong.
make your minds up.
Good on you Tim.
There is a problem with sponsoring children, and it’s not colonialism. It is very difficult to avoid conditions which encourage corruption. The ever-present fear of paedophiles means that correspondence between the sponsor and the child must maintain a significant distance and vagueness. The sponsor cannot visit to ensure everything is as it has been presented. This makes is very easy for someone to run a sponsorship scheme fraudulently whereby some (or all) of the children are fictional and the money disappears elsewhere.
Even in the article we see how “World Vision has implemented a system whereby donors “sponsor” a child directly, and communicate with them, but the money they donate goes to the community as a whole,” so if the donor gives a sum of money even a real child will have no way to know if any of it has been diverted.