How Do We Best Help? Two Forms of Aid

How can we best help people?

That is the main question that I ask myself when I consider the needs around the world and the actions of humanitarian aid.  I think that at this point everyone knows that we cannot willy nilly do humanitarian aid.  There needs to be a strategy.  There needs to be a plan.  There needs to be a reason behind the things that we do, the resources that we use, the manpower that we utilize, and the money that we spend.  And all of this needs to revolve around one simple question: How can we best help people?

I would like to offer a simple and yet strategic way to best help people: simplifying humanitarian aid down to two specific forms of aid.  We need to re-think “short-term” and “long-term” forms of aid.  We need to change them to be more specific, more strategic, and more accurate.  Here are the two forms of aid that we should be focusing upon: Desperate and End.

Desperate-term. This form of aid is extremely similar to short term.  This is the type of aid reserved for people who are in desperate situations.  This is the aid that people need or else they will die or suffer or continue to live in extreme oppression.  This aid is the type of aid that needs no thinking.  It doesn’t matter where it comes from or who gives it or anything.  People need help.  They need it now.  And those who have the ability to help – they have to help.  This is desperate term aid.

End-term. Now end-term aid is a lot different than long-term aid.  End-term aid is doing things that are going to literally end these problems.  That means we need to do big things, macro things.  End-term aid revolves around changing the context so that these problems fully end.  There is a lot more to say about this type of aid, as it is a relatively new idea.  But end-term aid is all about ending these problems.

And those are the two places where we need to focus.  Help people today.  Help people forever.  And that is all we need to be doing in order to give people the best help possible.

Are you ready?

Let’s go.