I hear an awful lot of planners’ thinking.

Let’s cross one river at a time, eh???!!!

1) for the sake of your reputation and the world, steer your career clear of anything other than making money for yourself.

2) especially if you’re famous, be selfish. If you care about problems like poverty, keep your mouth shut.

3) only about 5 people in the world know anything about development and aid. Everyone else trying to do something is borderline evil.

4) If you think you’re part of the solution, you’re really part of the problem.

5)private sector take heed: doing a little to help is usually worse than doing nothing at all.

6) misguided good intentions should be dealt with harshly, with righteous indignation, rather than nudged toward more effective paths.

How bout at some point looking at the good intentions of this blog with an eye to whether it’s really helping “aid benefit the poor,” or “just asking.”

Anyway, I’m taking my tourist dollars to Vegas, baby, to be on the safe side.

Thanks indeed for informative response. I personally think it is good to try different market approaches to start/spur local developments. Of course, not all market principles might suit local institutions, norms, and traditions. Maybe some kind of synthesises must be cautiously analysed and in discussion with local participation applied. Haven’t we for a quite long time now argueing that aid is bad we need market driven development in African poverty striken communities? I think we souldn’t get rid of or discourage people to dis-act. We should suggest ways of improvement if we can but not stop people from their efforts to help. Some of you might be saying mere $25 each but have you been able to do that? How much have you contributed and from that how much of that contribution you can be sure that reached the really needy? some of us might recommend to watch documentaries on HIV/AIDS in NYC cinemas as awareness. Don’t you think you as a developed nation and we as developing or at least little better of than Africa nations already know enough about the causes or scale of problems in Africa? I think we do. But we have been less courages to act…try something and maybe fail.

How much did the holiday cost them? At a conservative estimate $2,000 though more likely to be more. So there’s a million dollars spent to give $12,000 to a village.

It seems to me that similar activities are carried by study abroad programs in westerner universities. But implied from some of the bloggers’ opinions, it seems like when “poverty tourism” is rather administered by a tourism company it becomes disgusting and de-humanizing.

por·nog·ra·phy(n): the depiction of acts in a sensational manner so as to arouse a quick intense emotional reaction.

How do we know if there is truely a market being served or if the market is being created to satisfy the supply.

There are places in Bangkok that are created to meet the demand of horny old perverted men that want to have sex with little girls. Does meeting the demand make it justified? The sex trade certainly pumps millions of dollars into the Thai economy. There are ethical and moral issues that also must be taken into account. I am not implying that the MVP is unethical or immoral. There are complicated issues that are involved here.

I would like to know what the exit strategy is for this particular organization to hand over control and management to the local community. For this project to be about empowerment and grassroots sustainability there must be willingness for the non-Africans to walk away from the project at some point.

In my job as a consultant in corporate America my attitude was that my job was to eliminate my job. That is the same mission and vision that organizations like this need to have to be truely effective.

If you had a market for pornography (yes, the actual) in the MDV with the consent of the local, would you have set up a porn tour? I guess, no, and the reason is a similar reason your critics are raising.

Regarding the villagers’ involvement, I have seen many instances of this situation where in fact the villagers are guided to choose what is planned for them. A friend of mine was joking a few days ago about that regarding the CDDP (Community driven Development Projects) that he is working on with the WB.

SS