> The “leaders” are gonna pigging out on this stuff. <
Yep. I once read an article about a group of tourists who had visited a town in central Africa. The town had no electricity, but was near a large waterfall. An engineer in the group realized that a turbine placed under the waterfall would generate enough electricity for the entire town.
So the group raised money for a turbine. It never made it to the town. From the moment the turbine landed on the coast, local officials were demanding “transit fees” (bribes) to let the turbine pass.
The group payed the first fee. And then they paid another fee a little further down the road. Etc. Eventually the group ran out of money. The turbine was abandoned on the side of a road.
Unless the aid bypasses the government or powers-that-be or reforms the government, it will do diddly-squat. As someone else said, “Rich country US takes money from poor people here to give it to rich people in poor countries.”
My favorite African (true) story is what happened when a Christian group decided to help build some water wells in some rural African villages.
They came into the area, built the wells and showed the local leaders how to use them to get fresh water.
A year later a few of them revisited the villages to see how everything was going.
The wells had fallen into disrepair and nobody was using them.
The local villagers gave no explanation as to what happened.
The Christians visited other villages that had not gotten the wells and asked what they should have done differently.
The answer stunned them.
It turned out that these villages relied on their children going to local streams and bringing back buckets of water as part of a daily routine.
It took about an hour for the kids to make the trek to the stream and return.
That was the only time the adults had total privacy from their children and could have sex without interruption.