Working for charity

Recently, I had a bit of a moan about charities and direct debits. I expected to get slagged for it. I was amazed to find pretty much universal agreement.

I was reminded of an experience I had a few years ago when I was offered an IT contract for a well known international charity who shall remain nameless for fear of being sued for telling the truth.

The charity in question, who for the sake of argument we shall refer to as "Oxfam", controlled a lot of projects to help the local communities out in Africa. This is a good thing and it also generated work for the locals in not only building the thing, but also in keeping track of what was being spent.

I am a great believer in helping people help themselves. It builds their self respect - so when this project was described to me, I was a bit taken aback.

The idea was to spend huge amounts of money on a laptop based computer system to enable the local project managers to keep their own records and then send them back to HQ via satellite links.

"What's wrong with that?" you ask. Well, I'll tell you :

(1) For every system that was being rolled out, we put three or four local clerks out of work thus depriving them of the opportunity to earn money and damaging the local economy.

(2) The money being spent on the system was depriving starving natives in Africa of food.

"That last one's a bit strong, isn't it?"

Well, no actually. The idiot interviewing me told me that for every £1 he knocked off my hourly rate, he could feed a starving family in Africa for a week. I asked him how many he could feed by scrapping this daft system.

"I think you're missing the point" was his reply.

Actually, I dont think I was...