Development Geography - Aid

Aid

MEDCs (More Economically Developed Countries)can give aid to LEDCs (Less Economically Developed Countries). There are several types of aid:

  • Governmental(Bilateral) aid
  • International Organizational (multilateral) aid
  • Voluntary aid
  • Short-term/emergency aid
  • Long-term/sustainable aid
  • Non-governmental organization (NGO) aid

Aid can be given in several ways. Through money, materials, or skilled and learned people (e.g. teachers).

Aid has advantages. Mostly short-term or emergency aid help people in LEDCs to survive a natural (earthquake, tsunami, volcano eruption etc.) or human (civil war etc.) disaster. Aid helps make the recipient country (the country that receives aid) get more developed.

However, aid also has disadvantages. Often aid does not even reach the poorest people. Often money gained from aid is used up to make infrastructures (bridges, roads etc.), which only the rich can use. Also, the recipient country becomes more dependent on aid from a donor country (the country giving aid).

Read more about this topic:  Development Geography

Famous quotes containing the word aid:

    “Frustrate a Frenchman, he will drink himself to death; an Irishman, he will die of angry hypertension; a Dane, he will shoot himself; an American, he will get drunk, shoot you, then establish a million dollar aid program for your relatives. Then he will die of an ulcer.”
    —Stanley Rudin. The New York Times (August 22, 1963)

    “The reason why any one refuses his assent to your opinion, or his aid to your benevolent design, is in you: he refuses to accept you as a bringer of truth, because, though you think you have it, he feels that you have it not. You have not given him the authentic sign.”
    —Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    “Under the pressure of the cares and sorrows of our mortal condition, men have at all times, and in all countries, called in some physical aid to their moral consolations—wine, beer, opium, brandy, or tobacco.”
    —Edmund Burke (1729–1797)