Imagine that you are an aid worker and finally get the responsibility you have been waiting for. An intervention in a crisis area. You are a health officer. You must build a center for cholera control. You get about 100 new infected per day. And you have access to 5 beds. What are you doing? There you have the impossible mission.
Your mission is to build a Cholera Treatment Center. You will be given a budget to stick to. You are assigned a kind of room – a simple tin shed with a gravel floor. With this as a starting point, you must build a cholera treatment center. You soon notice that the budget is insufficient – much of the money is eaten up by arbitrary “fees”. Greedy people see an opportunity to make money from other people’s misfortune and thus all prices go up.
But somehow you still manage to get a Cholera treatment center up and running. Many times with own private financial efforts. The influx of patients is great, hundreds per day and you only have 5 beds. With great ingenuity and an equally great courage, you have succeeded in putting together a treatment center in a disaster area heavily affected by war.
You have succeeded! You are a hero!
Do you think you will be appreciated?
No! A talentless and envious mid-level official takes all the credit for your work!!!
In fact, this is the main problem for many aid organizations. Too many executives. Everyone is a executive! There are no trained workers. Instead, the organizations have to rely on untrained volunteers. Meanwhile, envious middle managers watch over individual aid workers with conscience and empathy – worried that they will be more successful than they will ever be.
For the individual empathetic aid worker, only one thing remains: a private initiative.
