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Ever heard of the orphan-crushing machine?
In 2020, a now defunct Twitter account posted this: “Every heartwarming human interest story in America is like, ‘He raised $20,000 to keep 200 orphans from being crushed in the orphan-crushing machine’ and then never asks why an orphan-crushing machine exists or why you'd need to pay to prevent it from being used.”
It sure sounds like they could be describing the humanitarian system, doesn’t it?
As the Trump regime has taken a machete to US aid, some argue that it could actually be an opportunity to remodel or even get rid of the system, and begin to address the underlying causes that make aid necessary. However, I’ve noticed a tendency for many to respond with a version of: “Sure, it’s a flawed system. But it’s what we’ve got and it saves lives”.
Orphan-crushing machine!
Impacted communities are not congenitally incapable of taking care of themselves or adapting to the modern world. Rather this capacity has progressively, and sometimes deliberately, been stripped away from them.
Two years ago, The New Humanitarian set up a small internal working group that was charged with looking into how the organisation defined a humanitarian crisis. Incredibly, there is no commonly accepted global definition of what constitutes one. This is what we came up with: “A humanitarian crisis occurs when, over time, a community’s capacity to cope with human, physical, economic, or environmental challenges is progressively and severely undermined or overwhelmed by local and/or global policy factors”.
For us, it was important to emphasise that impacted communities are not congenitally incapable of taking care of themselves or adapting to the modern world. Rather this capacity has progressively, and sometimes deliberately, been stripped away from them through the operation of local and global systems. What is required, therefore, is not just “aid”, but fundamentally for the world to actually get out of their way.
This does not mean that these communities wouldn’t benefit from aid or that providing it is an intrinsically immoral enterprise – just as rescuing orphans from an orphan-crushing machine is not a bad thing. However, not questioning the existence of these global systems – whether it be the humanitarians providing aid or the journalists covering it – is an ethical failure.
This means that we can still work for a world without aid, while simultaneously recognising that that aid saves lives. What a world without aid requires is a world without the systems that create its justifications.
Today that includes accepting that USAID (and much of Western humanitarianism) continues to legitimise the existence of orphan-crushing machines while presenting itself as the heroic saviour of orphans.
Once we do that, we will be forced to acknowledge that this model of humanitarianism is part of the problem – and that the main issue is the framing of charity rather than justice.
The “aid” lexicon is full of terms that emphasise the supposedly moralistic and self-sacrificing nature of “assistance”, and “help” for the “less fortunate” and avoids any discussion of how they became less fortunate, who is responsible, and what they are owed. This allows Western regimes to insist that “aid” must serve their interests rather than those of the recipients, as well as to unilaterally set the level of such “assistance”.
Rather than aid, we should be talking about reparations. So the end of aid does not mean the end of payments; it just means overthrowing a patronising framework that considers those payments as charity while legitimising the continuing extraction of even more resources from recipients. Remember: Africa, the poster child for aid, is actually a net creditor to the rest of the world. Those who push for aid often describe donations as acts of solidarity. But solidarity is not built on pity. True solidarity shuns charity in favour of justice.
Critiques of aid are, of course, nothing new. There are those like the British sociologist, Graham Hancock, who in his 1989 book, Lords of Poverty, argued that “development aid is bad through and through, and it is impossible to reform it.” Even those who accept that aid has delivered some good outcomes don’t always believe it should continue. Professor Ken Opalo, for example, accepts the positive impacts of aid and the sincerity of those who champion altruistic global solidarity through aid. Still, he believes that these positives do not negate its harms and that “low-income countries can and therefore must aspire to wean themselves off of aid dependency in critical service sectors”.
Similarly, there is no shortage of true believers willing to admit the system is flawed but touting reform as an eventual panacea. “Aid isn’t useless; it just needs to be handled properly,” opined Bradford Plumer in Mother Jones nearly two decades ago. “Since the end of the Cold War the donor community has improved, and there’s no reason to believe it can’t continue to learn from its mistakes... to walk away rather than try to fix these problems makes little sense.”
I don’t doubt the sincerity of those who believe the system is capable of change. But they miss the point. It is irrelevant that the system can be improved – not because it is not needed or because it does no good. It is irrelevant because regardless of how many orphans you save, what really matters – what we should not lose sight of – is the orphan-crushing machine.
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Aid and Policy Podcasts 13 March 2025