Kenya RPCV Michael Maren says the U.S. Agency for International Development, CARE, and Save the Children have actually contributed to the economic, social and political problems in underdeveloped nations, even as they were trying to alleviate them.
Andrew S. Natsios says that using Somalia in the 1980s as a case study on the effectiveness of development assistance, as Michael Maren does in his latest book, is comparable to using 19th-century New York's Tammany Hall to assess the success of the American democratic experiment: neither is a particularly representative case study.