Summary Of The Book 'Government Relations' By Jenny Wells

III. Reservation & Rebuttal Not only do agencies fail to account for delivering resources, they also tend to refer to their success by how much money people have donated and their data often manipulates how people perceive the effectiveness of their donations. In her pamphlet, Government Relations Coordinator Jenny Wells encourages Australian citizens to donate more money to the Official Development Assistance (ODA) by explaining how much money Australians have donated in the past and how this affects people in developing countries. Wells uses a table (see fig. 3) and emphasizes the importance contributing money to foreign aid agencies. She notes Australia’s success in 1975 when Australian citizens donated approximately 0.66% of the Gross
National Income (GNI) as donations to the ODA. However, Wells does not explain where this money went to, how much of it the agency used for certain projects, and how effectively the aid worked. Instead, she optimistically points out what people want to hear: that people were “provided access to agriculture technology” and the agencies “provided immediate and life-saving support” (Wells 6). Too often agencies portray their success too simplistically by measuring their success by how much people donate.
Fig. 3 Money Australians have donated over the past four decades
Wells, Jenny. Foreign Aid and Its Importance in Relieving Poverty. Melbourne: Warringal, 2015. Print.

Aid programs also inaccurately show their success by not releasing information regarding where people’s donations go to and often disguise the side costs that it takes to eventually send resources to developing countries, making expenditures for supplies seem less expensive.
[Insert New Analogy Here]. Similarly, aid programs do not simply acquire money and then immediately millions of children instantly receive vaccines or clean water. It costs money to advertise to potential donors, purchasing resources, and transporting those resources to developing countries. For more complex needs, especially medical, agencies must find and provide transportation for medical professionals. They must also provide clean places to store medical supplies, perform surgeries, and check on patients. All of the expenditures to transport resources and materials costs money that agencies subtly hide from the public eye by using. Foreign aid agencies hide much of the complexity involved with delivering even the smallest of resources through their vague representation of the foreign aid
process. Although every system has flaws, foreign aid agencies do not actively try to hurt people in developing countries.
In fact, foreign aid agencies do wonderful humanitarian work to help people around the world. However, their system that they use has flaws. Too often optimists attribute failures in development and economic growth to a lack of donations. Professor and Humanitarian, Jeffrey Sachs, in his book The End of Poverty points out the apparent failure of the United States regarding the government’s goal to donate 0.5% of its GDP towards foreign aid. While his data at first appears to show the United States and other developed countries’ failure to reach 0.5% of their GDP, Sachs does not account for inflation in which the value of money changes with supply and demand over time. He also fails to refer to what currency his data uses whether the graph uses USD or the Euro, which affects the amount needed to reach 0.5% due to the difference in value of different currencies. Sachs’s deceptive statistics creates the illusion that developed countries refuse to offer enough money to make changes. The U.S. along with Germany, France, Italy, and other top donors for foreign aid actually donate more money each year despite the slow or decreasing GDP growth (see in figure 4). By using manipulative data, optimistic authors such as Sachs do not account for complex factors including inflation and immediately turn blame towards a lack of money and paint the image of crass developed
countries.
Fig. 4 GDP growth in the top five foreign aid donors
“GDP growth (annual %).” The World Bank. World Bank Group, 2014. Web. 28 Feb. 2016.

Other agencies also accuse developed countries of acting selfishly and hindering the journey to end poverty. In her article, government coordinator Jenny Wells pushes Australians “do more” as a response to falling contributions to foreign aid agencies (Wells 8). Every large-scale operating agency needs funds, but demanding money to end poverty does not make sense. Afterall, aid has increased over the past couple centuries, and still GDP remains stagnant. Multiple countries have severe cases of poverty despite increased aid. Extreme poverty still exists today, and agencies look to blame anyone except themselves.. They accuse developed countries by claiming that our selfish nature and need for a “soft drink or two chocolates” kills people. While agencies do not and should not stop asking for funds for their good cause, but they should not blame developing countries, since they clearly do not stop foreign aid agencies’ progress.
IV. Conclusion
Despite their benevolent intentions, foreign aid agencies continue to fail citizens of developing countries and we must hold them accountable so that they change the broken system they use today. Agencies fail to increase economic development, even with an increase in funds. Millions of women, children, and others continue to die from curable diseases with inexpensive cures because agencies work to appeal the public rather than preserving the most lives. Even worse, these agencies portray false success through deceptive data that hides some of the foreign aid system’s worst flaws. No system works perfectly, yet these agencies should not stop to become better, and nor should we allow them to. Too often we forget that people live in extreme poverty, people live in places where they do not know where their next meal will come from, people live where they do not know if their children will ever live better lives than they live now. We want to believe we make enough of a difference by simply contributing money or spreading publicity even though the statistics clearly show that aid does not work. If we want to truly help people, if we want to offer them aid, then we must work with agencies to change this broken system rather than sitting back and pretending that we have righteously helped others to make ourselves feel better. We must act because we have the opportunity to do something amazing, these agencies have a chance to do something amazing, and what a waste it would be to squander such a chance to help make our world better for everyone.