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African History 1.65 Charity 2 Views


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Description:

Charities and NGOs are doing their best to improve health and education in Africa, bit by bit. Meanwhile, the guy who set up a Kickstarter to make potato salad raised $55,000. To make potato salad. Quite a world we live in.

Language:
English Language

Transcript

00:00

We speak student! Let's say hypothetically we want to help a homeless person not that we [a homeless person begging for spare change]

00:07

don't always want to help homeless people we mean like we're just trying to

00:11

set up an example here okay people what we're trying to say is that if we wanted

00:14

to help a homeless person with developmental aid we'd give money to the [a man stood beside a homeless person in the street]

00:17

government that way the government could hire more social workers build more

00:20

shelters and stuff like that but if we wanted to help a homeless person with

00:24

charity we'd help them directly like we'd go buy them a McRib or something [A man giving a homeless person a McRib]

00:29

because you know everybody deserves a McRib in general charity is a small

00:33

scale and situation specific way to help people no charity usually does not [traffic quickly going by on a big bridge]

00:37

develop whole economies or fix infrastructure but it can help

00:41

individuals folks be healthier better educated and more self-reliant the big

00:46

players in the charity game are nongovernmental organizations or NGOs as [a tree of hands symbolising non governmental organizations]

00:50

the name very subtly implies NGOs are not associated with any government got

00:56

that instead they provide social services free of charge typically to [NGO building on a map showing aid and services to places in the world]

01:00

people from all over the world most common charities in Africa are religious

01:04

there are the swarms of Christian missions and also the less common but

01:08

still around Islamic waqfs most religious organizations in Africa are [religious people stood outside a large temple]

01:12

awesome and helpful they provide food education and medical care to whoever

01:16

needs it even if the needy don't wear a hijabs or JD bracelets well some

01:21

stand-up examples are the Catholic missionaries of charity and the Islamic [christians holding signs outside a church]

01:25

Crescent of Hope organization unfortunately there are some religious

01:29

charities out there that rank significantly lower on the awesomeness

01:32

scale charities of all religions have been caught red-handed in money [charity worker arrested with red hands]

01:36

laundering schemes in Africa other religious NGOs have also been pressuring

01:40

governments to adopt from harsh policies like oh say abiding truth ministries to [judge rendering a ruling with a gavel in a court room]

01:46

encourage Uganda to institute the death penalty for LGBT people just what Uganda

01:52

needs more death secular or non-religious charities are a smaller but growing part

01:58

of the charity scene in Africa the most important one is the Bill and Melinda [Bill and Melinda Gates]

02:01

Gates Foundation yep that Bill and Melinda gates this

02:04

organization does a lot of good in africa by using its endless piles of [Bill Gates picking up a stack of money from an overflowing vault of cash]

02:08

cash to fund infrastructure projects and to try to stamp out malaria unlike Bill

02:13

Gates other major creation windows OS the foundation so far has avoided

02:17

randomly crashing we kid you bill good work secular charities MO is usually [Bill Gates helping a homeless person]

02:23

trying to solve a specific problem for example plan Canada found out that it's

02:28

hard for peasant farmers to get social services if they don't have a valid [farmer wandering in a field]

02:32

birth certificate so what did they do well they hired notaries to go make sure

02:36

people had legitimate certificates of birth who knew a notary could be a [notary worker handing over a birth certificate to a peasant farmer]

02:39

superhero and then there's engineers without borders who noticed that water

02:44

poor countries could get more water by drilling boreholes down to underground [a man drilling a borehole in the ground]

02:48

aquifer so guess what they did they wrote an existentialist play about it

02:52

no just kidding they sent engineers to boreholes down to underground aquifers yeah

02:57

so while not all charities and NGOs have lived up to the dream there are a bunch [asian people sitting in a line on the floor with food]

03:01

out there who are doing a ton of good on the local level they aren't going to

03:05

save an entire country all at the same time but they're going to do their best [Map of africa showing areas in green that are saved]

03:07

to help bit by bit and proving that we don't have to be Superman to make a

03:11

difference though being Superman would be pretty sweet [superman making a cup of coffee]

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