In a story for Time.com, I revisited the story of Uganda bringing back the female condom. Partly this was because I got some more interesting reporting after submitting a story I wrote for The Lancet. The big issue for me is this: How much credibility you ought to give nongovernmental organizations that demand a particular initiative? Do they really think that women need the female condom? Or do they see a potential female condom campaign as a source of revenue?
My suspicion in the case of Uganda's female condom initiatve is that it's the latter. It's difficult to imagine a product that is poorer suited to fight HIV/AIDS in Uganda, chiefly because the virus is spreading most quickly among people who have more than one longterm partner. Those are the people least likely to use any form of protection at all.
Now there's
more literature coming out that lends credence to something it's impossible to ignore when you're on the ground. Local NGOs are often a way for their founders to make a living, and the altruistic part comes later. The people who run them are entrepreneurs more than anything else, skilled in the ways of grant-writing and development-speak. This has been going on for years and ought to come as no surprise -- one of the key indicators of a charitable group's efficiency these days is the percentage of your donation that actually gets to the person you wanted to help. It is hard to fault someone who has the initiative to make some cash, but as in Uganda's case, the trouble comes when the campaigns they preach may actually hinder development or the fight against HIV/AIDS.
I have been thinking about this a lot lately as I wait for various strings to publish stories I wrote about jatropha curcas, a wild plant that has been hailed as the next great step in the biofuels revolution.
Overzealous advocates of jatropha (who in many cases have a financial stake in the plant's success) persuaded poor farmers to plant jatropha based on claims that would be impossible to meet. It turns out jatropha isn't all it's cracked up to be, and smallholder farmers are the ones paying the price.
