When well-meaning Christians attempt to alleviate poverty, they often unintentionally do more harm than good, according to Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert in When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor. It is an important message for Christians from Western countries to hear before they march boldly onwards with their poverty relief efforts. Poverty is not solved simply by splashing cash around.
Poverty is not just an absence of money; it is also about broken relationships, and people living in poverty have often been acculturated into a poverty mindset. Materially wealthy people have poverty in their lives, just as do materially poor people, and if you want to serve the poor in a non-arrogant way you need to acknowledge your own struggle with brokenness. Helping people out of poverty is more about people and processes than about projects and products.
This is an important book which needs to be read by any church groups involved in poverty relief, and I am therefore reluctant to offer criticism. However, I think that, in the context of today’s African poverty, the authors’ ideas of relief, rehabilitation and development do not fully take into account the economic conditions driving people into poverty. When war, disease, famine, corruption and many other forces prevent people from improving their conditions, successful development is almost impossible. If people are living in conditions which Western Christians consider unacceptable, then the option of refusing to provide ongoing relief on the ground that it creates dependency is not in my opinion morally justifiable.