Whoever is running the Canadian Military Medical Unit in Kandahar should be given $100,000 a year to improve health care in the neighbourhood...This is a drop in the bucket for the Billions of available charity, and the immense Afghan health problems, but we have the people at the scene and with the knowledge, and I am sure they are doing some charity themselves, but if we gave a slug of money they could do much more.
DualCore, you're right, something like a targeted $100K could do a great deal of good in the hands of a front-line medical professional at a place like Mir Weis. There are some issues with doing it like that, however - which doesn't make it a bad idea, but they need to be taken into consideration before taking that course of action.
There are a
million such projects in Kandahar that could use $100K, or $50K, or $10K. And we can't do them all, so we prioritize. When you followed the links in my post, I'm sure you noticed the Canadian donation of $6K worth of medical supplies and linens to the police hospital, and the $37K worth of diagnostic kits donated to help nursing students at Mir Weis. These piecemeal, one-off efforts are good for quick-impact where you can do them without distracting from the bigger capacity-building projects (like the $5M CIDA put into a polio vaccination program to immunize over 7M children in Afghanistan). But there's only so much money our country is willing to donate, and there's only so many projects that money can be spread over before becoming ineffective.
Achieving that balance between immediate relief and long-term development is a tough problem, and one with no definitive answers. Even the doctor to whom you'd give the money would have some difficulty deciding what to do with it. Do you buy medicine with it? If so, what happens when the supply runs out? Do you buy thousands of bandages, or do you buy a couple of high-priced pieces of equipment (x-ray machine, difibrillator, etc)? Do you spend it all hiring more doctors and nurses? Do you pay a local construction company to improve the facility, the infrastructure? Or, do you go the opposite way and invest the $100K in something safe and give them a monthly stipend to supplement their meagre budget? The bandages probably provide the best bang for your buck right now, and the monthly income probably the best bang in the long-term. Which is more important?
Speaking with a friend at CEFCOM a few months ago, I asked if more money for development was required to get reconstruction moving faster in Kandahar. He told me that while more money is never a bad thing, there's only so much that can be done quickly with the infrastructure - or lack thereof - in Afghanistan right now. Few skilled tradesmen, few doctors and nurses, few educators, etc mean that the ability to actually use the money available right now is limited. In other words, the money isn't the bottleneck in the system right now: it's the capacity to spend it effectively at a local level.
Or, put another way, the problem trying to drink from a fire-hose isn't the water supply, it's trying to get some into your mouth without losing half your cheek.
I know that's only one fellow's opinion, but as he was working on the file every day and had spent time in Kandahar himself, I thought it worth noting.
Not an easy problem, that's for sure.
And thanks, forcerecon85, for the kind words.
