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
[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
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