Virginia Blackburn

WHAT an appalling set of allegations to have come out about Oxfam, with tales of sexual abuse rife not only in disaster zones but in its own high street shops, for goodness’ sakes. Not that I am going to mourn the downfall of this particular institution. I haven’t donated anything to it since it started handing out food packages in the East End of London in the 1980s in a nakedly political attempt to equate life under Margaret Thatcher with the woes of the developing world. I have been to rural Tanzania to work on a volunteer project and that comparison was an obscenity.

That stint in a school in Tanzania and another in South Africa did give me a tiny taste of aid work though, and it is a considerably more troubling area than you would imagine. In both cases I worked in schools and in both cases, although we were all motivated by a desire to give something back, what it amounted to was a group of rich (in the eyes of the locals) white people swanning in, laying down the law about how they should run things and then swanning off back to our privileged existences in conditions they couldn’t even dream about.

There was one massive argument within the South African group, about whether we should buy the school a printer. For us the outlay was absolutely trivial but the underlying issue was whether we should throw money at a problem we couldn’t really understand. Was it OK to show largesse mainly out of Western guilt or would it be better to encourage them to earn the money for their own printer? And yes, I am very well aware that across subSaharan Africa that is considerably easier said than done.

Ever since those experiences, though, I have harboured a suspicion that the best thing we could do