Reddit mentions of Despite Good Intentions: Why Development Assistance to the Third World Has Failed

> My issue is that the link between the act of donating money and the actual achievements of the charities is too tenuous. Shouldn't charities do more to show exactly how they spend money, what they spend it on, who decides how to use it, etc...?

No. What you are unaware of is that charities actually already spend a lot of resources on what is called "accountability" and "measuring effetiveness" and this process already takes up a good n of resources. The question of effectiveness was a small section of the subject of my Master's thesis on NGOs (NGOs are related to charities; effectively, what we call charities might be called NGOs in other countries).

There are two problems with traditional accountability systems and they are:

1. They are resource intensive. They require the charity to devote a lot of man-hours to measuring and reporting on the effectiveness of their programs. Often it means one (or many, depending on the size of the organization) people devoted exclusively to managing and sharing this information with donors.
   
2. When you measure the effectiveness of an organization quantitatively, you are going to inevitably start focusing on projects which can be measured quantitatively and devote less resources to projects which can't. So even in a region, for example, would benefit greatly from work on community empowerment, or improvement in gender equality, or improvements to mental health, these sort of things can't be as objectively measured as things like numbers of wells dug or buildings built. Although I am of course exaggerating, as no doubt by now there are ways to measure things like improvements in mental health. Still, there is still a mentality from this accountability mindset that values tangible countable improvements over uncountable ones.
   
   What I will say is that, on the whole, almost no one is in the charity business to make a lot of money. There are some organizations that do this but they are very few, and more often they are the smaller organizations. The very large organizations, such as the Red Cross, Heifer International, etc. all do very good work and your money will not be wasted if you send it to them. I would steer clear of nearly all "personality" organizations where the name of the organization is the same as someone famous, with the exception of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation which has done stellar work and should be praised for focusing on some very serious but nonetheless fairly un-glamorous causes (malaria for one).
   
   There are definitely problems in what is sometimes called the "Development Industry" - structural problems, logistical problems, etc. Even some accountability problems. If you are interested in this you might want to read Despite Good Intentions which is well-written and engaging (although also depressing) and addresses a lot of the problems with development aid.

> It's better to give them the tools to build their own rice than to just give them rice, charities like Oxfam Novib work according to this principle.

Sometimes. There are arguments that after trying this for 50+ years in developing countries without substantial improvement that it may not necessarily be better. Read Despite Good Intentions for a sobering look at international development.