This Christmas, let's find better ways of doing good

When donating and serving the less fortunate, we should consider whether we are truly helping or possibly even hurting the very ones we are hoping to uplift.

- Steve Loh

Filled with a sense of purpose and conviction, I embarked on a career in professional charity work 17 years ago. But as the years went by, serving some of the most impoverished communities in Asia, a sense of unease and discontent had clearly set in.

Part of my job was to facilitate short-term teams of well-meaning Singapore-based volunteers who set out to serve the less fortunate in the region. The well-intentioned individuals would cheerfully hand out aid on our regular trips to villages and slums. They gave sweets to children and food packets to families as well as water filters, medicine, second-hand spectacles, pre-loved clothes and even solar lights.

This took us to neighbourhoods of shanties lined alongside piles of decaying single-use plastics, rotting clothes, non-functioning water filters, children with tooth decay and communities that often were chronically ill and desperately poor.

I realised we were handing out aid in an arbitrary way, based on our assumptions and resources. I wondered what the long-term impact would be - were we doing more harm than good?

The unmaintained water filters, in my view, were testament to a First World charity prescribing a solution that locals had not bought into. As for the ill, they received occasional medication, but no health education or follow-up. And the tooth decay - I hoped it wasn't exacerbated by our candy. Perhaps toothpaste, a toothbrush and a session on dental health might have been more well-informed.

After a decade in the field, I decided to take a long, hard, no-holds-barred evaluation of my work, as well as a deep examination of the unintended consequences I had caused, if any.

Suffice to say, I found little evidence of any transformative or sustainable impact, and some negative outcomes that I had not expected. In other words, a decade later, the communities we had served were still struggling with the same issues and problems they had when we first arrived.