If you look closely at the Varsity fashion spread from November 12th, 2010, you might notice that one of our models is wearing a gunmetal whistle. This accessory comes from a nonprofit organization called Falling Whistles, to whose remarkable story and mission we wanted to draw some attention.

In 2008, while Sean Carasso was helping out with a TOMS shoe drop in Africa, he ended up on the fringes of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, one of the most dangerous countries in the world. After a decade of civil war, the DRC is still wracked with conflict and struggles to rebuild on the shakiest of economic and political foundations.

Sean and his companions stumbled upon a military camp called T2, where the National Army was holding five boys who had been abducted and forced to fight for the rebels. Sadly, as often happens with child soldiers, they were treated with as much violence by their rescuers as by their abductors. The boys had been starved and beaten for days. As he waited for UNICEF to extract them from the camp, Sean listened to their stories. One image stood out: kidnapped boys who were too small to hold a gun were given whistles and sent into the jungle as bait. ‘The horror grew feet and walked within me’, Sean recorded later on his blog; in response he received a torrent of emails asking what could be done to help. When he got home, he started Falling Whistles, which funds the rehabilitation of war-affected children in the DRC.

Aid is a tricky subject, particularly in places that are still in transition between conflict and reconstruction. Whereas large, international bodies are ill-equipped to asses the specific needs of communities, smaller local organizations often lack the resources to implement programs effectively. After university, I spent some time living in Freetown, Sierra Leone, a city that has one of the highest concentrations of NGOs in West Africa. Like the DRC, Sierra Leone has been slowly recovering from a devastating civil war, but the quantity of aid projects has not produced visible improvements in quality of life. The education system is still in shambles, infrastructure is non-existent, and the country’s youth continue to believe that if they want to make it, they have to get out.

During my time there, it became clear to me that misdirected aid projects lead to squandered resources, frustrated beneficiaries, and discouraged donors, and can be profoundly detrimental to the growth of a developing country. In a recent study, economists Raghuram Rajan and Arvind Subramanian found that because they cause a developing country’s currency to become overvalued relative to its trading partners, ‘aid inflows have systematic adverse effects on the relative growth of labor intensive and export sectors’. For the DRC this would impact the mining sector, which produces the valuable minerals coltan and cassiterite, both of which are used to manufacture electronic devices like the laptop I’m using. Since aid makes up more than 25% of the national income, the damaging effects that the study identifies could pose a serious threat to economic growth in the DRC.

As well, while microfinance has been hailed as a huge success in global poverty relief, the industry also drives up interest rates which, left unchecked, can lead to the kind of credit crisis that recently crippled the Indian province of Andhra Pradesh. Also, while imported agricultural technologies like ‘super sorghum’ may increase crop yield in the short term, they also expose the African seed market to the control of profit-hungry corporations and threaten biodiversity in the long term. These problems are exacerbated by the naïve assumption that participating in and donating to development projects is always a good thing. Moral philosopher Peter Singer frequently argues that none of the problems with aid can justify not giving, but while I agree with him that good aid is inspiring, transformative, and necessary, bad aid is everywhere and it is worse than none at all.

After I read Falling Whistles’ annual report, I still had questions. For one thing, I tend to be deeply skeptical about NGO jargon: opaque terms like ‘sensitization’ and ‘psychosocial rehabilitation’ whose sophistication belies emptiness. I challenged them to explain these to me and asked for more detail on the actual use of funds. What is does it mean to pay for a student’s ‘tuition’? Often, tuition does not include the cost of school supplies, uniforms, books, or additional lessons that underpaid teachers sometimes force their students to attend. Who runs operations in the DRC? Does Falling Whistles have a trustworthy representative based there who monitors the program’s effectivness? I worked for an NGO in Freetown that, as it turned out, was run by a crook. Its mission was also the ‘rehabilitation of war-affected youth’ but its director was selling donated computers for personal profit and touring the world as an expert in post-conflict reconstruction. The best NGOs are only as good as the people they have on the ground.

I spoke to Houston Shearon, their Development Consultant, who told me that although Falling Whistles does not have a permanent representative at their partner organization in the DRC, an associate ‘regularly checks up on operations.’ I asked about the long-term vision of Falling Whistles and what it plans to do when stability is eventually established in the DRC and rehabilitation becomes less relevant, while vocational training and education become vital. Houston responded that Falling Whistles hopes to adapt to the needs of the community as they change, but at present their ‘goal is peace in the DRC.’ Throughout our conversation, he kept returning to the idea that it is a young organization, which suggested to me that although they have the benefit of enthusiasm, they have not yet sorted through some of the issues I raised.

I remain undecided about Falling Whistles. It is made up of committed, creative individuals who are doing their best to facilitate the work of local leaders, but as I saw every day in Sierra Leone, good intentions are often not enough to produce good aid. It troubles me that they themselves weren’t sure about some of the information I’d requested, but as a relatively new organization they are in an excellent position to start implementing tougher standards of scrutiny on their own operations. I will keep an eye on Falling Whistles and hope that in time they will grow to be informed, focused and efficient providers of aid. While Singer advocates the creation of a ‘culture of giving’, I think we need more than that. We need a body of selective, responsible donors who are willing to find out whether or not something is working, support it when it is, and demand improvement when it isn’t. Not all students are in a financial position to give, but perhaps the best thing we can do for aid is what we do best: think critically, and ask the toughest questions we can.