What about Charity?
When crises happen in the developing world, the most common impulse of developed nations is to give "aid" or charity in the form of free resources (food, money, clothing, etc). It is a reasonable impulse: if there are people who lack things, then those who have an abundance should generously provide for those who need them. This is no less true with an overwhelming disaster like the current job-loss crisis... if people are not getting wages, the impulse is to give money. While entirely well meaning, charity can often do more harm than good.
Fikkert and Cobert, in their book When Helping Hurts, distinguish between relief, rehabilitation, and development aid. In any disaster, it is entirely appropriate to bring in relief. Those who have lost their homes, businesses, or food sources, need immediate help to solve catastrophic medical situations or to stave off starvation immediately following the disaster. However, if relief continues beyond the crisis and becomes a longer-term way of supporting a community, it unintentionally creates a form of crippling, unsustainable dependency. Once financial resources are given, local charity recipients, who naturally want the free money to continue, unconsciously take on the role of pandering to whatever beliefs the charity givers have about the local problems and solutions. As a result, those local recipients own neither their problems ("we don't need to solve these problems, others will do it for us"), nor the temporary solutions created by the charity ("they are sending us free food... I hope they keep doing it"). And, those solutions only continue as long as the charity does. In addition, and quite unconsciously, recipients often begin to take on a poverty mindset which says “we are the kind of people who need others to help us, because we cannot help ourselves.” Dignity gets swallowed up in the belief that others have to solve their problems.
Worse still, local business and other sustainable solutions which could provide locally-produced and dignity-rich solutions, cannot compete with free resources provided by charity. Whether this is free clothing, food, or money, those that are trying to start businesses cannot sell what the charities are giving away for free. Many such businesses have been forced to fold because of the influx of well-intentioned charitable resources that have continued long past a crisis. And then, when the charity stops the free resources (because of donation fatigue or because the crisis is no longer felt), then there are no sustainable solutions to take the place of the free resources. Often a community that has been dependent on a charity for a long enough time has little choice but to find another charity from which to get the same support. This is why Fikkert and Cobert say that relief should always be "seldom, immediate, and temporary".