Their official objective is to help the poorest members of poor societies, but these are the people who have the least ability to give feedback about whether this help is effective. Hence it will be very difficult for the international organizations, or anyone else, to tell whether their aid is effective. Aid will flow in the dark to good and bad projects alike.
Aid is ineffective when it lacks good feedback mechanisms.
The private sector solves the feedback problem with a free market. Markets are the greatest feedback mechanism the world has ever known, as the decentralized desires of the majority for products are communicated back to suppliers through easily monitored changes in sales and prices. Even for those that don t go bankrupt, firm managers are held accountable by shareholders for any dip in profits due to misreading market feedback. Governments in rich countries try to solve the feedback with democracy, a very imperfect mechanism. Aid organizations have only an indirect democratic mechanism to hold them accountable, in that the voters electing the democratic governments that provide most of the financing of aid organizations could choose to cutback on their financing if they perform badly.