NGOs were biggest businesses in town. Somalis had seen the foreigners do it. They watched young foreign kids come in, get hundreds of thousand of dollars in foreign cash and that looked good to them. Somalia's NGO economy, briefly thrived and then collapsed. It was a far cry from the real progress that has been made in the year and a half since the UN left Somalia.
Today there are certain groups of people dying to get the aid gravy train back on track in Somalia.
In the absence of a policy or some greater plan for dealing with poverty in the Third World, we spend money. They don't pay much attention to how successful or devastating those development projects might be. That's too objective to really measure. Our concern or lack of concern, for most of these people is determined solely by the bottom line on the foreign aid budget. And there is one more group in Somalia that really wants the aid to start.