Public Health

Cautionary tales: Effective foreign aid often proves elusive

KNKX Public Radio | By Larry Johnson

Published August 9, 2011 at 1:12 PM PDT

The tents of displaced Afghans still dot the countryside.

Despite the best intentions, foreign aid often goes awry in countries overwhelmed by war.

A series of recent news stories have shown clearly that governments rushing in to help people in war-torn countries often find they have solved few long-term problems and sometimes made matters worse.

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Larry Johnson

Larry Johnson has been a journalist for more than 30 years and worked 11 of those years with Tom Paulson as the national/foreign editor at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper. Johnson’s award-winning writing has appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers, and he has traveled in more than 35 countries, covering Iraq for the PI in 1999, 2002 and 2003. A collection of his work, “Looking for Trouble, Dispatches from the Middle East, Asia and Central and South America,” was published in 2008.

See stories by Larry Johnson