The Heads on Fire Community

For the past few days the fab lab interns have been doing presentations on each of their projects and seeing how each project connects to one another. During my project about the irregular settlements in Tijuana, I and the interns had engaged in a deep conversation discussing whether providing a large amount of aid(money) to poor people is really benefiting them or is it just creating dependency. I felt that giving too much aid to a people would definitely cause them to be dependent and they would just think that they wouldn't have to work hard to get themselves out of situations because they would be so reliant on the aid from other people. My mentor Katie Rast decided to have us explore more on this project and she found an author by the name of Dambisa Moyo. Dambisa is an author of a book that explains her perspective and ideas about what the aid is doing to the people in Africa. Form the statistics that she gathered she had came to a conclusion that the more aid that is being given to Africa is creating more poverty. The reason was for various reasons but one of the main reasons was that the governments in Africa were very corrupt and they were stealing the money and not getting it to the people. After gathering information from her point of view and our point of views about that situation we decided to come up with the best possible solutions for Africa. We couldn't really come up with a lot of solutions because the situation in Africa is so complicated that a solution to one problem would only cause another problem. My opinion was that in order for Africa to come out of poverty they would need someone to come in and give them a structure on how to run a nation because Africa has the resources. Also there was an idea that they should find a way to get the money to the small businesses in Africa and have them expand and get the economy going. A lot of different ideas and opinions were brought up and discussed in this conversation that we had but Africa is in such a complicated situation that it was hard for us to come up with one solution.