Reader Mohammed, who, let me underscore, does not support Islamic radicalism, sends this story as a reminder that we more enlightened folks may have a lot to learn from the fanatics. It’s a story about what has happened in Somalia after the Islamists kicked out foreign NGOs. Excerpts:

Before the banning of NGOs and the construction of the town’s canals, Qarawi says he was a “beggar”. “Every last week of the month we used to go to the NGOs’ office to ask for food. Sometime they will tell us there was no food. It was a shameful life.” Two years after deciding to return to farming, Qarawi is a happy man. “All my children go to school. I can afford to send them to study and I have surplus cash,” he said with a smile.

According to data from the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the number of people in crisis in Somalia is at its lowest since famine was declared in Somalia in 2011. FAO credits average to above average rainfall, low food prices and sustained humanitarian response for the improvements.

More:

But farmers here see the turn of their fortunes differently. The area’s newfound prosperity “is because of the NGO ban”, said Mohamed Sheikh Abdi, the chairman of the Bulo Mareer farmers union. “They always brought food to the town weeks before the harvest… They bought their food from abroad and never bought from us local farmers. They killed every incentive to farm. We were hostage to the NGOs.”

Restaurant owners have also benefited from the NGOs’ absence. Al-Shabab offers tax exemptions and free rent to restaurants that sell only locally produced food. In every town controlled by the rebel group in the Lower Shabelle, so-called qutul wadani (“national dish”) restaurants have popped up and are proving popular.

Abdirashid Xaji, 38, runs one such restaurant. It is dinnertime and the restaurateur, a father of 13, is busy giving orders to his staff. His restaurant was the first to open, but four others have since opened their doors in Bulo Mareer, a town of about 30,000 inhabitants.

“On a very quiet day, we serve 150 people. On a busy day like Fridays, we serve three times that number,” he said. “We are popular because people now know the health and economic benefits of eating locally produced food. Doctors have also told them to eat local food.”

Along those lines, there was a fascinating TED Radio Hour broadcast last fall about this issue, asking, “Is there a wrong way to help someone?” Here’s host Guy Raz talking to Ernesto Sirolli, a former NGO aid worker in Africa:

SIROLLI: Every single project that we set up in Africa failed, and I was distraught. I thought, age 21, that we Italians were good people and we were doing good work in Africa. Instead, everything we touched we killed.

RAZ: How did every single project fail?

SIROLLI: And they still do. See, the first reaction was, let’s not tell anybody we made a mistake. Let’s not tell anybody about this project. I really thought that it was one bad project that will never be repeated, which, I think, is what the Americans in the Peace Corps are thinking right now. That they are in a bad project, but it’s unique. So what they do, they don’t tell anybody what they’ve done because there must be lots and lots of lot good projects out there.

But if they had the chance to go and find out what their colleagues are doing around Africa, they will discover that, in fact, the norm is failure. The question is, of 50 years of international aid, what can we point to that has been successful? In the last 50 years, the donor countries have donated to Africa 2 trillion American dollars and the African continent is the only continent in the world that has not caught up with the alleviation of poverty, education and health that the rest of the world has done.

RAZ: I mean, this is a serious issue here. Poverty is a real thing, it is a really serious thing that many people want to tackle, right. I mean, they want to fix this problem. So how do you do it without doing it…

SIROLLI: Not by arms. You never solve problems of poverty by giving people money. You have to teach them how to fish.

Here’s a short piece I wrote for NRO back in 2003, commenting on President Bush’s new push to spend on fighting AIDS in Africa. I spoke with three Africa public health experts, two of whom were physicians, all of whom welcomed money going to fight AIDS, but all of whom said that the West had a bad habit of throwing good money after failed solutions. Excerpt:

Edward C. Green, a Harvard researcher who has tried in vain to wake the West up to what Uganda accomplished, also welcomes the new money for AIDS treatment, but is concerned that the Bush initiative could become another case of throwing good money after bad.

“It might be expected that Ugandans and Senegalese would constitute a vocal lobbying group that would insist that AIDS prevention funds be spent in ways they know to be effective. And there are certainly some who will speak out,” says Green.

“But people in resource-poor countries everywhere have learned to play the game involved in getting donor funds,” he continues. “The name of the game is asking for what the donor organizations want to provide, namely drugs and condoms. Yes, these are both needed, but if experience to date is any guide to the future, funds would be even better spent supporting the kind of faithfulness/abstinence AIDS prevention interventions that brought down infection rates in the countries mentioned.”

Dr. Rand Stoneburner, an epidemiologist who has worked on AIDS in Africa for a variety of public-health agencies, says experience in Uganda and elsewhere demonstrates that money and the drugs it buys alone will not stop the epidemic. Putting so much money into antiretroviral therapy while not giving proven behavior-change strategies their due is a mistake, he says.

“We must support countries with a sincere commitment to provide social and political resources to turn this thing around and not create future generations dependent on foreign aid for pharmaceutical lifelong support,” Dr. Stoneburner says.

I did a more in-depth piece for National Review, not available in its online archive, talking with Dr. Green and others about the success Uganda has had fighting HIV using both condoms and strategies that work with pre-existing African cultural beliefs to affect behavior change. I recall Dr. Green telling me for that piece that the way Western NGOs work is corrupted by Western prejudices. That is, he says that we in the West operate from a particular mindset that we wrongly think is universal (this is what has since been identified as the WEIRD outlook). Not only does this blind well-meaning people to cultural realities, but it also affects the way money gets allocated to them for their field work. If donors hold a WEIRD outlook, then they will only give money to fellow WEIRDoes. Result? Billions of aid dollars get spent by Westerners trying to please other Westerners; the actual condition of the locals they’re trying to help are secondary. (I hope I have fairly summed up Dr. Green’s argument; I’m going from memory of an article I wrote 11 years ago.)

Finally, here is a terrific 2009 essay from The New Atlantis, the science and ethics journal, in which author Travis Kavulla talks about lessons he learned from working in the field in Africa, with an NGO. Kavulla explains that Western technical approaches to fighting AIDS — condoms, etc. — simply do not work in Africa, not because they are scientifically invalid, but because they cannot be received by the local cultures. The epidemiology of AIDS in Africa is different from that in the West, for reasons Kavulla explains. The conclusion?:

The only lasting solution to AIDS in Africa will come through behavioral change. In a society that associates ailments with individual and collective moral wrongdoing, an approach that re-moralizes sexual behavior and encourages Africans to take control of their bodies is the most promising path to tread. That is not to say that it is easy or can be accomplished quickly. Any successful AIDS policy will probably involve a degree of social coercion — ostracism of those who do not abide by the moral consensus, a public shaming of hypocrites who preach one thing and practice another. Such a policy allows an essentially religious movement to co-opt the government and the generous foreign aid it receives. To some extent, this is what ABC policies already do, though they are still hampered by the squeamishness of American grant-makers who wish to decouple abstinence and monogamy from the religious and moralizing message they are often embedded in, and instead treat them as sterile and scientific methods by which to avoid infection. Rather than promoting condoms and sending a mixed signal, it would be better to continue to make them freely available in places known to those people, mainly city-dwellers and sex workers in market or industrial towns, who are already using them or inclined to do so because of the anonymity and casualness of their sexual relations.

The Western public-health lobby, bred in a culture that preaches unconstrained freedom of the individual in the realm of sexual relations, is put off by talk of moralizing policies, or of any policy that de-emphasizes condoms. But it needs a dose of its own advice. It must stop imposing its own agenda on Africa. It must realize that HIV has a social dimension that must be addressed, that Africans are naturally wont to view this disease, which perversely inverts the life-giving act of sex, as a moral calamity. The sooner the donor community realizes this, and reorients its policies to fit African realities, the better.

What did the terrorist Islamist loons of al-Shabab know that the NGOs trying in good faith to help the poor Somalis do not?