Want to make $500,000 a year? How about getting into the aid business? I interviewed Africa expert and author of The Rift, Alex Perry, earlier this week. Get a job helping to sort out the misery that the aid agencies tell us is Africa, and your package won't come in much below that of a London fund manager's. That's nice for the employee (if not for the donors or the needy). But it epitomises the way the aid industry has become corrupted by money.
As Perry puts it: "If you pay that much money, what kind of person applies for the job? The kind of guy who's interested in a lot of money; not the guy that's doing it out of the goodness of his heart... Combine that with a culture in which there's almost no checks and no accountability (and) you have a guy that messes up in South Sudan, gets promoted, and goes to eastern Congo and makes even more money... It's a systeman institutionalised system."
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