Open Problem 20

When Charity Harms

When does charity cause harm, through dependency, crowding out local markets or governments, or delaying reform?

Status: open
What would count as progress

A catalog of documented harm mechanisms, with the conditions under which each appears, drawn from real cases.

Why it matters

Good intentions are not good outcomes. Some programs have made things worse, and others may have delayed the structural fixes that would have helped more. A science of giving has to study harm as carefully as help.

Where to start

The Failure Archive collects documented cases. The work is to find the patterns that connect them.