---
title: "When Charity Harms"
number: 20
statement: "When does charity cause harm, through dependency, crowding out local markets or governments, or delaying reform?"
progress: "A catalog of documented harm mechanisms, with the conditions under which each appears, drawn from real cases."
conditions: ["symptom-trap", "silence-about-failure"]
status: open
bounty: "Unfunded. The Question Bounties program will attach prizes once it is funded."
---

## 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](/record/failure-archive/) collects documented cases. The work is to find the patterns that connect them.