Big charity

The aid business has grown fat. It’s time there was proper scrutiny

Such a simple question: should Oxfam spend a couple of hundred pounds a month opening up the swimming pool at its guesthouse in one of the nicer parts of Nairobi? It was posed by Duncan Green, the group’s head of research, on his blog, and provoked a revealing bout of navel-gazing in the aid industry.

The pool was shut, Mr Green disclosed, on the orders of the charity’s head office, which feared a scandal after an advert for a pool attendant appeared on its website. The post went viral, sparking a far bigger response than Mr Green’s usual musings on poverty. Some comments were satirical, such as the suggestion Oxfam open a golf course for staff in Kenya. Others were superbly sanctimonious, such as the humanitarian worker who wrote: ‘We all agonise that we are not Gandhi.’ One respondent alleged that a major charity recently held a big management meeting at a luxury game lodge in South Africa, where rooms are £150 a night.