New Strategies for Helping Third World

April 9 -- For more than a year now, a wonderful smell has wafted through Rwanda's drought-stricken Kigali Rurale province.

It is the aroma of a local delicacy, fried bread, delivered by 21-year-old Jean-Paul Safari as he pedals his bicycle through the dusty streets.

But to Safari himself, it is more.

Before he started his business, Safari and his five orphaned siblings were among the thousands of wretched survivors of his country's notorious genocide. They were destitute and needy, living in orphanages and surviving on handouts from the developed world.

Then Safari received a grant to buy the materials he needed for his business, and he began bettering his life. Now he makes enough to support his business and his siblings, and even pay for some of them to go to school.

To Safari, and many others, that delicious smell is now not only his product, but a sign of hope.

Waste of Money?

Safari's story is one of the many recounted by the New York-based aid organization Trickle Up, which gave him $50 to buy the first batch of ingredients and utensils he needed to make his bread, and a bicycle to transport them with.

The developed world has spent billions of dollars in efforts to aid people like Safari since World War II, when the Marshall Plan mostly succeeded in restoring war-ravaged Europe with a $13 billion outlay.

But in the following half-century, foreign aid has not always had the best reputation.

With many of the developing world's countries actually declining in development levels despite aid payments, critics paint it as a lost cause, a gaping fiscal black hole that has few effects other than to support corrupt regimes and ineffectual international bureaucracies.

"The United Nations has declared that 70 countries — aid recipients all — are now poorer than they were in 1980," said Doug Bandow of the libertarian CATO Institute. "An incredible 43 were worse off than in 1970."

Interactive: Click to learn about where American aid dollars go