For a number of years I worked in one of the UK's leading aid agencies. Almost all of the staff are drawn from the affluent middle classes, I never met anyone from a working class background. Does this matter? I think it does because it produces people with a similar world view and similar limitations.

Staff generally are sincere in their desire to improve life for those in the developing world but they tend to see these countries as blank canvasses upon which they can paint or draw their own beliefs of what an ideal society looks like. Hence the emphasis on gender and sexuality. Similarly, religious belief plays little or no part in their lives and they are genuinely baffled when they encounter people for whom it is important.

Many have studied 'international development' at university level but none, generally, have ever actually run any business enterprise, nary so much as a successful whelk stall. They rarely understand that what academia declares *should* be an outcome of given actions doesn't always hold true in the real world.

Like so much in our society, many charities need scrapping. We should be much more rigorous in examining what, exactly, they are achieving and at what cost.