After reading this incredibly inspiring piece on the charity Partners in Health in the New Yorker, I was moved to cancel all of my tiny scattershot direct debits to various other, more famous charities, and set up a single monthly donation to PIH instead.

Why? Well, almost ten years ago now I was sent on behalf of another development charity to write about their work in Uganda, and I was so utterly horrified by the mismanagement of that and the other NGOs that I saw working there that it destroyed my faith in charites ever since. I carried on giving but with no strong conviction that my money was doing any good whatsoever. I just hoped that donating was better than not donating, but at the back of my mind was the fear that I was actually doing more harm than good.

Reading Ariel Levy’s profile of Ophelia Dahl, the founder of Partners in Health, I found passages describing my exact observations and my very concerns, and discovered that Partners in Health had been set up precisely in order to counter these problems. They’re embedded, playing the long game, and joining up the gaps that other NGOs leave behind.

They had seen this kind of thing all over the world. Development organizations will donate something finite, even if it’s redundant, rather than something essential but ongoing; thus, a community might receive a bathroom, a handwashing sign, or a thousand packets of oral-rehydration salts, instead of salaries for trained nurses, or, say, electricity. “There are endless examples of bigger interventions—like a hospital—in the middle of nowhere, and it falls apart because it hasn’t been built within a community of trained people, or with the normal pipeline for overhead and upkeep,” Dahl said. If a hospital is erected, but there is no running water or sewage system—to say nothing of diagnostic equipment or personnel who can operate it—it is as useless as a bucket of water without soap. Consequently, Partners in Health often helps supply things that fall outside a medical-aid organization’s typical purview, such as bridges and satellite dishes and gasoline. “These things need to be done in order for people to have a reasonable chance of being healthy,” Dahl said, “and not being … dead.”

The piece is fantastic and worth reading in its entirety, and maybe you’ll be moved to donate too, which you can do here. There’s lots of interesting stuff about what the role of charities should be, and whether NGOs should work with governments in places where there is corruption.

“If you believe health care is a right, then you have to work with governments, because they are the only group that can confer rights,” Dahl said. “Ninety-nine per cent of people, the first thing they ask is, ‘What about corruption?’ It’s an easy nugget to grab on to. ‘There’s nothing to be done. Let’s sleep now, free from worry.’ ” Though P.I.H. won’t collaborate with a government that is dictatorial or hopelessly dysfunctional, it expects to have to work around patronage systems. “It’s not that we’re crazy bleeding hearts that just choose not to see any of this stuff,” Dahl continued. “It’s just that we don’t let it be a showstopper. Imagine if we shut things down whenever there was corruption in the United States: ‘Sorry, now you can’t have any health care.’ ” This reasoning reminded her of another common accusation: that white, Western people doing aid work in poor countries are practicing a kind of latter-day colonialism. “It’s often used as a not very eloquent excuse to do nothing,” she said. “It brings out the worst in one. You feel like saying, ‘So what are you doing?’ ”

These are thorny issues and I’m sure not everyone will agree with Dahl’s take,  but it totally resonates with my experience. It feels good to have found a charity that truly reflects my values, and I’m looking forward to hearing more about them over time.