Daniel Magnus, a senior house officer at Southmead Hospital in Bristol describes the Kenyan Orphan Project - a small group started by him and two friends that sends doctors, nurses and medical students to Kenya to help with health, education, and social welfare programmes. Their most recent trip was in July to run a series of free medical camps in one of the most impoverished areas in the country.

"We have observed in that time a persistent and insidious phenomenon which is essentially aid snobbery," he writes.

The problem is that aid and development work is big business, and in the arguments and snobbery and wrangling over who is more sensitive to the local culture or having the least negative effects on the local economy, all cooperation and collaboration is lost, he says.

"As we have seen worldwide, organisations end up repeating and overlapping their aid and development initiatives to the tune of millions of dollars."

"I appreciate that there is enormous potential for organisations to have damaging and destructive effects in developing countries, despite the best of intentions," he adds. "But in five years, I have seen very few to whom this applies, and yet the snobbery is ubiquitous."

This trip did not provide a sustainable or lasting solution to the disease and social and economic deprivation that have a stranglehold on thousands of people living in the province. But it is a step, and it is action, he writes. "In partnership with local organisations and by supporting health initiatives in the area, we can move forward, repeat the medical camps, and look at ways to build long term, viable health and community programmes."

Surely, charitable groups can best maximise their contribution to the causes in which they believe so fervently by working together to streamline their activities, increase their efficiency, ad minimise administration costs. This can only be done by accepting and respecting others' activities and approaches.

"The key is to stay focused on working for, and in the interests of, the people we are trying to help. And whether or not a world without poverty and suffering can ever truly exist, it is our continuing duty to try to build one," he concludes.

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