3.08.2012

Invisible Children?

We've seen it all over Facebook: the awful videos highlighting a terrible man named Joseph Kony. It's crazy that this cause came out of no where. I've known about the Invisible Children organization since my freshman year of high school. Today my boyfriend and I were discussing this and out of curiosity I researched the company just to see what all these videos and all this noise is actually DOING. I found some shocking things...
Invisible Children is an organization that focuses attention towards the war in Uganda based on accusations of stealing children and forcing them to be soldiers. They make famous Joseph Kony by vilifying him as the head of this regime and show us horrifying videos. However what good is this really doing? Invisible Children is a non-profit that tries to raise money for this cause, however only about 30% of the proceeds they raise actually go to Africa. The rest of the money goes into paying for the staff and those shocking videos. There are two armies in Uganda: the Lord Resistance Army (Kony's) and the Ugandan Army. Invisible Children supports the Ugandan army that is fighting against Kony but that army also has proof of having children forced to serve. And if that's not enough for you, they spend so much time focusing on Kony when in reality if Kony was taken over or assassinated the LRA (his army) would replace him and carry on which makes the videos that vilify him perfectly pointless because he is merely a figure head of the real problem. Many charity comparison cites have given Invisible Children only a two out of four stars. I understand that it is great to raise awareness but all this leaves me to question, what is this company actually doing? Overall Kony is "alleged" to abducting 30,000 children when Malaria kills hundreds of thousands of them every year. This is a good cause and it needs to be supported but before you go all willy nilly with the anti-kony hatred (which he IS evil to be sure) shouldn't you look at where your attention should really be focused and figure out what is actually going to help these kids rather than jump on the video sharing bandwagon? Think 
about it.
Please do not think of this as me discounting the horror behind forcing children to be apart of the army. It's a great cause to fight for as long as it's the cause and not just blind agreement that causes us to join it. 


My sources:
http://visiblechildren.tumblr.com/
http://givewell.org/International/charities/invisible-children%2C-inc-0
http://greatnonprofits.org/reviews/profile2/invisible-children-inc 

1 comment:

  1. Also I'm not claiming to be a complete expert I am just showing the fruits of my research.

    ReplyDelete