By Ben Schiller

Foreign aid has gotten a lot of flak recently. Critics like William Easterly and Dambisa Moyo say the West has spent a lot of money in poor countries with little result, and often for the wrong reasons. Aid fights symptoms, not deep problems, people say. It feeds corruption. It is colonialism by another name. Poor countries can fix their own problems, if only aid organizations would let them.

This video, from U.K. charity Save The Children, is a humorous corrective to the all-aid-is-useless point of view (Bill Gates, who knows a few things about it, has called it hilarious). It isn't a point by point reply of sophisticated arguments. But it is a reminder that aid does aid, even if the money sometimes gets wasted and misused.

"What have the Romans ever done for us?" More than we might think.

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