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Faith-based foreign aid refers to the international development and relief-related spending and activities of religious or religiously motivated organizations, and the government financial and political support of those organizations. For centuries, Western religious groups, who often accompanied and financed early explorers, colonists and conquerors, also contributed money and services to help people in need around the world. Today, many so-called faith-based nongovernment organizations, or NGOs, exist to provide development or disaster-relief services in developing countries, often with significant backing from the taxpayer dollars of Western donor governments. Critics question the mingling of economic, health, or other types of aid with the motivation of religious development groups, nearly all of which are Christian, often seeking conversions and threatening indigenous beliefs and cultural practices. Defenders credit Christian development and missionary groups for reaching people like no other groups can, due to historical networks, such as Africa's churches, and providing top quality services, often in health and education. Some, however, consider faith-based foreign aid to be a modern-day extension of religious colonialism, with morality often dangerously mixed with critical development concerns, especially global health education, prevention and treatment of infectious diseases, economic security and other issues. While "faith-based" political issues have been covered extensively by US news agencies, especially related to domestic issues, the crossroads of religious international development and US foreign aid has received little media attention. Notably, a four-day Boston Globe special report, published in October 2006, called "Exporting Faith", that examined the expansion of US foreign aid funding going to religious organizations under President Bush's faith-based initiative. The result of an 18-month investigation conducted by the Globe's Washington bureau, the report analyzed more than 50,000 government funding awards by the US Agency for International Development, or USAID, over 5 years of the Bush administration. The Globe discovered that the share of US foreign aid dollars for aid organizations that was going religious groups had doubled, from 10 percent to nearly 20 percent, totaling more than $1.7 billion. Of those funds for so-called "faith-based" organizations, 98% went to Christian groups.〔(Bush brings faith to foreign aid - The Boston Globe )〕 Globe journalists reported from Kenya, Angola, Pakistan, Washington and the American heartland on the politics and practices of American Christian development workers spreading across the developing world with the help of US taxpayer funds, often leading the way to remote locations where there is little to no monitoring or evaluating by the federal government. ==History== For a long time running, most religious organizations have had a tendency to support like-minded or related groups in need. A central tenet to many religions is offering a portion of one’s money to the social institution. For example, members of Christian churches offer part of their income, called a tithe. Likewise, one of the five pillars of Islam, called the Zakat, is the offering of a percentage of one’s income. America has been fairly generous in giving to faith-based organizations; in 2004, gifts to religious causes made by Americans totaled $88.3 billion. A mission of many of these religions is to spread their message to countries all over the world in hopes of converting or deliberately changing religious beliefs of as many people as possible. This mission to the world combined with other types of emigration has placed members of many religions all over the planet. Because the social institutions want to support their outreaching branches, many of them contribute time and money to these branches. This is often the motivation behind much of today’s faith-based foreign aid. Alternatively, many countries all over the world are in need of money or the assistance of an external pool of labor. In response, many religious institutions in middle to high-income nations are willing to allocate resources to similar religious social institutions in poor or developing nations. Aside from supporting the spread of their own beliefs and philosophies across the world, many motivations exist for wealthy countries to contribute to poor countries. These motivations will be explained in detail in the ''positive effects'' section of this article. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Faith-based foreign aid」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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