Hundreds of Liberians marched through the streets of the capital city Monrovia late last week, clad in black and waving placards that read “No excuse for rape,” “Fix the system,” and “Shame on you Katie Meyler.”

The name on that last sign was the focus of the crowd’s anger. Katie Meyler is a young American woman who, until recently, ran a charity in Liberia called More Than Me, a nonprofit that took in and educated poor Liberian girls at high risk of sexual exploitation.

For years, Meyler was celebrated in the media and philanthropy world for More Than Me’s work. She raised more than $8 million, including almost $600,000 from the US government, and opened 19 schools responsible for more than 4,000 students. But a ProPublica investigation published October 11 found that amid that success, the girls her charity was supposed to be protecting were being raped by the man who helped found it.

That man, Macintosh Johnson, had AIDS when he died in 2014. One of the girls who ended up testifying against him in court tested positive for HIV.

In a statement following the ProPublica report, More Than Me said: “We are deeply, profoundly sorry. To all the girls who were raped by Macintosh Johnson in 2014 and before: we failed you. We gave Johnson power that he exploited to abuse children.” 

MTM’s Liberian advisory board recommended an independent investigation, and in a letter to the board, Meyler wrote that stepping “aside while the investigation is underway will further the goal of a thorough and impartial review.” She added that she was “confident that the results from this investigation will outline the best way forward for More Than Me.”

Looking back, Meyler’s trajectory is staggering. She went from being a 26-year-old intern at an evangelical charity during her first trip to Liberia in 2006 to receiving $1 million in 2012 to start her own school from the American Giving Awards, sponsored by JPMorgan Chase. By 2014, the Ebola outbreak would hit Liberia and Meyler would be named one of Time magazine’s People of the Year for her role in the response.

It’s shocking now that no one seemed to question, at least publicly, whether a young American woman with no experience in education or health was qualified to be running a school and a medical center serving thousands of Liberians. But if you’ve spent time in Africa in proximity to the Western charity machine Meyler was a product of, then it’s not shocking at all.

I was a young, white American woman living in Kenya during her rise to fame, and I was often asked, both in the US and in Kenya, whether I was going to start my own NGO, despite the fact that I was a journalist with little experience or interest in the nonprofit world. Such questions evinced a presumption of my innate moral fiber — not to mention a complacency in the belief that any white Westerner was capable of starting an NGO, regardless of qualification or mission.

I have no doubt that at 26 years old, I could have gotten funding to start my own NGO, even though I had no experience in nonprofits. I knew many other young Americans who got funded. If people tell you enough times that you’re qualified to do something, sometimes you start to believe them.

In a 2012 Atlantic piece, Teju Cole called the phenomenon the “White Savior Industrial Complex.” It is “a liberated space in which the usual rules do not apply: a nobody from America or Europe can go to Africa and become a godlike savior or, at the very least, have his or her emotional needs satisfied.”

We should be upset by Meyler’s story. But we should be more upset with what her story is emblematic of: a Western charity machine, propped up by an eager media, that valorizes inexperienced American do-gooders and that values heartwarming stories over impact.

Rewarding inexperience and ignoring warning signs

In a tale that would become central to Meyler’s narrative, spun dozens of times in speeches across the US, Meyler herself questioned whether she was qualified to start her own NGO. But a friend told her, “Get over yourself! It’s not about you!” and that tough-love pep talk quashed her doubt.

Meyler would have done well to heed her own alarm bells. In retrospect, the cracks in Meyler’s organization were glaring. If she had tried to do the same thing in the US, it never would have gotten off the ground.

Meyler had no experience in education or management herself, and the board she recruited only compounded the incompetence. According to ProPublica:

The board included Skip Borghese, an Italian prince who marketed cosmetics on the Home Shopping Network; his wife, Katie Borghese, a close friend of Meyler’s, who ran a perfume company; Chidegar “Chid” Liberty, a Liberian-American who left Liberia as an infant but returned in 2009 to start a fair-trade clothing business; and Saul Garlick, an American whose startup organized entrepreneurship experiences in Africa for U.S. students.

The school was staffed mostly by American teaching fellows and, barring one position, no teaching experience was required when it started hiring. The first principal was a 31-year-old high school English teacher with no administrative experience. These low standards, particularly for staffers, might sound surprising, but in my experience they’re not actually uncommon for charities started by foreigners in Africa.

Warning signs cropped up quickly: The charity’s country director wrote a memo in the early months documenting her concerns about girls being taken from their homes without guardian consent and spending the night at staff houses, including Meyler’s and Johnson’s. Money was going missing.

Then there was Meyler’s foray into Ebola relief. When West Africa was hit by a widespread outbreak of Ebola in 2014, Meyler started organizing Ebola-relief efforts in Liberia: complex work that requires high levels of expertise and is better left to the professionals.

According to the ProPublica investigation, MTM never received approval to have an Ebola care facility. In the early days of the outbreak the school itself didn’t even have accreditation from the Ministry of Education. One Ministry of Health official said at the time that Meyler appeared to have a “pattern of disregard for laws.” But that didn’t stop the media from hailing her do-gooding efforts.

More Than Me’s pattern of negligence is appalling — but it isn’t new

Taken together, the levels of negligence at More Than Me are shocking. But Meyler’s story is emblematic of a larger rot within a sector of American philanthropy: the fetishization of young and inexperienced do-gooders setting out to change developing countries, regardless of whether they are qualified to do so.

For evidence of the trend, you don’t need to look farther than some recent scandals that rocked international philanthropy.

Greg Mortenson was a mountain climber who, after failing to summit K2, the world’s second highest mountain, promised a Pakistani villager he met on his descent that he’d return to build a school for girls. He went on to found the Central Asia Institute, which by 2010 reported that it had built more than 171 schools that provided education to more than 64,000 children, including 54,000 girls.

He fundraised by speaking to audiences at churches, schools, and philanthropic dinners across the United States, much in the same way that Meyler did, and chronicled his story in the best-selling book Three Cups of Tea. He was also written up in glowing terms by publications like the New York Times and NPR, and given millions of dollars to continue his work.

His was an incredible story — and a lot of it was a lie. Multiple investigations revealed not only that Mortenson lied about his origin story but that he had allegedly misspent millions of the organization’s dollars.

An even more notorious recent example was the Invisible Children NGO, which came to public view through its viral campaign in 2012 to “Stop Kony.” The organization was founded in 2004 by a group of young American filmmakers who wanted to stop Joseph Kony’s brutal Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in Northern Uganda.

The video was viewed more than 100 million times in one week, becoming at the time the most viral video ever. It helped the organization raise more than $30 million and had a profound impact on US foreign policy in the region. One of the founders claimed the organization had lowered the number of internally displaced people (IDP) in Uganda by 98 percent.

But the film dangerously oversimplified events in the region, including the fact that Kony probably wasn’t even in Uganda at the time. And the organization’s impact is questionable (it certainly wasn’t responsible for slashing the number of IDPs to that degree). Donors accused the organization of misleading them by spending money on advocacy rather than actually helping LRA victims as their video claimed. Invisible Children denied this. According to the CEO, they spent all of the money raised by the video in 18-24 months.

These are just a couple of the more prominent examples. Meyler and More Than Me now take their place alongside them.

The “white-savior industrial complex”

The fallout over the ProPublica investigation continues to roil Liberia. The government has launched an investigation into the charity and the Minister of Gender, Children and Social Protection Williametta Saydee Tarr said the government would be requesting Meyler’s cell phone records.

Meyler has temporarily resigned as CEO and the board chair has also resigned.

While Liberians work to unravel how More Than Me went so wrong, the rest of us would do well to examine the larger system that Meyler was a product of. In a 2010 article, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof dubbed the trend the “DIY Foreign-Aid Revolution.” He wrote that “it’s not only presidents and United Nations officials who chip away at global challenges. Passionate individuals with great ideas can do the same, especially in the age of the Internet and social media.”

But where some see a parade of goodness making the world a better place, others perceive more problematic scenarios. Journalist Courtney Martin refers to “the reductive seduction of other people’s problems,” in an essay in which she points out that it would be absurd for a Ugandan college student who saw a mass shooting in the US to decide to go to the United States to get gun legislation passed. Meyler being tasked with fixing girls’ education in Liberia was no less absurd.

Robtel Neajai Pailey, a Liberian academic, is more blunt: Meyler “reveals our warped tendencies to glorify foreigners for swooping into poor countries under the guise of doing good.”

For all the problems that she brought, Meyler (and the dozens of others like her) isn’t malicious. She and many others like her are driven by a genuine desire to help. But altruism that isn’t fortified by rigor or metrics can lead to disastrous results.

It’s the same impulse behind voluntourism, the widespread practice of Westerners traveling to developing countries to see the world and do some good by volunteering in orphanages or building schools while on vacation. (The practice is actually where Meyler got her start, when she fundraised in high school to send herself to Central America to volunteer with street children.)

Jacob Kushner, writing in the New York Times Magazine about the practice, argues: “Unsatisfying as it may be, we ought to acknowledge the truth that we, as amateurs, often don’t have much to offer. Perhaps we ought to abandon the assumption that we, simply by being privileged enough to travel the world, are somehow qualified to help ease the world’s ills.”

Those are wise words, but they can be hard to heed when the White Savior Industrial Complex is constantly churning out new avatars. There’s a slew of awards, fellowships, TED Talks, and funds directed at people like Meyler. Many American readers are eager for simplistic stories with a relatable hero (read: white and middle class) and media organizations are slow to fact check international stories — particularly of the feel-good variety. (Marc Gunther, in a piece published Monday, went through the major sources of the millions of dollars in funds that flowed More Than Me’s way.)

There’s a lot of anger directed at Katie Meyler right now, and rightfully so. But we’d do well to zoom out a bit. Katie Meyler created More Than Me, but the white savior industrial complex created her — and there’s a lot more of us complicit in that than we’d like to admit.

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Remember when the possibility of nuclear war seemed remote? The fact that it doesn’t anymore shows how quickly threats to humanity can change and how important they are to pay attention to.

The Global Challenges Foundation, which works to reduce the global problems that threaten humanity, compiles an annual report on global catastrophic risks. The group released the 2018 edition in September, and the litany is harrowing: Chemical warfare, supervolcanic eruptions, asteroid collisions, and the looming effects of climate change threaten to cause everything from civilizational collapse to human extinction.

Some of these risks sound like science fiction, but so did weapons of mass destruction and climate change 100 years ago. As Allan Dafoe and Anders Sandberg of the Future of Humanity Institute write, our brains aren’t good at thinking about catastrophic risk because they either “completely neglect or massively overweight” things that are low probability. So the report, overseen by a team at GCF but with each section written by leading experts, combines historical evidence and scientific data to determine the biggest threats.

The good news for us is that scientists think the world will be habitable for at least a few hundred million more years. The bad news is there’s a lot that could change that. The risk of the threats highlighted in the report actually causing mass casualties are still small, but that doesn’t mean they’re not important to pay attention to — especially when the worst-case scenario means human extinction.

Here’s what should be keeping you up at night and what, realistically, might cause humans to go the way of dinosaurs.

1) Nuclear war

A nuclear detonation from one of today’s more powerful weapons would cause a fatality rate of 80 to 95 percent in the blast zone stretching out to a radius of 4 kilometers — although “severe damage” could reach six times as far.

But it isn’t just the immediate deaths we need to worry about — it’s the nuclear winter. This is when the clouds of dust and smoke released shroud the planet and block out the sun, causing temperatures to drop, possibly for years. If 4,000 nuclear weapons were detonated — a possibility in the event of all-out nuclear war between the US and Russia, which hold the vast majority of the world’s stockpile — an untold number of people would be killed, and temperatures could drop by 8 degrees Celsius over four to five years. Humans wouldn’t be able to grow food; chaos and violence would ensue.

A big worry here is the arsenal of nukes. While numbers have fallen over several decades, the United States and Russia have just under 7,000 warheads each, the largest collections in the world. The UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea, and Israel all have nuclear weapons.

Hundreds of nuclear weapons are ready to be released within minutes, a troubling fact considering that the biggest threat of nuclear war may be an accident or miscommunication. A few times since the 1960s, Russian officers (and, in 1995, the president) narrowly decided not to launch a nuclear weapon in response to what they’d later find out were false alarms.

2) Biological and chemical warfare

Unlike nuclear weapons, which require complex engineering, biological and chemical warfare can be developed at a relatively low cost and with relatively attainable materials.

In the past few years, the Syrian government has used chemical weapons in the civil war that has ravaged the country. These chemical attacks using sarin and chlorine have appalled the international community, and underscored the damage chemical weapons can do. Weaponized toxic chemicals could do tremendous harm to a localized target — say, if the toxins were released into the air or into the water supply.

Biological weapons represent a greater catastrophic threat. Advances in synthetic biology have made very real the possibility of malicious actors creating harmful pathogens for weaponization — or innocent researchers accidentally releasing a lethal infectious bug out into the world. In the event of a fast-moving pandemic, the world would be pretty vulnerable.

3) Catastrophic climate change

A United Nations panel of scientists released a report last week saying that we only have 12 years to keep global warming to moderate levels.

Projections of the effects of climate change vary depending on how much the Earth warms (usually modeled on an increase of 1 to 3 degree Celsius). None of the scenarios look good.

At best, we’re looking at more frequent and severe tropical cyclones. Midrange predictions include the loss of the majority of global agricultural land and freshwater sources, with major coastal cities like New York and Mumbai ending up underwater. At worst, human civilization would come to an end.

Even if current global commitments to reduce carbon emissions are kept, there is a one-third chance of the Earth’s temperature increasing by 3°C, which would cause most of Florida and Bangladesh to drown.

Catastrophic climate change is also not something we’re dedicating nearly enough attention to. The author of this section in the report, Dr. Leena Srivastava, the acting director of general at the Energy and Resources Institute, points out that we’ve put enough time and resources into airplane safety that only 27 planes crash a year. But “if dying in a flight accident was as likely as a 3°C global temperature increase, then the number of people dying in airplanes every year would be 15 [million].”

4) Ecological collapse

Ecosystems are the delicate community of living organisms, like humans and animals, interacting with their nonliving environment, like air and water. Ecosystems can recover from a certain amount of impact from humans, like temperature increases or habitat loss, but there’s a tipping point at which they can’t — and according to the report, we might be reaching that tipping point.

Lake Chad in West Africa is an example of ecological collapse. Sixty years of drought, overuse of water, and the impacts of climate change have reduced the lake by 90 percent. Its massive reduction has adversely affected the livelihoods of more than 40 million people in Chad, Nigeria, Niger, and Cameroon that depend on it.

Scholars believe this moment in history constitutes a new geological era, called the Anthropocene. In this new era, humans are the primary change agents, rapidly degrading what makes the planet habitable, intensifying greenhouse gas concentration, and damaging the health of marine ecosystems.

5) Pandemics

Twice in modern history, plagues have swept across the world, killing an estimated 15 percent of the population in a few decades. They occurred way back in the fifth and 14th centuries, respectively — but there is a serious risk that a new infectious disease could cause another outbreak, especially with today’s urban and mobile global population.

Luckily, deadly diseases with the capacity to spread globally are rare. But they do happen — a century ago, the Spanish flu killed more than 50 million people. Outbreaks of SARS and Ebola in recent years also ring alarm bells.

Antibiotics, our greatest defense against disease, are becoming less effective as some strains of bacteria become resistant to them. Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are responsible for an estimated 700,000 annual deaths. If we don’t develop new advances against antibiotic resistance, that number is estimated to reach 10 million by 2050.

6) Asteroid impact

Asteroids are rocks that revolve around the sun and that occasionally collide with the Earth. An asteroid large enough to cause a global catastrophe hits Earth every 120,000 years, scientists estimate. It’s likely what killed the dinosaurs, and if an asteroid even one-tenth the size of the one that caused their extinction hit Earth today, the results would be devastating. Scientists estimate it could release enough particles to block the sun for months and cause a famine killing hundreds of millions.

NASA announced in 2011 that it had mapped more than 90 percent of objects in space larger than 1 kilometer in diameter, and that none of them are likely to hit Earth. But there’s still a lot we don’t know about smaller objects that, while unlikely to cause a global catastrophe, could have a big enough local impact to disrupt social and economic systems.

7) Supervolcanic eruption

A supervolcanic explosion 74,000 years ago ejected so much debris into the atmosphere that scientists believe it caused the Earth to cool by several degrees Celsius. Some experts believe this caused the greatest mass plant and animal extinction in human history, bringing the species to the brink of extinction.

How likely is that to happen today? It’s hard to say since we don’t have much to compare it to, but data suggests a supervolcanic eruption occurs on average every 17,000 years. If that’s true, then we’re overdue — the last one we know of was 26,500 years ago in New Zealand.

We don’t have a way to anticipate eruptions more than a few weeks or months in advance, and we don’t really have any way to reduce the likelihood of eruption right now, but scientists are monitoring several areas of risk, including Yellowstone in the US.

8) Solar geoengineering

There’s a dramatic option for stopping, or even reversing, rising global temperatures, but it comes with significant possible risk.

Solar geoengineering would reflect light and heat away from Earth and back into space by injecting aerosols into the stratosphere, the second layer of Earth’s atmosphere. For now, it only exists in computer models, but the first experiment is being planned by Harvard researchers.

Solar geoengineering is one of two emerging technologies that could manipulate the atmosphere and reduce climate risk. The other is directly removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, which doesn’t currently exist on a big enough scale.

If solar geoengineering were deployed, it would affect the entire atmosphere and be humanity’s largest-ever global endeavor. While it is the only known technique that could stop rising temperatures, there’s still a lot we don’t know, including whether it could destabilize local and global climate or ecosystems. Manipulation on this scale without understanding the effects could turn out to be catastrophic for the human race. The technology could also be cheap enough (as low as $10 billion a year) that it could be wielded by one country or a wealthy individual, introducing the possibility of reckless use.

9) Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence (AI) is progressing rapidly. Surveyed scientists estimate, on average, that there is a 50 percent chance of AI being able to perform most tasks as well as, or better than, humans by 2050, with at least a 5 percent chance of surpassing human intelligence a couple of years after that.

There’s a common misconception that the risk of AI is that it will become malevolent. The bigger concern is that it will become too good at its job. As the report says: “If you ask an obedient, intelligent car to take you to the airport as fast as possible, it might get you there chased by helicopters and covered in vomit, doing not what you wanted but literally what you asked for.”

The implications become much more frightening when you consider AI weapons in the hands of the wrong person, or an AI arms race leading to an AI war.

10) Unknown risks

It wasn’t that long ago that climate change and nuclear warfare were largely unheard of. Today, they’re risks we’ve already seen the devastating effects of — and that we worry could get much worse. Because of this, there’s a possibility that we haven’t even conceived of what is most likely to kill us.

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Stephen Hawking has a final message for humanity: If robots don’t get us, climate change will.

Hawking, who died at age 76 of a degenerative neurological disease earlier this year, offers his parting thoughts in a posthumously published book called Brief Answers To The Big Questions, which comes out Tuesday. It’s a message worth heeding from a man who is probably the most renowned scientist since Einstein, best known for his discovery of how black holes function. Hawking’s book A Brief History of Time sold more than 10 million copies and tackled questions as big as “How did the universe begin?” and “What will happen when it ends?” in language simple enough for the average reader.

In an excerpt published in the Times of London over the weekend, he’s funny and optimistic, even as he warns us that artificial intelligence is likely to outsmart us, that the wealthy are bound to develop into a superhuman species, and that the planet is hurtling toward total inhabitability.

Hawking’s book is ultimately a verdict on humanity’s future. At first blush, the verdict is that we’re doomed. But dig deeper and there’s something else here too, a faith that human wisdom and innovation will thwart our own destruction, even when we seem hellbent on bringing it about.

The robots might be coming for us

Hawking’s biggest warning is about the rise of artificial intelligence: It will either be the best thing that’s ever happened to us, or it will be the worst thing. If we’re not careful, it very well may be the last thing.

Artificial intelligence holds great opportunity for humanity, encompassing everything from Google’s algorithms to self-driving cars to facial recognition software. The AI we have today, however, is still in its primitive stages. Experts worry about what will happen when that intelligence outpaces us. Or, as Hawking puts it, “Whereas the short-term impact of AI depends on who controls it, the long-term impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all.”

This might sound like the stuff of science fiction, but Hawking says dismissing it as such “would be a mistake, and potentially our worst mistake ever.”

Compared to robots, we humans are pretty clunky. Limited by the slow pace of evolution, it takes us generations to iterate. Robots, on the other hand, can improve upon their own design a lot faster, and soon, they’ll probably be able to do so without our help. Hawking says this will create an “intelligence explosion” in which machines could exceed our intelligence “by more than ours exceeds that of snails.”

A lot of people think that the threat of AI centers on it becoming malevolent rather than benevolent. Hawking disabuses us of this concern, saying that the “real risk with AI isn’t malice, but competence.” Basically, AI will be very good at accomplishing its goals; if humans get in the way, we could be in trouble.

“You’re probably not an evil ant-hater who steps on ants out of malice, but if you’re in charge of a hydroelectric green-energy project and there’s an anthill in the region to be flooded, too bad for the ants. Let’s not place humanity in the position of those ants,” Hawking writes.

For those still unpersuaded, he suggests a different metaphor. “Why are we so worried about AI? Surely humans are always able to pull the plug?” a hypothetical person asks him.

Hawking answers: “People asked a computer, ‘Is there a God?’ And the computer said, ‘There is now,’ and fused the plug.”

The end of life on earth?

If it’s not the robots, it is “almost inevitable that either a nuclear confrontation or environmental catastrophe will cripple the Earth at some point in the next 1,000 years,” Hawking writes.

His warning comes on the heels of last week’s alarming Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report warning that we only have 12 years to make changes massive enough to keep global warming to moderate levels. Without such changes, extended droughts, more frequent tropical storms, and rising sea levels will only be the beginning.

Runaway climate change is the biggest threat to our planet, he says, and we are acting with “reckless indifference to our future on planet Earth.”

In fact, we might not have a future at all, he says, warning us not to put all our eggs “in one basket.” And yes, that basket is planet Earth. Even if humans figure out a way escape, “the millions of species that inhabit the Earth” will be doomed, he says. “And that will be on our conscience as a race.”

Another warning isn’t any less menacing. We are entering a new phase of “self-designed evolution.” This stage means we will soon be able to cast off the chains of traditional evolution and start changing and improving our own DNA now — not in hundreds of thousands of years.

As with AI, the ability to edit our own DNA holds the potential to fix humanity’s greatest problems. First, and likely not in the distant future, we’ll be able to repair genetic defects, editing out genes for things like muscular dystrophy and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, the disease he was diagnosed with in 1963. Hawking says that within this century, we’ll be able to edit intelligence, memory, and length of life. And that’s when things could get really complicated.

Hawking calls the people who will do this “superhumans,” and they’re likely to be the world’s wealthy elites. Regular old humans won’t be able to compete, and will probably “die out, or become unimportant.” At the same time, superhumans will likely be “colonizing other planets and stars.”

If that all sounds pretty depressing, it is. But even as Hawking serves up an apocalyptic prognosis for the planet and everyone on it, his brand of optimism comes through. He has faith that “our ingenious race will have found a way to slip the surly bonds of Earth and will therefore survive the disaster.”

He even believes that, instead of being terrifying, these possibilities are thrilling and that it “greatly increases the chances of inspiring the new Einstein. Wherever she might be.”

Figuring out a way off of planet Earth, and maybe even the solar system, is an opportunity to do what the moon landings did: “elevate humanity, bring people and nations together, usher in new discoveries and new technologies.”

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