Well-Meaning Solutions That Created Total Hell

5

The "International Decade Of Clean Water" Poisoned Millions Of People

In 2005, The World Health Organization declared Bangladesh in the grip of the "largest mass poisoning of a population in history." Did everyone in Bangladesh marry the same mysterious yet glamorous widow? Is the whole country eating at Jack in the Box? Who could have done such a thing? Well, the culprits turned out to be those monsters over at the ... World Health Organization. Plus the UN, the World Bank, and a bunch of other development groups.

Lief Jorgensen/Wikimedia CommonsIt'd be an ending reveal worthy of Scooby-Doo, except for the part where everybody got poisoned.

4

Sean Penn Accidentally Founded A Massive New Slum In Haiti

In 2010, Haiti was devastated by a massive earthquake, then devastated again by one of the most incompetent relief efforts in modern memory. Most famously, doctors were surprised to discover the earthquake had somehow introduced cholera, a disease that had literally never been known in Haiti. Then it turned out that the UN had tried to help the recovery effort by sending peacekeepers from Nepal, which was dealing with a cholera problem. Locals also took issue with the sewage from the poorly built UN camp spilling directly into the Artibonite River, which provided drinking water for thousands of people. You can probably puzzle that one out from there.

There were many other problems, including Oxfam's attempt to help out by deploying an elite squad of sex predators. But probably the weirdest was a dipshit effort by human cigarette Sean Penn, who accidentally became the founder of a brand new slum-city on some formerly unoccupied scrubland. Penn had gone to Haiti, with his powers of brooding and smelling like a taxi seat, to help out with the relief effort and ended up running an enormous refugee camp on Port-au-Prince's only golf course, much to the irritation of the retired dentist trying to sink a tricky put on the 14th.

With the rainy season approaching, US army engineers warned that the camp was at risk of flooding and that 5,000 people should be relocated to make way for drainage ditches. It was decided to move them outside the capital to an area called Corail-Cesselesse, which the government had earmarked for a Korean garment factory. However, the Haitians were reluctant to leave, feeling that wealthy locals just wanted their golf course back. So Penn personally made an attractive pitch, pledging that everyone who moved would get $50, medical care, shelter and schools built by relief agencies, plus the first pick of jobs at the garment factory.

3

Seoul's Anti-Suicide Bridge Quadrupled Suicide Attempts

Seoul's Mapo Bridge has a reputation as something of a suicide hotspot, although they'd prefer it if you didn't describe it that way in your TripAdvisor review. For many years, the city faced calls to install high guard rails, or at least take down the diving board. But the local government was reluctant to take a pessimistic step like guard rails, for the same reason the London Underground no longer has a guy standing on each platform screaming "for the love of God, don't do it!" Instead, they turned to Seoul's booming creative and tech sectors to stop suicides in a peppier, more cutting-edge kind of way.

In 2012, the city teamed up with Samsung and an advertising agency to rebrand Mapo as "the Bridge of Life." The existing guardrails were outfitted with brightly-colored LED lighting. Motion sensors would detect pedestrians and quickly project images of babies and happy families on the rails. Others would light up with suicide hotline numbers and comforting messages like "Your worries will feel like nothing when you get older," or "Isn't it nice to be walking on a bridge?" and "Have you eaten yet?" They also installed a statue of a depressed youth being pinched on the cheek by a "grandfatherly" man. Suicide attempts more than quadrupled.

2

We Keep Building "Clean" Hydroelectric Dams That Release More Greenhouse Gases Than Coal

From the '30s to the early 2000s, the world was building dams faster than a beaver downriver from an Adderall factory. The international development community in particular went dam-crazy, seeing hydroelectricity as the solution to economic problems in river-heavy developing nations. The World Bank alone spent $75 billion building dams in third-world countries, before an internal commission found that they consistently provided less water and power than promised, and often weren't worth relocating thousands of people and devastating local fisheries. But, hey, at the very least hydroelectric dams provide clean energy, right?

1

The World Bank's Forest Preservation Program Ended With Armed Gunmen Rampaging Through Kenya

Back in 2007, the World Bank agreed to provide $68.5 million to finance a forest preservation program in Kenya, which vastly expanded the protected area of forest in the Cherangani Hills. Protecting the world's remaining forests from loggers and ranchers is vital, so that sounds like a great program! Unless you're a member of the Sengwer, an indigenous people who have lived in the forests for centuries, in which case it sounds like the moment your house caught fire.

The Sengwer are a marginalized people in Kenya, and the government has long wanted to clear them off their ancestral lands to secure water supplies for the nation's cities. Forced evictions tend to provoke a lot of whining from the international community, but the forest preservation program was the perfect cover. The World Bank cheerfully signed off on funding for a newly expanded forest reserve, with thousands of Sengwer people inside the redrawn boundaries. They were promptly informed they would have to leave their homes in order to preserve the "pristine" forest.

This wasn't exactly a polite request. When the Sengwer protested, heavily armed rangers from Kenya's Forest Service rampaged through the hills, burning down Sengwer houses. Many were forced into hiding, sleeping rough in makeshift shelters in the trees. The Sengwer allege that the guns and vehicles used in the evictions were bought with the World Bank money, meaning that international development money went to fund something not far removed from a Viking raid.

The World Bank's internal investigation found that the bank had violated its own rules by approving the project without imposing any conditions to safeguard the local people. However, the bank denies direct responsibility for over 1,000 evictions linked to the preservation program. Meanwhile, an officer of Kenya's Forest Service offered the following defense: "You are being lied to ... They claim that we are burning the houses -- how do you know that they are not burning their own houses?" Which is the equivalent of "No officer, he must have shot himself in the back through the trunk of my car."

Top image: Riccardo Mayer/Shutterstock