“In the early 1990s, Save the Children UK had a small plane that ferried supplies between Nairobi and Mogadishu for the Somalia relief programme, including large bags of notes for cash payments, since the banking system had all but disappeared. As the agency’s head of research at the time I was sometimes a passenger on the plane, but my maiden flight nearly ended in disaster.”

Read on at The Guardian ‘Comment is Free’: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/sep/11/direct-transfers-end-bureaucracy-foreign-aid