When Do-Gooding Goes Bad
The problem with do-gooding is that it's very often unintentional do-badding, due to a lack of consideration of possible unintended consequences.

In an article at FEE, a man with the marvelous name, "Orestes R Betancourt Ponce de León," hits on a few examples of foreign aid gone terribly wrong:

Known as the "Lord of the Wangara Mines," Mansa Musa I ruled the Empire of Mali between 1312 and 1337. Trade in gold, salt, copper, and ivory made Mansa Musa the richest man in world history.

On his way, the Mansa of Mali stayed for three months in Cairo. Every day he gave gold bars to the poor, scholars, and local officials. Mansa's emissaries toured the bazaars paying at a premium with gold. The Arab historian Al-Makrizi (1364-1442) relates that Mansa Musa's gifts "astonished the eye by their beauty and splendor." But the joy was short-lived. So much was the flow of golden metal that flooded the streets of Cairo that the value of the local gold dinar fell by 20 percent and it took the city about 12 years to recover from the inflationary pressure that such a devaluation caused.

Since then, the unintended consequences of good intentions in foreign aid have occurred again and again. More recent historical examples abound:

1. Between the 1950s and 1960s under the Food for Peace program--created by Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1954--the markets of India, Pakistan and Indonesia had to compete with the massive flow of donated agricultural products from the United States. The donations bankrupted thousands of local farmers and restricted the development of agriculture in these countries for decades.

2. In 1971, the Norwegian government earmarked $22 million for a fish processing plant in Kenya on Lake Turkana. The aim was to export the fish and provide employment for the Turkana people, but they were nomads with no knowledge or interest in fishing. In addition, the cost of refrigeration equipment and drinking water were very high. The plant closed after a few days.

3. The World Bank loaned Tanzania more than $10 million for cashew nut processing. As a result, by 1982 Tanzania had 11 factories capable of processing three times what was produced each year. On top of that, within a short time, six of the factories were idle and in need of spare parts and the other five were running at less than 20 percent of their capacity. It was cheaper for Tanzania to send its raw cashew nuts to India for processing.

4. In 1995, during the civil war in Sudan, Christian Solidarity International began paying between $100 and $50 ransom for Dinka slaves captured in the south of the country. It became more lucrative to sell slaves to well-meaning Europeans and North Americans than to sell them to the North for $15. The dynamics of good intentions encouraged this market and the slavers to take more captives.

...Though many like Bill Gates think foreign aid is unquestionably good, the flow of capital from developed countries largely fuels the corruption of recipient governments and diminishes the accountability of these governments to those most in need. What is worse, it postpones the reforms necessary for these countries to integrate into world trade under sound institutions and economies free of bureaucratic burdens. After all, this is the best way to achieve progress!

International development agencies seem to be gaining awareness of the impact of unintended consequences. Nevertheless, it is not enough. The US Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported that in 2015 six major organizations considered unforeseen side effects in only approximately 28 percent of the evaluations of their foreign aid projects.

...Unfortunately, as Milton Friedman said, "one of our great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions and not by their results."

Per what I've read, foreign aid that does seem to work more often involves vaccinating people against diseases and providing microloans direct to people in need and teaching them ways to support themselves.

Still, these have to be considered on a case by case basis, and I think there's a strong tendency when it's "other people's money" and do-gooding to do very little looking at all -- as well as something noted in part of the article I didn't excerpt: a failure to admit to failures, which is the only way to possibly prevent them from happening again and again.