I did a stint in a rural bangladeshi hospital while a medical student.
I went on an outreach camp with an opthalmologist. In one village we saw dozens of elderly people partially or fully blind from cataracts. None of them could afford the surgery. I asked the opthalmologist how much the operation was and he said "$40 each", so I said "ok choose the 20 people who need this operation the most and ill give you the $800". They put 20 of them in minivans and took them to the hospital the next day and all 20 got their operations. Had a whole ward of really delighted people.
I've seen fundraising campaigns from the big charities (Oxfam, Unicef etc) where they put a price on different interventions. E.g. £5 buys a dose of medicine, £10 vaccinates a child, £50 buys a goat for a family, etc.
I've often found this sort of fundraising slightly off-putting because it implies that there is literally a line of people waiting to be vaccinated, and they're just waiting for your money before they can move on to the next child. I find this scenario hard to believe, and I think the over-simplification is patronising.
However you've described a situation where there literally was a line of people waiting for cataract operations, and your donation had an incredible impact on 20 people's lives.
It would be great if there were easier ways to donate money directly to people like you did. Donating money via huge organisations that employ hundreds of people in developed countries seems like an incredibly inefficient way of doing it.
To put it another way, I'm sure most people would rather pay for 20 cataract surgeries for 20 real people than 20 notional goats
street wisdom (or they...) says that roughly 95% of charity/help donations go to management and delivery of those donations, and only 5% is spent on actual goods (be it medicine, blanket, food etc.) that help people. it seems a bit over-the top statement, but then you realize how massive organizations (or corporations?) like UN are, employing thousands and thousands of people in most expensive parts of the world (New York, Geneva... seriously WTF?).
Here in Geneva, there are gazillions of non-profit orgs, then there are various organizations grouping those non profits and so on. Still talking about one of most expensive cities in the world. Yes, those people probably don't have private bank-levels of salary, but I know a people or two who are curently buying high-priced properties over the border in France, so they are more than OK.
Friend in quite high position in Red cross hates UN with passion, stating they are useless in real crysis scenarios, just bureaucrats etc. Not sure if that's an objective statement, but there is probably at least some truth there.
What I decided to do, at least for now - Amnesty International. Rather than putting bandage where bleeding, it might lead to improvement of system. And I pay directly organization of lawyers who actually try to do good stuff, not bureaucrats who travel all around the world and check some spreadsheets and do presentations.
But what one poster says here is probably one of best things - directly invest into treating people, no useless middlemen who, like it or not, also need to be payed.
I went on an outreach camp with an opthalmologist. In one village we saw dozens of elderly people partially or fully blind from cataracts. None of them could afford the surgery. I asked the opthalmologist how much the operation was and he said "$40 each", so I said "ok choose the 20 people who need this operation the most and ill give you the $800". They put 20 of them in minivans and took them to the hospital the next day and all 20 got their operations. Had a whole ward of really delighted people.