For fifty years, the people who design foreign aid programs have rarely been the people who have to live inside them. In this episode of The Unpopular View, host Michael Brown sits down with Dr. Samantha Nutt, founder of War Child, to ask the questions the humanitarian sector debates privately but rarely says out loud on the record.

Samantha has spent three decades working in Somalia, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Uganda — picking up the pieces after wars. Michael has worked in many of the same countries on land rights and rural livelihoods. Together they dig into how War Child actually operates on the ground, from running a registered law firm providing legal aid to women and children in Uganda, to the real cost — beyond any budget line — of operating where roadblocks, customs, and armed groups all take their cut.

They talk through hard cases: Kahuzi-Biega National Park in eastern DRC, where a 2022 African Commission ruling against a 55-year-old eviction has gone largely unenforced; Norway's REDD+ forest-protection funding running alongside undisclosed logging concessions; and Jebel Amer in North Darfur, where local mining governance was overtaken by force. The conversation asks what's genuinely sustainable and appropriate for outside NGOs and donors to do — and what belongs to the people who actually hold the rights.

In this episode:

• Why War Child exists and how its education, opportunity, and protection programs work in Uganda and eastern DRC
• Running a law firm inside a refugee response: mobile legal clinics and justice training in Uganda
• What happens when a community says the aid offered isn't what it needs
• The hidden cost of operating in extractive systems, and where War Child draws the line
• What Somalia, Sudan, the DRC, and Uganda should actually be hoping for from foreign donors — and what they should hope stops
• What's still standing in West Darfur after nearly twenty years of War Child programming, paused since the 2023 war

Guest: Dr. Samantha Nutt, physician, founder of War Child

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