Twice in the past 40 years, French oyster farmers were saved by their colleagues on Japan's northern Pacific coast. After the March 11 tsunami, they decided it was time to return the favour. This week they kicked off an aid effort to help oyster growers who lost everything when the seabed quake sent a massive tsunami barrelling into Japan's north-east, destroying entire towns - and their livelihoods.

The European Commission has pledged $14.5 million in emergency food aid to help 650,000 North Koreans at risk of dying from malnutrition. An EU mission visited the country last month and saw hospitals, kindergartens and state food distribution centers.

UK aid agencies raised £71m in their Pakistan floods appeal last year, the third highest amount raised for a humanitarian disaster, according to the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC), the umbrella organisation of British humanitarian groups.

There is no way forward in Afghanistan, unless the international community rethinks the way they have operated in the country so far. To avoid failure and more of the same, they must exploit the strategic opportunity of capitalizing on the many lessons learned they have learned thus far to replace the “Afghan face” with the “Afghan hands” on getting the job done henceforth.

People have spent years trying to learn from past foreign aid disappointments and still, with all these resources, the results are discouraging. This experience should have a chastening influence on the advocates of smart power. But it could be that cultural and economic development works on a different timetable than traditional foreign policy.

Dominic Deng Diing, who escaped the violence in Sudan, raises funds to help schoolchildren there. More than 3,000 children in South Sudan attend the two-year-old New Hope Primary School, a project of Diing's Buffalo-based nonprofit group Aid and Care for Africa.

Americans continue to strongly support charitable work with their dollars last year, despite the lingering recession, says a new report. The biggest area of growth in charitable giving was in aiding international causes, such as the earthquake relief efforts in Haiti.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton says she is concerned by Chinese aid and investment policies in Africa. "We are...concerned that China's foreign assistance and investment practices in Africa have not always been consistent with generally accepted international norms of transparency and good governance...,” she said.