A Fan Story From Indonesia Exposes a Blind Spot in Aid

A service trip to a rural school in Indonesia once ended with a lesson that had nothing to do with the classroom. A visiting team installed fans to cool a sweltering building, only to learn on their next visit that the village had no electricity until seven at night, hours after students had already left for the day. The fans worked. They just never cooled a single class. That story, told by Mike Holden, the Learning Service Coordinator at ICS Bangkok, on a recent Students Incorporated episode, sits at the center of a problem that shows up everywhere people try to do good: intentions and diagnosis are not the same thing, and getting the second one wrong can quietly undo the first.

When Help Misses Its Target

Holden's path into service work started early. He grew up watching his parents volunteer at church and school, joined student council partly because it was the main outlet for organized service, and took two trips to Mexico as a teenager that made service feel like a default rather than an event. That pattern followed him into a teaching career across Southeast Asia, first in Malaysia, then in Indonesia, where his role shifted from organizing service for students to running it directly, taking groups into nearby villages.

The fan story came out of that stretch. A team noticed classrooms with no cooling and asked the obvious question: would fans help? The answer was an easy yes, so fans were sourced, installed, and celebrated. On the group's next visit, the school was still using them, just not during class. "We actually don't have electricity until seven at night," the villagers explained, according to Holden. "So we've got fans for the students, but there's never fans on when the students are here." The fans got real use anyway, at evening community meetings, so the gift wasn't wasted; it just solved a problem nobody had raised.

Holden doesn't tell the story as an indictment of service trips. He tells it as the reason he now treats "understanding what's happening" as a discipline that comes before any project, not an assumption baked into the plan. Asked what a lasting, positive legacy looks like, he put it simply:

Seeking first to understand others before we make assumptions.

A Well-Documented Blind Spot

The fan problem isn't unique to one school trip. Dirk-Jan Koch, a Dutch aid researcher, has spent years cataloging how often well-funded interventions land exactly like Holden's fans: functional, even appreciated, but missing the point. The Overseas Development Institute summarized his work in 2023 into roughly ten recurring categories, including marginalization effects, where aid aimed at one group sidelines another, and price effects, where donated goods flood a local market and undercut existing businesses. The common thread: the people funding an intervention are rarely the ones best positioned to know what it will actually do once it lands.

The clearest evidence for the alternative comes from cash-transfer research, which has spent a decade testing what happens when donors let recipients decide instead of guessing. A 2021 study comparing a straight cash payment against an equivalently priced, in-kind nutrition-training program in Rwanda found cash outperformed the training on nearly every measure tracked, because families bought what they, not a program designer, had already identified as the actual gap. GiveWell, which evaluates charities on cost-effectiveness, has since raised its estimate of how much good unconditional cash delivers by three to four times over its 2019 assessment, largely on findings like this. None of it says fans, school supplies, or any in-kind gift is wrong. It says the question that has to come first is whether anyone asked.

A Payment App Built Around the Same Question

The episode's other guest, Dr. Narisa Chauvidul-Aw, is trying to answer a version of that question with a product. She's the founder and CEO of KogoPay, a London-based fintech company she started in 2018 after stretches as a finance lecturer, a chartered auditor at PwC, and a chief financial officer. Her goal was blunt: make sending money across borders as easy as sending an email, especially for the migrant workers, single parents, and small households who pay the most to move the least.

The global average cost of sending a remittance sat at 6.36% in the third quarter of 2025, according to the World Bank, more than double the 3% target the UN and G20 have set for 2030. In 28 countries the average fee still tops 3% outright, and for someone sending part of a modest paycheck home every month, that friction is not a rounding error. Chauvidul-Aw's answer, alongside the standard transfer business, is a feature called Pay It Forward, letting a customer cover part of a stranger's bill at a partner cafe or shop. It's a fintech-native version of caffè sospeso, the "suspended coffee" tradition from Naples' working-class cafes, where a customer buys two coffees, drinks one, and leaves the other paid for whoever needs it next. Her version routes that same impulse through a payment rail instead of a barista's memory, so generosity doesn't depend on someone remembering to pass it along.

The Other Constraint: Raising the Money to Try

Diagnosis wasn't the only obstacle Chauvidul-Aw described; fundraising was the one she called hardest, personally. She recounted being selected for a UK trade delegation to the United Arab Emirates as one of twelve fintech founders, and by her account the only woman and only Asian founder in the group. Months later, per Bloomberg Live's own event records, she sat on a Bloomberg Business Summit panel on women in business at APEC in Bangkok, alongside Thailand's finance minister and the heads of major banks, an experience she described as feeling "nobody among somebody." She also cited a statistic that has aged into prophecy: only about 3% of venture capital was reaching women-led companies.

If anything, the number has moved the wrong way. Data from PitchBook shows startups founded exclusively by women received just 1 to 2% of total U.S. venture capital funding in 2025 and 2026, roughly flat with 2024 and down from a decade ago, despite research showing women-founded companies deliver stronger returns; blended-gender teams have absorbed most of the recent growth, all-women teams have not. Chauvidul-Aw's own fix: route around the gatekeeping where she can, raising early capital through a public Crowdcube round that pulled in more than £200,000 from ordinary backers, followed by a $1.41 million seed round in 2021 led by the payments firm Lightnet. It's a workaround, not a fix, but it matches her advice to young founders: don't wait for permission from the people least likely to give it.

What Actually Lasts

Both guests were, without planning it, describing the same failure mode from opposite ends. Holden's team had the resources and the will to help and still got it wrong, because the plan was built on what looked useful from outside rather than what the village actually needed. Chauvidul-Aw is trying to remove that guesswork at the point of the transaction, whether that means cutting the cost of moving money across a border or making sure a free meal shows up where someone is already standing. Neither approach is foolproof: cash transfers still require trusting the recipient's judgment, and a payment feature still requires someone to opt in.

What both guests landed on, in their own way, is that the "legacy" this episode set out to define isn't really about being remembered. It's about whether whatever gets left behind still does something useful once the people who built it are gone. A working fan in an empty classroom fails that test even though nobody involved did anything careless. A cross-border payment that still charges 6% doesn't fully pass it either. The standard both guests kept circling back to was smaller and harder than good intentions: ask first, build for the answer you get, and check back later to see if it held.

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