The Road to Hell is a scathing critique of the development and relief aid industry in East Africa. In his expose, journalist and former aid worker, Michael Maren portrays several US Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO), the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), and the US military, among others, as corrupt, self-serving agencies whose ulterior interests contributed to rather than helped resolve conditions of famine and war in Somalia. According to Maren, relief aid to Somalia in the 1980s and 1990s was manipulated by local authorities, hoodlums, and even refugees who grew rich diverting food and other donations or by using these resources for political ends. Despite this, Western aid agencies continued to solicit funds and carry out relief and development activities because they benefited financially. Maren exposes the expatriate aid community in Africa as comprised of careerists who live luxurious lifestyles in the midst of poverty and make little attempt to learn about or to integrate themselves into their host society.

Maren uses his own experiences as an example of how easily expatriates obtain comfortable jobs in Africa and how little the impact of their action or inaction matters to them and their funders. As a Peace Corps volunteer in Kenya in the late 1970s, he discovered that he had little to offer in the village where he lived and that his presence there was the result of a bribe made by the school headmaster who wanted a white teacher to attract more students and donations. As an employee of Catholic Relief Services in Kenya, Maren learned, "[w]ith my English degree and suburban upbringing and white skin, I could walk into an African village and throw money and bags of food around. I could do anything I pleased. I had, admittedly, enjoyed the feeling of power. Suddenly it scared me." Maren later worked for USAID in Somalia as a food monitor in the early 1980s, where he discovered that the Somali government was deliberately diverting development aid and inflating refugee numbers to keep refugees dependent and to keep the aid flowing.

Maren takes aim at Care, Save the Children, AmeriCares, and other American NGOs. He accuses CARE of continuing to solicit UN funds for food relief in Somalia while knowing that its donated food was turning up in markets in other countries. He criticizes Save the Children's exploitation of starving children to raise funds which are spent mostly on administering grants from the US government. Save the Children in Somalia did not pay field personnel or disperse project funds, preferring to make a profit by changing money on the black market and renting a weekend beach house for the director. Maren suggests that AmeriCares' purpose is to provide tax write-offs for corporations, and details how the agency delivered inappropriate donated goods (Gatorade, Mars Bars, Pop Tarts, Maidenform bras) to disaster-stricken areas in Russian, Bosnia, and Japan.

If all that he says is true, The Road to Hell provides a depressing comment on the state of foreign and charitable aid. The book's most important contribution is as an eye-opener for the general public whose only information about international development and relief aid comes from commercials for charities and the popular press. Maren does provide insightful details about interclan conflict and politics in Somalia. As an objective study of aid in Africa, however, The Road to Hell is inadequate.

Maren is right: the development industry is inherently paternalistic, but he does not mention and may be unaware of the lively debate and increasing attempts in development literature, in NGO and major bilateral and multilateral agency policies and programs to reverse the top-down, dependency-creating, bureaucratic nature of development. Maren also does not distinguish clearly between relief aid and development aid. Food aid is notorious for creating dependency and disrupting local markets in emergency situations, while development, although by no means free of problems, does not suffer from the massive influx of funds and the sensationalistic press coverage that distort relief aid. His analysis ignores local movements and small NGOs based in African countries who receive aid funds and manage them more responsibly and responsively than the large agencies.

By sensationalizing the corruption and greed, Maren's analysis overlooks the complex but less flashy problems of the aid industry. In this sense he is no different than those he criticizes. Like the journalists who flocked to Somalia, Maren was right there with them, looking for a good story.