What do the poor deserve? Ask yourself.
How you answer will depend at least a little on why you think they’re poor. Why do you think the poor are poor? Do you think they’re poor because they’re lazy? Is their poverty part of cosmic retribution for wrongs committed by their ancestors? Do they deserve to be poor?
Or maybe you think is poverty something imposed on them against their will, from outside? Are the poor simply the pawns of evil people who perpetuate global systems of oppression based on race, ethnicity, class, culture, language and geography? Are they innocent, yet nonetheless helpless victims?
* * *
It’s been written before that how we think about aid and rationalize it emotionally mater. What’s been written less often before is that how we think about aid is inextricably bound up in how we think about poverty and about “the poor.” More specifically, how we think about what good aid is and how to do it, where we’ll cut corners in the name of expedience, or whether or not we’ll hold the line on technical standards and insist that our staff meet minimum qualification requirements before we hire them, all come back to why we think the poor are poor.
If we think the poor are poor in some way due to their own negligence, then it is far easier to justify poorly planned and implemented aid as “good enough.” If we think, even in a small way, that the poor are poor because they deserve to be, then how we market aid, how carefully we manage the edges of appropriate CSR, how rigorously we evaluate not just the value for our balance sheets but also the raw need for our GIK, or sending a troupe of Western teenagers to spend two weeks “doing disaster response” all become less important. We may not articulate it to ourselves in these exact words, but the I’d like to suggest that our collective tolerance for bad aid – from the amateur orphan-huggers, all the way on up through NGOs and INGOs and BINGOS to the UN to the hallowed halls of USAID and ECHO to the gilded halls of Busan – is in direct inverse proportion to what we think the poor deserve from us.
I don’t think that anyone of us is competent to pass judgment on what anyone else deserves in any kind of cosmic, universal sense. But I think that it’s important that we ask ourselves this:
What do the poor deserve?
Do they deserve our cast off clothing, our old shoes? Do they deserve our discarded bicycles and old soap? Do they deserve our church youth groups coming to practice on them for two weeks? Do they deserve us shutting them out of our planning processes or delivering aid based, not on their priorities and need, but on the priorities of donors, foreign governments or for-profit corporations? Do they deserve celebrities popping in for a few days of “humanitarian assistance”, perfectly coiffed, cameras rolling? Do they deserve foreign journalists plastering their faces on mass media in the name of “raising awareness”?
Whether as amateurs, as students hoping to enter the industry workforce, or as professionals who have been in the game for a while, we most commonly rationalize and justify our participation in the humanitarian endeavor in our personal terms. That is, we explain it in terms of what we feel compelled to do. Our motivations. It’s about us. We want to make a difference, see the world, atone for something, maybe accrue some good karma.
We need to change this. We need to be talking about relief and development work in terms of what the poor need and, if you will, what they deserve. Not deserve in the sense of something they somehow earned. But deserve in the sense that they’re human beings, just like us. Personally, I believe that the poor deserve the best we’re capable of, if for no other reason than simply by virtue of their humanity.
Aid blogger and AidSource co-founder Alanna Shaikh once wrote about the danger of allowing ourselves to believe that the poor have nothing. That danger is specifically that if we believe that “they” really have “nothing”, then anything we give is “better than nothing”, and therefore “good.”
I think there’s at least as much danger in believing that the poor deserve their poverty, or on the flip side, that they somehow deserve less than the best we can provide.
J.
aidsource
Alanna
/ January 12, 2012Is this another way of calling for a rights-based approach?
Amy Corinne Knorr
/ January 14, 2012J. -
You are my favorite blogger. period.
– thegeographyofsoul
rowanemslieintern
/ January 16, 2012@Alanna – +1 on that call (if it is)
Gijs
/ January 19, 2012Is every donor using a ‘rights-based approach’ or ‘participatory development’ really listening? There is a world of difference between using the term and actually following its principles.
D. Gregory
/ March 1, 2012The question “what do the poor deserve?” was a very interesting one. Yes I’m sure it is a good feeling knowing that the poor were treated with clothes, toys, soaps and other goods. It’s especially nice to see a celebrity make an appearance as well. But this is not what the poor needs. These are simply donations to make us feel better about ourselves. This is another case where the planners far outweigh the searchers. Instead of making such quick plans to send another shipment of useless items there should be more time spent searching for what will truly resolve the poor countries economic problems. Countries such as these need/deserve government policies that will create jobs for citizens and help their country develop.
Emma H
/ March 22, 2012I agree with this post and feel that many times poorly implemented and thought out aid is accepted because people feel like that is all that the poor deserve. Many people feel that the poor are poor because of their own doing and that any help is good, even if it is poorly thought out an unhelpful. I agree that many people give aid to feel better about themselves and to be able to say that they are making a difference, but this needs to stop. We need to give aid because the poor needs it and we need to give them the aid that they can use and can be helpful to them. The poor deserve the aid that they need to help them and not the inadequate aid we provide because we feel that is all that they “deserve” in our minds.
Will D.
/ March 22, 2012I agree with you that the attitudes that we hold when working to find solutions to an issue will undoubtedly alter, hinder, or cloud the results. You are correct when you criticize the notion that the poor have “nothing” and how this lack of respect will lead to patronizing approaches in aid. This is evident when one thinks about church groups of 16 year olds jaunting to a developing nation for spring break to deliver “aid.” What can they do in a week, and, furthermore, a week spent by being “amateur orphan huggers” and distributing pocket sized Bibles? These practices are, in my opinion, a feel-good brand of poverty tourism. So, yes, by viewing the poor as have-nothings we feel content with providing sub-standard aid through giggly teenagers, celebrity glamour aid, and misprinted NFL t-shirts. These approaches demand one to ask, “What are they really accomplishing?” The answer is nothing. So, the have-nothing approach leads to a propagation of nothingness.
Danny O
/ March 23, 2012I don’t understand exactly who you’re talking to in this article? And further more, I don’t know what you want from your audience. ‘Looking down’ on the poor is easy to do from far away; but how does a young college student help other than sending clothing, going on mission trips, etc.? Go write my congressman? – yeah right. What services can I (as a college student) provide that will help their situation?
I do like the point you made, however, near the bottom of the article where you go into our minimum is seen as their best through their eyes. But like I said, there is little someone like myself can do (realistically.) And I also like your point in how we address these situations in our own terms. Too often have I heard a peer talk (EXTENSIVELY) about what he/she did in poor countries and beat me to death with photos of children they “loved”; as if the only reason they did it was to pick up the cute girl at the bar down the road. But in their defense, I ask again, what more could someone like me do?
Overall, who are you writing this article towards? Because if its big corporation, I don’t see many CEO’s heading to Jamaica to work with the Brothers of the Poor.