It’s been a while, I know. For the two or three of you who check in here, from time to time, I can assure you, no–this blog’s not dead. Just in a bit of a coma. Or maybe hungover. I’ve been busy.
But I’ll break my busy schedule to bring you all this public service announcement: There is an excellent new site up that you all need to know about.
A whole repository of links, sub-sites, commentary and analyses dedicated to one of the most important and also rant-worthy subjects in all of aid: Poverty P0rn.
That got your attention, didn’t it?
What is poverty p0rn, and what isn’t? How do we tell the difference? What’s so bad about poverty p0rn, anyway? How to we make sure that we don’t do it? And what happens if we do? How do we, practitioners, explain it to non-practitioners? Leaving aside the attention-grabbing term “poverty p0rn”, it’s probably more accurate to say: Regarding Humanity is a space for advanced discussion and commentary on issues around the ethics of representation of international relief and development–practice, practitioners, and recipients–in popular culture.
Regarding Humanity is produced by a group of professionals whose experience spans humanitarian aid, transmedia storytelling, journalism, service design, academia, ethnography, visual art, and mobile technology.
All of us have faced the challenge of representing communities in our work. We recognize that the questions are many and complex, and that there is a need for a public discussion about ethical representation to shift the focus from aid to agency.
We strive for a diversity of voices and perspectives from our partners in both Western and developing world contexts.
Take the time to bookmark and regularly check in with Regarding Humanity.
At any rate, rather than bore you with my own self-absorbed re-write or nit-picky takedown, I’ll just share that these two posts prompted the following responses in my head:
How we think and talk about aid matters. If you accept the general premise that what the aid industry has to offer the world is actually humanitarianism (humanitarian principles, if you will), rather than NFI distributions or food aid or MCH programs, then you’re not far from the realization that how we think internally and talk externally about aid does, in fact, matter. It matters a lot.
To put Paul Currion’s premise in other parlance, our job is or will become more about evangelizing good aid. Talking, communicating about aid in ways that are both truthful and also engaging. If that’s true, then we’d better get a better grip on how we talk about it than we currently have. More to the point, if our core purpose is increasingly around talking about what we do and how and why to those who don’t know, whether they’re our donors, those who ‘like’ agency Facebook pages, or the self-proclaimed critics, then more of that talking will need to be done by professional practitioners, with less emphasis on branded filtration. In short, it’s time for more full, honest dialogue about aid effectiveness in the public space.
Motivations matter; principles, not so sure. After I tweeted the link to Humanitarianism is a Disease there was a very interesting twitter discussion between myself, @reincongo, and @paulharvey72 about the extent to which principles really matter to beneficiaries, and what evidence there might be one way or the other. Basically, there is little evidence one way or the other (if I’ve somehow missed some major foundation-funded interagency longitudinal study documenting the evidence base for the effect of humanitarian principles on beneficiary acceptance, I’m sure someone will set me straight in the comments thread).
I think the more important conversation is one around motivations: why get involved in the humanitarian enterprise, whether as a practitioner or as a donor, or both, at all? And an acknowledgement that those motivations do have an effect, even if that effect is easily buried under pages of UN and IASC and aid agency technobabble, on the quality and impact of what ultimately makes it through to beneficiaries.
(an amusing video about the humanitarian impulse, HT @humanosphere)
We have to think past NGO brands. Whatever the future looks like, it will have to be an industry-wide, profession-wide discussion. And that discussion will not benefit from NGO or donor branding. I don’t seen NGOs/INGOs/BINGOs going away any time soon, but I’d see the currency of value, at least within the aid industry, being increasingly about networks among individual practitioners. I’m repeating myself.
I almost didn’t do it this year. But in the end Tom Murphy and Lina Srivistava talked me into it. And there’s been so much great #SWEDOW in the ambient aid environment this year, that it’d be a real shame to let it all go uncelebrated.
So…
Announcing the hottest new thing in the aid blogosphere, guaranteed to get at least 30 hits. Which is practically the same thing as viral in a crowd that is forever ‘too busy to read blogs’ – I’m pleased to announce this year’s Best In #SWEDOW competition, a celebration of bad aid, also known as:
#SWEDOW2012
Here’s some remedial coursework for those new to the #SWEDOW conversation:
“#SWEDOW” – the original post, where the term comes from, what it means.
Deadline for entries is 31 December, 2012, 11:59 PM, EST.
No limit on entries per person.
Sorry – no prizes this year. This year’s competitors will be doing it all for the fame and glory. And maybe the warm feeling of having made the world better.
To enter, send email talesfromethehood@gmail(dot)com (be sure to spell it correctly). Include any relevant URLs in their entirety (no tinyurls or bit.lys please).
Categories:
“Classic” – Entrants in this category will find examples of classic, old-school #SWEDOW. Stuff someone doesn’t want or need any longer but can’t just throw away or recycle. Doesn’t have to be used. Those surplus new silicone breast implants sent to Haiti after the earthquake? Yeah, those count, too.
“Eeeeww!“ – Winners in this category will go for the “ick!” factor. Recycled soap, harvested human hair… you get the picture.
“Rubbernecking delay on the information superhighway” – Those wishing to score in this category will enter examples of bad aid marketing. Really, really bad aid marketing, preferably of the sort that ‘goes viral’ or something. The less information about what the org being marketed actually does available on the website, the better. The less clear the link between the product/service/appeal being marketed, and life somehow becoming better for, you know, poor people, the higher the score.
“Technicality” – bad technology, cringe-worthy innovations, irrelevant inventions… all for the greater good. To score high in this category, the tech/gadget/invention/innovation has to be promoted in superlative terms, yet require a healthy imagination (and perhaps a sense of irony) to see beneficaries actually, you know, using it.
“just KIDDING!” – A brand new category this year dedicated to satire. This one goes to the best fake aid. Too many examples to mention… just don’t mistakenly compete in this category inappropriately (*cough* #KONY2012 *cough cough*)
We want to thank those of you who took the time to churn out a few hundred words and go through the 5 or so mouse clicks necessary to add your thoughts to our collection of blog posts on how you would make aid better. For those new to the conversation, read the original call for posts here.
Altogether seven bloggers managed to get a post written and added to the collection by the deadline (see the whole collection here) with Jennifer Lentfer adding a post several days after the deadline (good thing no donor funding was on the line) and Wayan Vota sharing some predictably smart-aleck advice on our Facebook page.
mmullen gave us six suggestions for how to make aid better (we’d only asked for 3, so bonus for us!). Read the whole post here. All of his suggestions were good, but we particularly liked suggestion #5:
There are three things that dictate success of a project: a) what is in the proposal meaning the actual program design, b) the mechanism by which the decision is made about the destination of the funds and how the funds are given out, how quick or slow this process is, reporting and sign-off responsibilities, indirect, management lines, head office/donor location, transparency, and c) how committed and vested the implementor is to the project design. Stop fetishizing the first one and ignoring the second two. (Emphasis added)
Our good buddy and AidSource member Timo Luge reckons that it’s all about abolishing earmarking, strengthening coordination and reforming the security council (!). He expounds here. Of course all of those are awesome, but we found ourselves applauding the very first one:
I think it is ridiculous and against the intentions of most non-institutional donors, that some disasters are overfunded, while others barely have money at all. The problem, which many people don’t understand when donating money, is that money earmarked for disaster A cannot be used for disaster B, even if all needs in country A have been met. This leads to absurd situations where the affected population in some countries benefit from “aid deluxe” while beneficiaries in other countries get nothing.
Go Timo!
One of our very own bloggers and co-founder of AidSource, J., also gets in on the action here. Tales From the Hood might be closed, but J. is still with us:
It doesn’t matter if you or eventually will end up as a finance officer or an IT specialist or a marketer. It doesn’t matter if you immediately move back to DC and spend the rest of your career in life-saving InterAction meetings. It doesn’t matter if you just left a senior exec role in the for-profit sector in favor of ‘giving back’ in the NGO sector: If you’re in the aid world and you want to supervise other staff, exercise financial authority, fill some externally-facing representation role, or have final say in decisions over “this, not that”, “here, not there”, “these people, not those”, you have to have spent at least six months on the front lines (not in a nice regional office in Johannesburg or Singapore) interacting directly with the core business of the aid industry. You have to have put in six months dealing firsthand with both the chaos and uncertainly of the field, as well as the realities of decisions made over your head which run counter to the obvious from your point of view. Before you sit in a cubicle and direct others, you have to have proven yourself capable of doing the basic, unsexy grunt work of helping programs run.
Dominic Haslam of Sightsavers shares seven ideas, and it’s a good thing because our favorite comes in at his #4:
INGOs should treat development resources as belonging to the poor, not to themselves. If you can’t spend it properly and with quality outcomes (or you don’t know whether it’s working or not and aren’t trying to find out), either don’t raise it or give it to someone who can.
We’re just saying.
AidSource member extraordinaire, Zehra Rizvi takes it to the limit one more time (here) and hits us with her best shot right out of the gate with her first (and in our opinion best) piece of advice: Get HR right. In her own words:
If you don’t meet qualifications or do a bad job, you should be fired. We fret so much about firing people. But seriously, if you suck at your job, why should you be hired again? In line with this is of course, that organizations should be training their people better. Train people seriously. Look at what their real gaps are and put them in situations where they CAN succeed. Too often we just stick people in positions since the position is empty and it needs a body in there. That is SO irresponsible. I could go on about this forever and people are looking at certification in aid work now but I still think there are some real gaps there.
The biggest gap for me and the question I feel like no one wants to touch is: Not everyone is suitable to do this work. Spare that person and let them know that. Accountants make a lot of money but I’m not suitable to be one so therefore, I am not one. And if someone is doing aid work, support them as much as possible to succeed. We tend to be the least humanitarian to ourselves when doing this work.
Our mate over at WhyDev.org and AidSource group facipulator, Weh Yeoh, has a really good post on the WhyDev blog. Rather than try to copy/paste the entire thing, we’ll leave you with his first and best tidbit. Simply:
Let’s make aid and development truly about “beneficiaries”, once and for all.
Imagine!
And finally the fabulous Soledad Muniz weighs in here. It seems to us that her first and third recommendations (“Listen…” and “Learn…”, respectively) really resonate with each other in all the right ways.
I’m quite shocked to see the difference between the theory in participation and empowerment, the discourses written in the ivory towers, and the real thing happening in the ground. I’d love to see an aid & development sector that listen to those who know best: the main actors of their own development. Those to whom we serve really know their problems. They also most of the times know the solutions. So if a project would start by listening, then engage in a continuous conversation while implementing, to finish listening again (and not just measuring ROI like if we are producing candy), the world would be a much nicer place.
We could stand to see the world be a much nicer place, too.
And with that our call for posts on how to make aid better is a wrap. This doesn’t mean that you have to stop writing, though. If you want to share your thoughts on how to make aid better, go ahead and write your post. Add a comment to the thread below this post with the link to your post. We’ll tweet and FB the best ones!
Yes, we know we’ve been delinquent about blogging here. We’ll publish a roundup of your posts about how to make aid better within a few days. First, however, we’d like to announce another blog link-up. This time on the topic of Gender Based Violence (GBV) in the context of livelihoods.
We’re especially pleased to host this blogosphere-wide meeting of the minds along with the Women’s Refugee Commission.
Do the economic empowerment programmes you design take into account risk that you could possibly be causing the women participating?
The Women’s Refugee Commission is raising awareness on a piece of work we’ve done on the intersection of Gender Based Violence and Livelihoods. Do your livelihood programmes cause more harm than the intended outcome of ‘good’—i.e: empowerment and protection?
We decided to link up with AidSource to have a blogger series that featured not just our comms people and social media experts (though we LOVE them!), but a series that featured YOU. We’ve asked some bloggers, journalists, practitioners to blog about this issue for us by taking a look at the tools we’ve produced but we would love to hear your perspective on the issue. We asked them to look at our 2009 report: Peril or Protection: The Link between Livelihoods and Gender-based Violence in Displacement Settings which was followed by the guidance manual Preventing Gender-based Violence, Building Livelihoods, and an e-learning course providing in-depth instruction on how to make work safe.
We also had an hour long interactive webinar on the 25th of July 2012 on the issue with Dale Buscher of the WRC and Mendy Marsh of UNICEF which over 350 signed up for from all over the world:
Take a look. Take a listen… and then tell us.
What do YOU think?
Anyone can be a part of this blogger series. In addition to being linked both here on AidSpeak and inside AidSource, WRC will also link to the posts on their website.
Here’s how it all works:
1) Write an original post on your blog about any aspect on the intersection of GBV and livelihoods. Some potential ways to think about the issue are listed below. Publish your post.
[Extra credit: publish first on your AidSource profile blog (you're a member of AidSource, right?). Extra-extra credit: publish only on your AidSource blog! Extra extra extra credit: talk about the WRC materials! ]
2) Click the goofy lizard icon at the bottom of this post, follow a few prompts, and add the link to your post to the collection. Takes two minutes, max.
3) Read posts by others, comment, debate, get your AidSource member friends to write posts, tweet famous aid pundits to persuade them to post, etc. (Inside AidSource, you can get things rolling in the Livelihoods group or by adding a blog post.)
4) This collection closes on Oct 15th which is when our campaign ends on raising awareness on the issue. We will be having a photo contest as well so be sure to keep checking the WRC campaign page.
We welcome ALL perspectives on how to make #SafeLivelihoods for women. Some potential questions to think about…
- Would you change or add anything to the WRC safety mapping tool? (We really want to know…we love feedback and the tools are meant for YOU to use!)
- Have you used livelihoods as a tool for protection? How has it worked out?
- Have you seen livelihood programmes cause more harm than good and how would you do it differently now?
The WRC recommends that men be involved in GBV and livelihood programming as part of minimizing risk to women—what do you think the best way is to do this?
- A key gap noted in the WRC research was on M&E for protection outcomes for women in livelihoods programming. Do you have good practice to share or how would you go about ensuring this happens?
- What organizational capacity needs to be in place? WRC recommends multi year funding, the hiring of GBV specialists and the mentoring of local partners—what else do you think we need?
Anything else that comes into mind once you look at the research, guidance, webinar and course?
You can email Zehra (ZehraR@wrcommission.org, or inside AidSource using the built-in email function), Senior Programme Officer for Livelihoods at the Women’s Refugee Commission for more details.
We all love to whinge and moan about how bad things are in aid. The big INGOs are bureaucratic money pits. Little LNGOs have low capacity and aren’t accountable. Expats ride around disaster zones in white Landcruisers. Too many journalists. Too few journalists. Aid workers are cynical. Aid is an instrument of foreign policy for wealthy Western countries. Aid organizations do not put enough sit-reps up on their websites… and on and on.
But let’s say that you had the ability to make changes. Real, lasting changes.
Let’s imagine that you could make three changes to the state of things in the aid industry. Forget practicality and reality, press ‘pause’ on good participatory process for just a moment, and just imagine that you could make three decisions or call for three changes and those changes would be followed through, applied across the industry. “Enforced”, if you will.
What changes would you make?
Would you put industry-wide regulation in place? Would you localize all field operations? Would you revamp aid marketing? Is there a particular HRI-affiliate you’d ban from practice? Enforce total transparency? Get rid of the UN? Force expats to take local transport to coordination meetings? What?
so many ways to make aid better
This is your big chance to sound off with yourideas. Here’s how it works:
1) Write an original post on your blog about how you’d make aid better. Give us a list of three, specific decisions or changes you’d make to the whole aid industry (relief, development, the UN system, institutional donors… all of it). Make it as practical or as pie-in-the-sky as you like. Take it as seriously or be as satirical as you like. Publish your post.
[Extra credit: publish first on your AidSource profile blog (you're a member of AidSource, right?). Extra-extra credit: publish only on your AidSource blog!]
2) Click the goofy lizard icon, follow a few prompts, and add the link to your post to the collection. Takes two minutes, max.
3) Read posts by others, comment, debate, get your AidSource member friends to write posts, tweet famous aid pundits to persuade them to post, etc.
4) This collection closes on August 1, 2012. We’ll publish a round-up and comments of our own soon after August 1.
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.
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.
