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.

Regarding Humanity

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.

From the About page:

Take the time to bookmark and regularly check in with Regarding Humanity.

You can follow Regarding Humanity on Twitter.

Key Excerpts:

“The programme encourages and enables original research and writing on issues and trends relating to humanitarian needs and response.”

“All research projects must be completed within six months and result in a 20 to 40-page paper and a possible presentation at an OCHA policy forum”

“Applicants should either have relevant academic credentials, such as an MA or a PhD, be currently enrolled in an advanced degree programme or have work experience relevant to their proposal.” 

You begin to get the sense that OCHA is not looking for a new T-shelter design, a soccer ball that generates electricity, or feminine hygiene products made from banana fibers…

life-saving innovation? or do-gooder boondoggle?

OCHA’s emphasis on the research-and-paper presentation portion of the grant is important, I think, and speaks to Ben Ramalingam’s concern that, “We are not helped by the fact that many innovation stories are in fact apocryphal – retrospectively woven to lend the star protagonists much more agency and awareness than in fact they possessed. This is true of even the best known innovation stories.“

This rings true anecdotally looking back on my own personal experience (and frequent frustration) over the past years, as a professional aid worker repeatedly called to weigh in on an awesome new product being touted as the thing that will revolutionize aid, but with no actual accompanying evidence.

But – and some will call me “elitist” – I’m still troubled by the fact that those doing the research and the innovating are a basically different group than those tasked with implementing humanitarian aid. I don’t know (m)any real aid workers who are either interested or at a station in life which enables them to consider taking six months off of life to implement a research grant.

I would love to hear from real aid workers what humanitarian sector innovations they think would be useful. Blog it and post the link in the collection here (click the blue lizard, follow the prompts); contribute to this conversation about mainstreaming new technology; or tweet to #huminnovation. Be serious or snarkastic. Bring evidence (not marketing). Argue your point.

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).

It seems to me, though, that The Humanitarian Principles are simply a proxy for something else. An attempt to make practical sense of a myriad of motivations ranging from tugs on the heartstrings of emotion, to CSR which truly struggles to be meaningfully more than benevolent appearing market penetration.

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.

#BOOM.

I’ve received a great deal of email inquiry lately from many of you, hoping for a career in the aid world, asking my advice about how to make that happen. And one thing that the majority of you seem to have in common is that you want to do “hands-on” work. You’ve made it very clear that you’re not so interested in sitting at a computer with spreadsheets or Word documents open in front of you, tasked with making sure that the cells are calculating properly or meeting a reporting deadline. By contrast, you are very interested in working “with the people” “on the front line” “in the field.”

what we all want to do

I get it. If you’re the kind of person who’d seriously consider a career in humanitarian aid or development, you’re probably not the kind of person who aspires to a 9-5 office job where the dress code is “business casual.” But as Alanna once wrote, “Most development work is office work”, and in another post, “we can go days without seeing anyone who is helped by our work.” She may have been writing about expats working on development programs, but let’s not quibble about terminology: these are absolutely true for relief workers, too. I flew in to Port-au-Prince in a 6-seat plane on day 10 after The Earthquake, but for most of the first month I was chained to a desk. And while of course there are some expat roles which inherently include more need for field time than others (being the M&E coordinator typically gets you out to the field more than being, say, the finance manager), you need to prepare yourself for this, too.

There are posts and posts and even books which could be written about why this is the way that it is. For now, I’ll briefly point out a few of the more obvious reasons:

More and more is being done by qualified locals. And rightly so. They’re the ones with language and cultural skills. It takes years and money for a foreigner to become competent just on the language and culture (to name only a few crucial skills).

More and more of the hands-on work is highly specialized. (As I read your email, I infer that when many of you use the term “hands-on”, what you really mean is “interact directly with beneficiaries.”) The work of interacting with beneficiaries is increasingly around specialized skills – things to do with people’s health or medical well-being, things around livelihoods or economics, very sensitive areas like human reproductive or safety and protection issues, to name just a few. Most NGOs now require that those who engage in this sort of interaction have degree backgrounds which qualify them to do it. We’re talking about people’s lives and livelihoods, here. It makes no sense and it’s unethical to put an inexperienced person on these tasks.

More and more of the hands-on work is casual labor. It’s somewhat paradoxical, given my point above, but it’s true. Much of the work that many, perhaps even you, envision doing when you envision humanitarian work is more or less menial labor. Building buildings, schlepping bags from the warehouse to the truck or from the truck to the distribution zone, cleaning up rubble or debris, distributing food or NFIs. It makes zero sense to send internationals to do this work, and not because the work is menial and it’s below internationals, but because there’s simply no need. Local people depend on this work for their livelihoods, too.

what we spend most of our time actually doing

I’ll say it again: Most aid, development and relief work is office work. Even in “the field”, the majority of the actual work that needs doing is around managing data and information and the flow of resources. This is the real “front line” “hands-on” work office work – just often in places where the offices aren’t as nice or where connectivity is poor or where it might be dangerous to walk outside. I won’t try to put a percentage on it, but as you consider a career in the aid world, you do need to understand that you will do a lot, if not mostly, if not almost exclusively office work. And while humanitarian aid and development can for many be an intensely rewarding career, I very strongly recommend that you adjust your expectations according to this reality.

I particularly dislike the American tradition“Caroling.”

 * * *

Several months ago I happened to spend some time bouncing daily between Israel and the West Bank for work. One day, driving through Jerusalem, out the window of the white Land Cruiser I spotted a sign indicating the way to “Rachel’s Tomb.” (Note: I want to see Rahab or Jezebel’s tombs. Apparently they’re not marked). The person hosting my visit (Palestinian) made a comment about how the location of Rachel’s tomb in Jerusalem could possibly have been political. Who knew? But apparently, Rachel’s tomb is really supposed to be in Bethlehem and since The Wall, Bethlehem is forcibly and obviously part of the West Bank. And it would never do to have Rachel, the daughter-in-law of Abraham, father of the Jewish people, buried not in Israel.

*

A day or two ago, in an American shopping mall I happened past a troupe of Christmas Carolers singing “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” It’s an expected site this time of year, complete with rosy cheeks and bad sweaters and some members forgetting the words.

It brought back my visit to the real Bethlehem, replete with hordes pilgrims at the Church of the Nativity, many weeping openly, some singing. But beyond the Church of the Nativity itself (which is a complete tourist trap), much of Bethlehem is bullet-ridden, non-descript and depressing. A far cry from what Robert Brooks must have been thinking when he wrote the famous song.

There is war and it is ongoing, and as we all know, Bethlehem is hardly the worst of it.

*

Today one of the headlines on CNN was about how an Israeli archaeologist has discovered evidence that the Bethlehem in the West Bank is probably not the “real” Bethlehem where Jesus was supposedly born. (I can’t seem to find the CNN link, so here’s the KNN link.) The real one, according to some, is in Galilee, firmly in Israel – not the West Bank. Go figure.

My friend must have been on to something.

And all those pilgrims went through all those checkpoints for nothing.

*

Over the past few months we’ve all be reminded of how precarious peace is in the so-called “Holy Land” (I believe that there are important historical sites there; not sure I believe the land itself is so holy). Many much smarter than me have long ago already commented on and attempted to analyze the irony of the fact that the home turf of the three major monotheistic religions is some of the most blood-soaked ground anywhere on the planet. A fact made doubly ironic by the vehemence with which all three claim to be religions of peace.

I really don’t care all that much where Jesus was born. I don’t care whether it was Bethlehem in the West Bank or Bethlehem of Galilee or some other, as yet undiscovered, village or town also called “Bethlehem.”

I don’t have any specific antipathy towards the song “O Little Town of Bethlehem” – no more than, say, “Blue Christmas” or “Here Comes Santa Claus.” But let’s remember the true meaning of “Bethlehem.” It’s not a song. It’s a place with people in it. People who, like far too many like them the world over, live with fear and for whom the threat of war looms large, daily.

Bethlehem, 2012

I confess that my initial reaction was to skim it quickly and then give it a quick yawn followed by an eye-roll. Just one more in an already crowded queue of aid outsiders getting flushed and hot, convinced that aid is failing because NGO expats in Phnom Penh go to parties. On second read, though, my impressions began to change. It’s a bit disconcerting to myself be under the lens of research scrutiny – normally I’m the one out in the field asking villagers those prodding, personal questions. But as uncomfortable-squirm-inducing as the article might be, I think that Ms. Fechter has hit key points. Using some of those key points as jumping off places, I’d like to invite discussion on the following:

At what point do our salaries matter? Or our lifestyles in the field? Ms. Fechter does a great job of characterizing the community-based intern or volunteer who lives in a village somewhere and then comes to the capital city and gets all moral outraged by the opulent lifestyle of the expats there. But she goes on to question the links assumed by many between aid worker sacrifice -> altruism -> effectiveness. I question it, too. To me, the argument which says that you have to be as much like the beneficiaries as possible before you can be effective is like saying that oncologists have to be cancer patients themselves in order to be good at their jobs. We’ll never be like them.Yet at the same time, I can’t help but believe that there are or ought to be limits. Over and above the abject cluelessness of the main character, shows like The Philanthropist grate precisely because the whole premise of some ridiculously rich dude getting all kinds of kudos for taking a few days off of real life now and again to swoop in and save some poor people feels vaguely hypocritical. After overhead, CEO and executive salaries are among the most hotly debated issues on charity rating websites.

So I put it to you, aid workers, students, aid outsiders alike: where should the limits be? Should aid work equal a life of deprivation as sacrifice as a matter of principle? If so, what principle, exactly? What is an appropriate salary for aid workers? Or if you can’t say a salary number, what lifestyle indicators would you point to as within or beyond the lines? Why those exactly? Be concrete.

What about local aid workers? What limits and principles apply there? I think it’s really important in this debate to consider the implications for our local colleagues. Ms. Fechter, along with a great many others (including that badly written and annoying poem by Ross Coggins), points out that by its very nature the aid industry confers on expats a level of social status they’d probably never be eligible for otherwise. Yes, yes – we travel to exotic places, have insight and perspective that our ordinary neighbors don’t, have deep wrenching experiences interacting with the bottom billion, and yet still find the time to wax melodramatic into our imported beer at the expat pub. That’s all as may be, and it may feel monumentally unfair that we all get to go home, eventually, and retire into our home country equivalent of genteel poverty. But let’s be clear: appearances aside, our supposed wealth and advantage rarely translates into any kind of real power or security for us in our world. I don’t know of any aid workers who have gone on to be, say, politicians at the Federal Government level (in the USA). Or who have gone on to run Fortune 500 companies. Heck, I can hardly think offhand of more than a handful of professional aid workers who have even gone on to hold senior leadership positions in INGOs – those slots are overwhelmingly filled with for-profit sector transplants.

Yet when it comes to hiring and compensating and retaining local staff, we very often intentionally or unintentionally create an elite class in the local context whose members absolutely and very tangibly benefit in dramatic disproportion to what they might using their skills and talents outside of the NGO world. It is common for by far the nicest house in the entire village to be the house of the INGO project coordinator. It is common for the mid-level national NGO manager or technician to use her or his contacts gained on the job to leverage a successful bid for prestigious roles in the provincial or national government. It is common for our local staff to retire early, after that working occasionally as consultants to the UN or World Bank, living a life of comfort and influence in their context far above what the expats who hired them could ever hope for in theirs. And I do not for one second begrudge our local colleagues their success – the vast majority of those I work with, if I am to be the judge, are utterly deserving. But – if we’re to make statements about the relationship between altruism and sacrifice and effectiveness of international aid workers, then we have to at some point contemplate what that all means for our colleagues who are from there.

So what do you think? Should exactly the same principles apply to expats/internationals as to locals? Is it a matter of simple fairness? Or should there be differences? What differences? Why?

Is it time to foster a collective humanitarian consciousness? Fechter argues that pretty much all discussion of development ethics to-date focuses on beneficiaries, ‘the other’, and as a result aid workers (whether local or foreign) become largely invisible. She’s right, of course: the tendency of our industry is to forefront those the work is meant to serve and their stories. And rightly so. We need to know the history. The movement to make things this way came out legitimate concerns a few decades ago that the predominant aid narrative was about aid workers and their heroic efforts. We’re right to focus discussion on the poor we claim to serve.

Yet, as I read and re-read ‘Living Well’ while ‘Doing Good’, I was repeatedly struck with the feeling that there’s really nothing in the aid world comparable to those professional fields we’re so frequently compared to. She compares our profession to nursing – a field which she says has a highly developed body of discussion around what nurses are and should be in their personal lives (my paraphrase), going on to suggest that maybe the aid world needs the same. Maybe it does. But I think that before that can really happen we need a level of collective humanitarian consciousness that we don’t currently have. Put firefighters or police officers or even physicians from around the world into the same room and before long you see a very distinct collective consciousness begin to emerge. Soldiers are famous for it. Despite differences in personal history or culture, there is an immediate bond forged by common experience and global sense of community.

I googled ‘collective humanitarian consciousness’ and this image came up… *random*

I think we need the same thing in the aid world. Right now we coalesce around individual NGO brands and to a much lesser extent, technical sectors. I think, though, that if we want to make aid better, not just technically, but for us all as individual aid worker people we need to begin thinking of ourselves collectively, consciously. I’m not at all suggesting that we become less loyal to our employers or that we’ll somehow automatically agree on everything that we used to argue about. Be I do feel strongly that before we can really have fruitful conversations internally about how we ought to live – not how to do good aid work, but how to be “good”, balanced, ethical, effective aid workers – we do have to have that collective humanitarian consciousness. (Fostering that collective humanitarian consciousness was part of the intent of AidSource, by the way.)

What do you think? Is a collective humanitarian consciousness something we need? Why? How do we achieve it? Or is the whole idea a load of rubbish? 

=====

I’d love to hear your perspectives on any of the questions above in the comments thread below this post. Alternatively, consider adding to the discussion in the Work & Life section of AidSource here and here.

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.

“The Best in #SWEDOW” – the first Best in #SWEDOW competition.

“The Best in #SWEDOW 2012″ – the winners of the most recent #SWEDOW competition.

*

The details of this year’s competition:

• 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*)

Happy #SWEDOW hunting!

I won’t belabor the point, except to say that I see as plain immoral the amount of money being paid to someone for something no more meaningful than being really good a tossing a ball through a basket while people in the same city go hungry and queue up to apply for minimum wage jobs.

Or the amount of money being paid to someone for riding a bicycle really well.

It was pretty hard to miss the drama around Lance Armstrong’s fall from public grace last week. In the end it was precipitous and sweeping. Stripped of past trophies, all but forced to resign from a cancer charity that he started, loss of title. Even the very real possibility that he’ll have to pay back actual cash earned through winnings and endorsements. Not to mention an internet full of emotive angst and moral outrage among faithful fans who expected better of him.

I find very curious the lengths to which particularly American audiences will go to insist on “purity” in professional sports. If find it curious that this supposed purity matters in the context of an industry so full of insider backstabbing, egoism, scandal, abuses of all kinds and just plain drama. But that notion of purity is important.

We allow our impression of an athlete or a sport or a team to be tainted by irrelevant things, while at the same time constructing for ourselves illogical narratives which reinforce the messaging coming out of sports industry PR machines. We believe in this notion of purity in professional sport in the face of repeated evidence to the contrary quite simply because we want it to be true. We need to cling to the belief professional baseball or hockey remains pure – that athletes really do what they do without performance enhancing substances.

For rock ‘n’ roll stars, drug use is de rigueur. Maybe if Lance had been a guitarist instead of a cyclist…

he should have just been a rock star

I think there’s a wake up call in here for humanitarian NGOs. We need to see this as a wake-up call about what happens when public perception goes up in flames

There is no point in denying that there are competing narratives about what is “real” in the world of international relief and development and philanthropy. Without banging on about which parts of which narratives I personally think are really real, I’ll simply say that we will someday come to the point beyond which it will be no longer possible to separate those competing narratives. There will come a time when our constituents will collectively demand an explanation for why we said one thing and did something else. And if we’re to really learn the lesson of Lance Armstrong, we need to understand that it will be very public and very much into the weeds of detail. We’ve seen what happens when someone the public thought was “pure” turns out not to be.

And in the end it will not matter whether so-called “purity” makes any sense in the real world or not. In the end we’ll be stripped of our awards and our credentials, forced to pay back donors, not because we didn’t do good work, not because we can’t show impact. Remember, Lance won a lot of races; the drugs very clearly worked for him. No, this will all happen because we allowed and in some cases enabled people to create a narrative about who we are and what we do that does not align with reality.

Possibly related:

• Aid as entertainment
• Beneficiaries versus aid workers

* * *

One of the most trendy critiques of the Humanitarian Aid Industry right now coming from cynical insiders and angry self-appointed pundits alike is that aid is not efficient.

There really is no getting around the fact that there is an awful lot that looks really, really damning to industry outsiders and even industry insiders when it comes to the subject of aid efficiency. Those gaggles of expatriate aid workers dominating coordination meetings, for example. Or the fleets of white SUVs in relief zones. Or cushy-looking HQs in cities like Washington D.C., Ottawa, and Geneva. It’s easy to compare the financial value of a relief item with the cost of getting that relief item into the hands of a disaster survivor and draw the conclusion that international relief and development are very expensive, ergo, inefficient.

As a long-term industry insider I can confirm many of the worst fears of many of the critics. There are aspects of the aid industry that make me cringe, and there are secrets I hope no journalist ever discovers. Aid industry beliefs and traditions around efficiency are particularly among those things that I personally believe need to change sooner rather than later.

This confession having been made, I think that it is very important to challenge some of the prevailing opinions about what constitutes efficiency (or inefficiency) in a non-profit relief and/or development context, and by extension the remedies to those supposed and sometimes real instances of inefficiency. One of the most common suggestions for making aid “better” is to make it all more like a for-profit sector business. And sure enough, I along with many others have said that of course there are aspects of the for-profit world that the humanitarian world would do well to emulate.

However, I feel strongly that we need to challenge the prevailing for-profit-sector-centric notion that simply reducing cost will make aid more efficient. I think it is important that we resist being pulled down the path of thinking, for example, that if we could only cut back the budget by X per cent, without a corresponding reduction in outputs and outcome we’d be more efficient. Being good stewards with the donor resources entrusted to us as humanitarians does not necessarily mean doing everything for the lowest possible cost up front.

Proof that aid is inefficient? Or just a way for aid workers to get to work? [photo by author]

1) Re-educate the public about overhead. I am by no means the first person to say this, nor is this the first time that I am saying it. But as long as charity rating websites, institutional donors, and the general public look at calculated overhead as an indication of organizational efficiency, we are and will remain in deep trouble. We’ve spent the past thirty years mis-educating the public (and sometimes ourselves, too) to believe that this is all inexpensive. But now we must un-mis-educate them. As long as individual donors are allowed to believe via NGO marketing that NGO X is efficient and reliable because 95 cents of their donated dollar goes directly to beneficiaries we will never be able to have a rational conversation externally about efficiency.

2) Focus on achieving critical mass, rather than minimum cost. The difference here may be subtle at times, but as we develop strategies, program plans, and budgets our focus should be on what it takes to get the job done and done properly. This, rather than the prevailing practice of trying to do as much as possible for the smallest amount possible. Even our for-profit colleagues comprehend that the least expensive product is typically not the best quality product. In the humanitarian relief and development world, program quality, including durable results (sometimes called “sustainability”) are not or should not be in any way negotiable. Invest in what you really need – people, equipment, maybe even white Landcruisers – to get it done and get it done right. There are no shortcuts. Aid costs what it costs. Get this part right and we’ll have fewer expensive fiascoes down the road. Ergo, efficiency.

3) Organizational discipline in maintaining mission focus. Over the course of my own career, those financial decisions made by my NGO employers which have left me the most disenchanted were those made to expend resources towards things that didn’t really help us achieve the organizations’ mission. I’m not talking about the kind of gross misuse of donor resources that (along with a healthy dose of incompetence) brought us all “Three Cups of Tea-gate.” I’m talking about far more mundane, sometimes difficult to recognize in the moment distractions that cost us. Those in-house pet projects no one quite understands the purpose of, but that get funded every year; those boondoggle junkets to take “major donors” to visit field initiatives you already know they’ll never ever fund; truly worthwhile meetings held at expensive resorts in Bali when they could be held just as easily and far more cheaply in Medan; those scrambles to do one-off projects in places where your employer has no prior presence in a sector your employer has no institutional expertise in. As an industry we spend a lot of time and money on activities that are not bad per se, but that do not really correspond to our core purpose(s) or clearly advance our cause(s). Simply put, we struggle to become and stay focused.

Will these three things save aid and make it immune to criticisms that “aid is not efficient”? No. And of course we are all, as professional humanitarians, behooved to use the resources with which we’re entrusted in a manner that maximizes the benefit to those we try to serve. Where accusations of inefficiency are rightly earned, it is our responsibility to address them and perhaps make changes. However, as we move into a time when the humanitarian world is increasingly under the scrutiny of a general public whose tendency is to impose for-profit sector “business case” thinking around efficiency on us, it is important to be able to respond coherently to that.

Despite some superficial appearances, the non-profit and for-profit worlds have some fundamental differences. It is incumbent on us as humanitarians to know what efficiency means for us and to be able to articulate that to industry outsiders.

But I think it’s time as well to recognize that standards and certification and regulation can only take us so far. They’re necessary, of course, but in focusing on trying to build a better system we’re overlooking the importance of individuals within that system.

I wonder if it’s time to adopt a version of the Hippocratic Oath for humanitarians.

HIPPOCRATIC OATH: A Humanitarian Version

I swear to fulfill, to the best of my ability and judgment, this covenant:

I will respect the hard-won scientific gains and lessons learned of those relief and development workers in whose steps I walk, and gladly share such knowledge as is mine with those who are to follow.

I will apply, for the benefit of those affected by conflict, disaster and extreme poverty, all measures [that] are required, avoiding those twin traps of overtreatment – aid programmes for their own sakes – and humanitarian nihilism.

I will remember that there is art to aid and development as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding are often as important relief and development activities themselves.

I will not be ashamed to say “I know not,” nor will I fail to call in my colleagues when the skills of another are needed in order to properly implement an intervention.

I will respect the privacy of beneficiaries and aid recipients, for their problems are not disclosed to me that the world may know. Most especially must I tread with care in matters of life and death. If it is given me to save a life or to improve well-being, all thanks. But it may also be within my power to affect – perhaps adversely – the livelihoods and well-being of individuals, of families, perhaps of entire communities; this awesome responsibility must be faced with great humbleness and awareness of my own frailty. Above all, I must not play at God.

I will remember that I do not deal with abstract numbers, statistics, or concepts, but human beings suffering as the result of disaster, conflict, or poverty. My responsibility includes understanding context, culture, and root causes if I am to claim the title and status of “humanitarian.” This holds regardless of whether I am based in a “field” context and interact directly with beneficiaries, or based far from the “field” and serve in a support or administrative role, and regardless of whether I am expatriate or national staff.

I will implement programs to strengthen resilience and build local capacity whenever I can, for resilient communities are better able to withstand the effects of disaster, conflict and economic stress.

I will remember that I remain a member of society, with special obligations to all my fellow human beings, those sound of mind and body as well as the infirm.

If I do not violate this oath, may I enjoy life and art, respected while I live and remembered with affection thereafter. May I always act so as to preserve the finest traditions of my calling and may I long experience the joy of responding appropriately and adequately to those who seek my help.

[Adapted from Hippocratic Oath: A modern version. The one written in 1964 by Louis Lasagna, Academic Dean of the School of Medicine at Tufts University.  I’ve attempted to retain as much of the original language as possible, although obviously some portions needed revising.]

I don’t naively believe that taking an oath will immediately resolve the problems of the aid world or make every mercenary pseudo-humanitarian out there suddenly all ethical and everything. We certainly have enough examples of malpractice and abuse in the field that gave us the Hippocratic Oath in the first place. But in the scramble to make aid more professional, to innovate more, do more, to fix a flagging system or build a fail-safe system (depending on your perspective), I’ll say again that we have left out an important element. Maybe the most important element:

Simply a moment of personal commitment for everyone who claims or aspires to the title of humanitarian.

Take that moment now. Put yourself under oath.