All posts tagged aid

Purity

I’ll be vulnerable and confess up front that I really, really dislike professional sports.

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:

7 Comments
by J. on October 29, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Aid, Aid Industry, Aid Marketing
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Posted by J. on October 29, 2012

http://aidspeak.wordpress.com/2012/10/29/purity/

On Death and Disaster Response

Several weeks ago someone in my family passed away. It came very quickly out of the blue. The person who passed away lived in another state, and my family (wife, children) spent basically the entire summer there, dealing with it. I feel as if I’ve just come off of a three-month hardship deployment.

The whole experience caused me to reflect on what it all means for me as a professional disaster responder.

First, simply a renewed and deepened respect for disaster survivors, for those who make it through to the other end of a war or natural disaster of some kind, still alive, still picking up the pieces and having a go at rebuilding. As professed humanitarians I think we too often under appreciate what our beneficiaries are going through. In the midst of our own often very real personal drama, it is easy to forget or never know in the first place just how hard it is for those we are trying to help and how much strength and courage it takes for them to soldier on. Just saying.

Over the summer I was repeatedly hit in the face with the reality of just how debilitating the loss of a family member was and is. And perversely just how much work – actual work – it is to deal with it all: the forms that have to be filled in, the waits in lobbies or on the telephone, the lawyers who have to be dealt with, the documents that have to be filed, arrangements, clean-up, not to mention the real financial cost of it all… All in a context with every conceivable advantage: Rule of law, no rebel snipers or Apache helicopters shooting at us, a working banking system, access to modern communication, extended family nearby to offer support, the ability to take paid leave, a supportive community, clear land tenure and inheritance laws… The death of just one family member was almost paralyzing. I cannot imagine what it must be like to add to that the chaos of a war or disaster zone, and maybe the death of more than only one family member.

The time-critical nature of disaster response. I’m not talking so much about “children will die unless you text to this number immediately”, because in the majority of cases NGO disaster response does not stave off imminent death. I am saying that we need to not waste the time of disaster survivors. We need to not tie them up in meetings or lengthy mobilization; we need to move quickly from assessment to action. It’s hard to overstate this. Time is something that disaster survivors just don’t have a lot of, especially early on. They’re searching for family members, looking for food, trying to find information, burying their dead, salvaging and protecting what’s left of their property, trying to leave the area, watching over their children, or any number of other things.

While I can appreciate the “long-term development” and “disaster response” overlap or closely link together theoretically and programmatically, they are worlds apart operationally. The days and maybe weeks (depending on the magnitude) following a disaster are not the time bog down in the lengthy assessments, analyses or intensive processes which would normally be the standard in community development (do assessments and follow good process – just not lengthy ones). If we want to really help disaster survivors, we need to not waste their time. We need to get in there, make decisions quickly, and get the NFIs or the food aid or the cash transfers done.

The importance of community. It’s been said many times before – and it’s true – that the very first responders are neighbors. And in my case, for all of the help that we received from the government and from formal service providers of different kinds, by far the majority came from community that we were part of. Things like meals we didn’t have to cook, watching the kids, help schlepping furniture. This experience also got me to wondering whether, perhaps, we’re overly focused on the individual beneficiary, as opposed to larger units of analysis (extended families, neighborhood clusters), particularly in our thinking around some of the traditional early recovery interventions like cash for work, different kinds of livelihoods schemes, and even cash transfer. Something to ponder.

New (for me) thinking on recovery. Many have written about the importance of moving quickly from disaster response (some use the term “first phase”) into “recovery” or “early recovery.”  We need to prioritize services that help survivors deal with their own issues in the early phases of a response. It should be more common practice in the industry to pay funeral costs, to set up services which enable survivors to make contact with relatives in other places (phone, internet), or to help them in sorting out the innumerable legal and procedural things they have to go through.

The amount of time that my wife and I spent in lines and waiting rooms and on the phone simply dealing with legal and estate issue was astounding. And again, all in a context where we had every conceivable advantage and convenience. I think that too often we envision “recovery” in the calculated sense of GNP and GDP and infrastructure. They’re important, of course, but we too often overlook those things which help survivors recover as people, as families, as members of communities.

The futility of token gestures. I was amazed by the number people who made gestures of different kinds that, while perhaps well-intended enough, did nothing to help us and in a few cases actually made our lives more difficult. Those who knocked on the door demanding to see a dying person who was quite clearly in no condition to receive visitors, and becoming downright belligerent when they were not allowed in, made me think of self-entitled disaster tourism. Those who made donations to random charities in the name of the deceased or organized convoluted prayer vigils, all while we were under significant financial strain and could have really used help moving a piano, and then very obviously anticipated our gratitude made me think of all of the cause-marketed, slactivist #SWEDOW-dumping, KONY2012-esque awareness-raising distraction that passes for “getting involved.”  I’ve written before about how, at least in North America, we’re experts at making helping or caring others all about us. And I personally witnessed this phenomenon up close daily.

Stuff. It’s simply amazing how much angst and drama we attach to our stuff. The amount of random stuff – mismatched Tupperware from the mid-1970s, a cow-shaped salt shaker, mountains of clothing – that can be crammed into a small house is truly amazing. Even more amazing, the amount of effort we went to to deal with it. We sorted, priced, sat in the sun for hours during the “estate sale”, and haggled (was this ca. 1986 blender really worth $7, or could we let it go for $5?). I won’t admit to anything specific, but there may have been a local church charity collecting clothes for a sister congregation in Zimbabwe, and I may have allowed them to come take what they wanted. I’ve written before about this, too – how hard it is for many of us, for me to simply throw stuff away.

No words of wisdom on this last one. Just confession.

8 Comments
by J. on September 25, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Aid, Emergency Relief
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Posted by J. on September 25, 2012

http://aidspeak.wordpress.com/2012/09/25/on-death-and-disaster-response/

What does it mean when beneficiaries sell relief goods?

We see it in almost every relief response: those life-saving NFI kits, food parcels (I don’t know why we insist on calling them “food baskets”), tarpaulins, jerry-cans, shoes, or whatever else… that we’d gone to a lot of trouble to distribute directly to refugees or survivors end up for sale in local markets.

We usually just take this for granted as one of those things that always seems to happen. In some cases (Tsunamiland and Haiti come to mind) we used the appearance of relief materiel in local markets as a crude proxy to tell us, “okay, we’ve distributed enough of _______.” But other than this and sometimes post-distribution monitoring (which typically looks at the absorption/resale on one specific thing, as opposed to the overall issue of resale), as far as I know, the phenomenon of beneficiaries monetizing (selling) relief goods/food has never been looked at in any kind of systematic way.

Both Fiona Terry (Condemned to Repeat) and Linda Polman (Crisis Caravan) discuss the issue of relief supplies ending up in local markets generally as a bad thing. And fair enough, I suppose, given that they’re talking primarily about situations where those relief items including food are either diverted before ever being distributed or confiscated from beneficiaries soon after distribution. While on one hand a certain amount of relief stuff ending up in the host economy is probably inevitable, and I have yet to meet a relief op of any size that had zero per cent inventory slippage. However, on the other it is our responsibility as humanitarians to do all we can to ensure that the stuff we give out is, first, the right stuff, and second, that it ends up in the hands of those for whom it is intended.

Plumpy’nut for sale in a relief zone near you (photo by J.)

Even so I’d see this as rather different from the phenomenon of beneficiaries who receive distribution and then under no apparent duress sell it. What does it mean when we see this happening?  Obviously there are many variables to consider, but here is part of what I think we need to be thinking:

More than anything else, we have to get past the simplistic explanations. Monetization of relief goods by beneficiaries isn’t necessarily a negative, but we need to watch it specifically, watch for it, and understand what it means in each context. We have to dig deeper than just, “well, there’s obviously something they want more…” We have to look more closely at the actual behavior, at what they’re selling, and what they’re buying with the proceeds. We need to systematically monitor and track and analyse monetization of relief goods. For starters, we need to look at/for two primary patterns (there are probably more):

1) Selling to buy something similar. They’re selling clothes to buy different clothes, food to buy different food. If we see this it means that we’re basically on the right path in assessing real beneficiary needs, but we probably need to look carefully at what’s driving us to distribute what we’re distributing rather than what they’re trading for. If we distribute wheat flour which they immediately sell in order to buy pasta, for example, then we need to ask ourselves the obvious question: why not just distribute pasta? (And if the answer to that is something about institutional needs or donor priorities, then we should probably be asking ourselves some deeper questions about why we’re there in the first place…)

2) Selling to buy something totally different. They’re selling the Plumpy’nut and buying SIM cards, or they’re selling the medium sized pot from the family kit and buying bednets. This is actually the larger, deeper problem. It is a signal that something is seriously flawed in either the logic of our selected intervention(s) or in the quality of our delivery. If we see this it means that at best we’re running a high cost, low impact cash-transfer program (more or less what distribution of TOMS shoes seems to have become in Haiti).

While monetization of relief goods doesn’t have to be a bad thing in every context, we should not let it become the norm. If we find it becoming our operative assumption that beneficiaries will sell what we distribute, then we need to be asking ourselves some hard questions about why we’re doing what we’re doing. We need to be reviewing the quality of our assessments, rechecking the validity of our analyses, checking the logic of our intervention. We also looking carefully at livelihoods options, cash transfer or voucher distribution and justifying our decisions to keep distributing.

5 Comments
by J. on June 21, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Aid, Aid Industry, Aid Marketing, Best Practice, Emergency Relief
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Posted by J. on June 21, 2012

http://aidspeak.wordpress.com/2012/06/21/what-does-it-mean-when-beneficiaries-sell-relief-goods/

Eight people

Most well-known North American newscasts and news magazine shows took a short break earlier today (Sunday, 7 April) to discuss the breaking news that famous interview journalist and 60 Minutes correspondent Mike Wallace had just passed away. While of course it would be hard to make the case the Mr. Wallace was ‘the most important’ or ‘most influential’ television journalist of his time, there is no hiding from the fact that he was hugely important in the field of journalism and hugely influential in the development of mass media news coverage as we know it today. Over the past thirty years the name “Mike Wallace” has become a household one, known by people all over the world and from all walks of life.

In other news related news, some of you may have noticed the other day that Matt Lauer has decided to re-up a multi-year contract with the Today Show.  This announcement laid to rest the fears of many (including my wife), amidst speculation on and offline that Mr. Lauer might actually leave and be replaced by Ryan Seacrest (!). In some ways, like Mike Wallace, Matt Lauer is a household name in North America and – regardless of how you feel about him personally, about MSNBC, or about television news magazine journalism, you must admit – a force to be acknowledged, if not reckoned with, in the industry.

This all got me thinking: Who are the forces to be reckoned with in the Aid Industry? Who are the names we need to know? The general public tend to know us based on our marketing or based on (typically) mid- to low-level comms staffers who write press releases and do interviews on television following large disasters. But there’s no real light being shined on those who are wielding the power, making the decisions which affect industry trends, or generally moving the big pieces around. As well, the growing array of graduate degree programs in internal development and humanitarian action (see here, among other places) tend to focus on technical things, like how to do assessments or implement proper WASH, or general theories like ‘Do No Harm’ and issues like ‘involvement of the global south.’ But there is similarly little education about the nuts and bolts of how the Aid Industrial Complex actually works.

So, for the sake of public good, I’d like to start this discussion off with a list of eight Aid Industry names you need to know, whether you’re a crusty old aid worker, a bright-eyed hopeful, a professor, a donor, a watchdog or a pundit. Obviously these are the not the only people in the whole industry who matter. I’m not even saying they matter most. But if you’re involved in the aid world or follow it closely, these people (listed alphabetically) affect your lives:

Ban Ki-moon – Secretary General  of the United Nations. Like it or not, there is no organization which wields more influence in the world of international humanitarian aid and development than the United Nations, and this man sits at the helm.

Valerie Amos – Undersecretary-General and Emergency Relief Coordinator. It’s a long title. In common English aidspeak, Ms. Amos is head of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), and leader of the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC). If there’s a disaster with a response by the international community (NGOs, UN Agencies, high-school students on spring break…), Ms. Amos is involved. If you’ve attended (or blown off) a coordination meeting, Ms. Amos has affected your life.

Ertharin Cousin – Executive Director of the UN World Food Programme (WFP). Ms. Cousin replaces Josette Sheeran who held the position since 2007 (and inspired one of the more amusing satirical twitter feeds in the aid blogosphere). By most any measure, WFP is the largest humanitarian organization. Period. And Ms. Cousin is its executive director.

Jan Egeland – Human Rights Watch Deputy General Director and Europe Director. Also formerly the United Nationa Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs. Mr. Egeland has a truly illustrious history in high echelons of the aid industry, academic scholarships and prizes, and direct influential involvement in a number of high-level peace processes over the past two decades. If you have interest or involvement in a conflict or post-conflict setting, Jan Egeland has an influence on your world.

Rajiv Shah – Administrator (head) of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Prior to USAID, Dr. Shah held several Director-level positions during seven years spent at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. USAID is by some margin the largest single donor to international relief and development globally. Regardless of whether you see this as good or not good, USAID, to a very large extent determines the global development agenda and as effective CEO, Dr. Shah is front and center to that agenda-shaping conversation. Even if your organization receives no USAID funding whatsoever, Dr. Shah’s opinions and policies affect your work in the aid sector.

Barbara Stocking – Vice Chair of the Steering Committee for Humanitarian Response (SCHR)  and the Chief Executive of Oxfam GB. Few people, especially outside of the UN system, can match the level of influence on the humanitarian world currently exercised by Ms. Stocking.

Nicholas Stockton – Variously in senior positions in Oxfam, ODI, ALNAP, and HAP (I don’t even know where he works now… I’m sure someone will enlighten me in the comments thread), Mr. Stockton is not a well-known name outside of the aid industry. However, few people are more prolific in writing and speaking out, in ways and on issues that change the industry for the better. It is probably not an exaggeration to say that if you pay attention to current aid world events, thinking, and trends, Nicholas Stockton has influenced your thinking.

Peter Walker – Director of the Feinstein International Center; Rosenberg Professor of Nutrition and Human Security. Professor Walker is one of a very few full-time academics who comes from a practical, NGO, field-based background: Unlike the vast majority of academic aid pundits with snappy book titles and speaking tours, Prof. Walker knows from experience what it’s like to run a relief operation. He is also one of the industry’s leading thinkers and proponents of making aid a profession, and in that context is also a regular participant and contributor in forums like ALNAP, HAP, and ELHRA. To the extent that professionalizing the aid sector is an eventual given (expanded discussion here), Peter Walker is among the most influential individuals in shaping what that will all look like.

6 Comments
by J. on April 8, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Aid, Aid Industry
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Posted by J. on April 8, 2012

http://aidspeak.wordpress.com/2012/04/08/eight-people/

Beyond aid

Tom Paulson over at Humanosphere makes an interesting argument that philanthropy-charity-aid-humanity is on the threshold of something… new, something different. Read the article. It’s compelling, but it leaves us with an un-answered question: what’s coming?

Matthew Bishop and Michael Green attempt to tell us in their co-authored article in the Huffington Post. Read the article. While I positively loathe the term “philanthrocapitalism”, and absolutely do not agree that corporate dogooding will save the world or even necessarily change the world for the better (both are frequently claimed), I agree with many of the predictions by Bishop and Green. They hit the main points in my opinion and give us at least a partial glimpse of the future.

The word is out: “aid” accomplishes far less, and at far greater a cost than everyone thought. The arena is packed with slathering competitors of all stripes, each stridently proclaiming their own awesomeness by defining their own self-interest in terms of the supposed needs of the poor. Moreover, aid in public consciousness is essentially entertainment – a reality drama that anyone can be part of whether they send $20, spend two weeks building a church in Mexico, or start their own non-profit. The genuine good that aid does do is fleeting, contingent, fragile, often despite the distracted inefficiency of the organizations that implement it.

Fairly or unfairly (both, actually) aid workers and aid organizations no longer occupy the position of good grace we once did in public opinion. Our real expertise is being questioned (typically by those not competent to understand real answers when given), and we’re being called out in those areas where we’ve been faking it. For the moment the vast majority – by which I mean practically all – of the journalistic expose and ordinary citizen outrage about aid is misplaced. They’re missing the point for now, but they’ll connect the dots eventually.

Whether one sees it as a good or a bad thing, there is a general movement within the industry to professionalize the aid sector. Right now the discussion is basically bogging down over issues like whether it will be, say, Harvard or Tufts University who “owns” the right to accredit aid organizations and license aid workers to practice, or whether the aid industry will somehow continue to be self-accrediting and self-licensing but to a higher standard. But it’s all largely a discussion about how and within which parameters to professionalize the aid sector, and distinctly not a discussion about whether or not professionalizing is a good idea.

Putting it all together (and there are plenty more articles out there), it’s safe to assume, as Paulson suggests, that we are in time of great change. I don’t know exactly when the penny will drop, but the clock is winding down. I don’t mean to sound alarmist, but we are very quickly coming to the point where “business as usual” will simply no longer be an option for the aid industry.

So what does it mean?

I think it means at least three things:

1) We need fundamental innovations to the ways in which we think about and conceive aid.  So-called “innovations” in the aid sector have more or less mirrored innovations in various technical industries. The automotive industry, for example, has not experienced a fundamental innovation since it came into existence. Sure, we have much nicer cars now than when Henry Ford built the first Model A, but a car is still a car: it has three or four rubber wheels which roll on the ground, directly powered by some kind of on-board engine or motor. No one has innovated a powered personal transportation machine for mass production that significantly challenges this formula.

And aid is the same way.

We tweak and fiddle, but sixty years later we still haven’t really gotten that basically the menage a trois is not working. Aid effectiveness, any hope of sustainability, and even the slightest glimmer of possibility for true local ownership and empowerment all directly hinge on whether or not we successfully find a way through or past the menage a trois.

And if we don’t…

2) We have to face and deal with the distinct possibility that NGOs are or may soon be irrelevant. Paul Currion explains here. He writes,

“A child of their time, INGOs clearly filled a niche in the international system, particularly as a counter to a post-war foreign policy based on military-industrial interests. Yet INGOs were based on assumptions shared by that same establishment, and took on forms that were familiar with that establishment. The fundamental problem for INGOs – as for governments and corporations – is that the world is changing in ways which are increasingly difficult to manage for these old forms.

The worst case scenario for INGOs is that they find themselves filling in where government has failed, providing alternatives that are not alternatives at all but simply poor substitutes for the old system; or find themselves filling gaps where corporations have proved unable or unwilling to extend their reach, creating pseudo-markets which are largely unsustainable. Where these scenarios come to pass, INGOs will twist themselves into new shapes not in order to challenge the systems which lead to these governance and market failures, but to prop them up instead.”

3) We have to change prevailing assumptions about the directionality of aid. It is quite simply no longer the case (if it even ever was) that there is a modern, technologically advanced, “developed” world who bequeathed it’s benevolent assistance to the dark masses of the not-modern, low-tech, not-developed world. It is a reality that aid assistance can literally come from anywhere, to anywhere. Perhaps we in the United States will have the hardest time swallowing this pill, but I really do see the day coming when foreign aid workers, perhaps from countries that I’ve been deployed to in the past, will come to my country to help.

It is one thing to say academically that we all have something to learn from others. It’s another to let oneself be taught by those others.

As I think about it right now, maybe this more than anything other single thing – the notion that we’re all in this together and can all receive help from each other – has the potential to make aid better.

23 Comments
by J. on January 26, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Aid
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Posted by J. on January 26, 2012

http://aidspeak.wordpress.com/2012/01/26/beyond-aid/

Aid as entertainment

In Empire of Illusion: the end of literacy and the triumph of spectacle, Chris Hedges makes a convincing, cogent case that American culture has been bankrupted and reduced to six-grade level meaningless fluff, obsessed with celebrity culture, coddled by the simplistic imagery and messaging of the entertainment industry, and having neither the taste nor the stomach for the nuanced complexity of the real world.

I’m glossing over. Hedges excoriates.

I don’t see myself particularly as a critic of American culture. I consume. I watch prime-time television. But Hedges touches nerves with me. What he says rings true. And it especially rings true after my own years of trying unsuccessfully to put into words what disturbs me about the way the aid industry talks about what it does. It rings true as I try to describe the deep chasm the separates aid marketing from aid action.

On page 26 of Empire of Illusion, He writes:

“The veterans saw their wartime experience transformed into an illusion. It became part of the mythic narrative of heroism and patriotic glory sold to the public by the Pentagon’s public relations machine and Hollywood. The reality of war could not compete against the power of the illusion. The truth did not feed the fantasy of war as a ticket to glory, honor, and manhood. The truth did not promote collective self-exaltation. The illusion of war peddled in The Sands of Iwo Jima, like hundreds of other Hollywood war films, worked because it was what the public want to believe about themselves.”

He might as well be talking about aid. He is talking about aid. Myself as a veteran of the aid enterprise, I react viscerally to what Hedges says here. I know it’s true.

There is the real world of international humanitarian aid and development. Then there is the world that the public consumes. And here let us be very clear: “consumes” is precisely the right word.

Because aid is entertainment.

Regardless of what we might or might not do in “the field”, in the context of the modern culture that constitutes our donor public aid is entertainment. It is scripted, produced and sold to a consuming public who consumes it precisely because it is entertaining. They consume entertainment aid because the produced, marketed product delivers an illusion which corresponds to what they want to believe about themselves. Like a visit to Disney World, the interaction between a household charity and an individual donor is increasingly scripted and “produced” to maximize the donor’s “experience.” This is not only what I like to call “the cult of the donor.” Whether they’re receiving a letter of thanks (signed by the CEO), “buying a well” from the gift catalogue, or going on a guided tour of a project they’ve supported in a foreign country, ordinary citizens who support relief and development charities are increasingly purchasing a product, specifically and experience.

The perception of international aid and development in popular culture, too, is carefully scripted as entertainment, as prime-time reality drama that anyone can be part of. Like American Idol or The Fear Factor, “helping the poor” and “making a difference” are just new arenas where anyone can have a shot at 15 minutes of fame. You can collect T-shirts or shoes to send to Africa, you can start a #socent cause that goes viral, you can invent a new widget that will make poverty history, you can start a 501(c)3 with it’s own website and mission statement. In the entertainment world of aid, you, too can be remarkable. You can change the world! Or so the script goes.

Aid is entertainment.

When President Barak Obama wanted a humanitarian perspective on such matters as, say, how to prevent mass atrocities or reduce the amount of sexual violence against women, he didn’t go to the community of professional humanitarian organizations and practitioners. There are surely plenty of real aid workers with significant expertise and experience, not to mention organizations who implement US-grant funded programs to address these exact issues within easy walking distance of the White House. No – in order to get the inside scoop on what’s really going with violence against women in other countries, the leader of the Free World held a private audience with a couple of actors.

Aid is entertainment.

Hedges continues: “Faith in ourselves, in a world of make-believe, is more important than reality. Reality, in fact, is dismissed and shunned as an impediment to success, a form of negativity.”

The real world of international aid and development is not a perfect world. There’s a lot that goes wrong in there, a lot that needs to change and get better. But at least it’s real.

And as unpleasant as it might be we have to make the public understand the reality.

12 Comments
by aidsource on January 18, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Aid
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Posted by aidsource on January 18, 2012

http://aidspeak.wordpress.com/2012/01/18/aid-as-entertainment/

What do the poor deserve?

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.

11 Comments
by aidsource on January 12, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Aid, Aid Blogging
Tagged , , ,

Posted by aidsource on January 12, 2012

http://aidspeak.wordpress.com/2012/01/12/what-do-the-poor-deserve/

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