Tag Archives: Perceptions

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity, Politics

Battle of the Models

5 Comments

Can we all agree that my last post set forth definitive proof of the fundamental superiority of the aid industry’s business model?  Eat your heart out $600-per-share Apple!  Aid NGOs will be around long after the I-Phone’s fashion accessory status pulls a Milli Vanilli.  My mortgage is safe.

Or is it?  Like cassette tapes being vanquished by CDs, and CDs by MP3 format, even the most perfect business model can be destroyed by a paradigm shift, such as by the appearance of a new model.

There are plenty of threats to the aid model.  But we will survive our collective Whites in Shining Armour tendencies.  We will survive the continued politicization of aid.   We will survive the Somali Spring’s challenges to the humanitarian cartel.   We will survive because these problems don’t touch the business model.  The givers will still give.  What we will not survive is this ancient Chinese proverb:  “Forget the favours you have given; remember those received.”

When I first heard a different version of it – “If you help somebody, they should never forget; but if you help somebody, you should never remember” – Professor Li Anshan (a Chinese academic) was explaining the difference between charity and the transactional (mutual interest) aid proffered by China.  We humanitarians scoff at the idea of beneficiaries paying for charity.  Professor Li scoffs (though, I must say, much more politely) at the idea of philanthropy-based aid.  He writes: “China has never used the term ‘donor-recipient’ (a philanthropic idea) to describe China-African relations, using “partner” instead. China believes that assistance is not unilateral, but mutual.”

Back to favours.  Take your Uncle Ken, who goes on and on about the time he gave you his prize bass fishing lure because you forgot your tackle box.  Twenty years ago.  That’s the first thing about favours:  your Uncle Ken will never shut up.  Even after he passes away, his kids will remind you of the time he gave you that lure.  Favours are open-ended, indestructible, immortal.

Favours lesson #2:  the giving of the favour is worth far more than the thing itself.  What would a bass lure cost?  Five bucks?  If you’d paid Uncle Ken a fiver, a year later he’d never even remember the transaction.   That’s because the favour isn’t about the thing, it’s about the thing at a given time.  How much would you pay for a glass of water if you’re stuck in the desert?  So it might cost $1M to build a hospital in Sierra Leone, but that’s $1M Salone doesn’t have.  Enter, stage right, the aid industry, Johnny on the spot with a favour.  Voilà.  The hospital Salone will be hearing about for the next twenty years.

And then there is the Trojan horse effect of favours, of charity, because the thing you get is never yours.  If Apple sells you an I-Phone, Stephen Jobs (RIP!) couldn’t care less if you download porn with it.  Not so with charity – just try converting that hospital into a police post, or a pub.  Daily Mail: “Ungrateful government turns British Taxpayer millions into a brothel.”  Ditto for those tirades against poor people who use welfare payments to drink beer, bet on horses or eat Big Macs.  Favours:  they never go away and you never own them.  What does that sound like?  Power.

The thrust of Professor Li’s critique places Western aid at the center of philanthropic elitism.  I’d say it goes further: philanthropic subjugation.  Debt and power:  we know aid comes with strings attached.  But because it’s charity, because it’s a favour, this debt comes concealed in the form of a vague expectation, to be exploited in perpetuity.  As the proverb says:  Sierra Leone should never forget. That’s a pretty damned good return on investment. Better even than usury.  Like usury, though, it only works if the poor don’t have a choice.  Transactional aid constitutes a second option.

Building a hospital in Guinea in return for access for Chinese state capitalists to bauxite mines is an exchange.  It presents poor/powerless governments with the opportunity to “pay” for services rendered.  The debt is fixed in time and kind; the hospital is Guinea’s to use as Guinea sees fit.  There is no principle of humanity or compassion through which the giver then morphs into the self-anointed judge, loudly denouncing the human rights violations or the fragility of the government while reminding us all of the favours that have been delivered.

Isn’t it strange how the span of the favour receiver seems to become the business of the favour giver, as if privacy itself had been overcome.  Rather impudently, I once told a Sudanese official that if they didn’t like noisy NGOs cranking on about “sovereign” matters, they only had to make good on their sovereign responsibility to ensure their own people weren’t starving to death or being attacked.  With favour-givers like that, who needs enemies?

Let’s not romanticize China’s approach.  We all understand the underlying imbalance of the bargaining power.  The beauty of the Chinese model, however, isn’t in the equality of the practical arrangements.  The beauty of the model is in the origins of the proverb:  human dignity.

The charity model, the creation of a scheme of favours, installs human hierarchy:  giver/receiver, success/failure, superior/inferior, saviour/beggar, hero/victim, upright/genuflected.  Uncle Ken didn’t just do me a favour, he engaged in philanthropic subjugation. Next time I need a lure, I’ll buy one from Uncle Wu.

Critique of Aid

Once Again, Wishing I Were George Clooney

3 Comments

George Clooney just got himself arrested, protesting in front of the Sudanese embassy.  I can’t quite put my finger on it, was it his radiant smile as the cop ushered him along, but somehow his arrest didn’t quite remind me of that archetypal image, repeated over and over again in places like 1960s Mississippi, 1980s South Africa, or the Arab streets of last year, of protesters being hauled off to the certainty of beating, torture, rape or disappearance.  I suspect George will not have his face rearranged by interrogators.  I suspect our tax dollars will not pay for his water-boarding.

With a world still excited over the Invisible Children video phenomenon, the last thing the Sudanese government wanted was to become famous like Kony.  They should have paid the WDC police not to arrest the most handsome gray-bearded man on the planet.  And even if there are plenty of similarities between Kony 2012 and the oversimplification of the Save Darfur Campaign, I’m not going to complain much about the useful fact of celebrity catastrophe tourism.  Let’s give Clooney some credit, because like Angelina Jolie, Sean Penn and some others, he has consistently made an effort, not just showed up at a few cocktail parties.

Celebrity altruism is at times comical, at times pitiful, and now firmly established as part of the humanitarian landscape.  As Madonna’s publicist explained to Mother Jones:  “She’s focusing on Malawi. South Africa is Oprah’s territory.”  See MJ’s clickable map of celebrity African do-gooding.     I guess I’m used to the idea of NGOs shamelessly exploiting celebrities, trading souls for search hits.    Celebrityism is just one more stunt, a questionable and yet undoubtedly profitable response to a world where American Idol losers are more famous than Omar Bashir or Joseph Kony or the entire nation of Chad. 

Should we question one children’s agency’s lucrative use of David Beckham, by all accounts a devoted father and footballer, simply because he’s pretty much a poster child for the sort of rampant materialism that’s consuming childhood itself, not to mention the idea of spending more money on a pair of underpants than 2.7 billion people earn in a week? Yes, of course we should, but it’s not such a big deal.

The more interesting story is the celebrifrication of the humanitarian crisis itself.  It is no longer just a question of celebrities shining the light of attention on a particular cause; it has become the interpretation or “reality” of that cause.  We increasingly perceive the disaster itself, be it the suffering of Somali refugees or the war in Nuba, through the eyes of movie stars, as opposed to the eyes of academic experts, humanitarians, or journalists.  Our views still exist, but who sees them?  Now, the story is the celebrity visit itself, not the disaster, and the suffering of others reaches us through the lens of their experience.  Here’s Sex in the City’s Kristin Davis fresh off the plane from Dadaab camp in Ethiopia. 

This is only partly sour grapes.  We should give some celebrities credit, for rolling up their sleeves and getting far deeper into the issues than many NGO CEOs like myself, who drop into major mediatized crises and demonstrate little timidity around cameras and starving babies. 

So as the celebrity experience of the suffering, catastrophe and crisis overshadows our own, who do we in the disaster cartel resemble?  Why, it’s the Somali, Congolese, or Sudanese people themselves, who we academic experts, humanitarians and journalists have spent decades rendering almost completely invisible.  Hooray for justice.

P.S. If you want to see a gray-bearded humanitarian take a stab at acting, click here.

Critique of Aid, Politics

The Rest of the Story

Leave a comment

When I get nostalgic for folksy American journalism, I think of Paul Harvey’s “The Rest of the Story” broadcasts.  In his rather unique delivery, Harvey would tell some story, hiding until the end the identity of its protagonist.  That was the surprise that transformed the rest.  Like a story about a kid who was so scared of heights, he was afraid to get on a playground swing.  The poor lad would have been mercilessly teased and abused a child, crying to his mama on a daily basis.  And then (after the commercial break!) Harvey would reveal that child to have grown up to become somebody like Orville Wright or Yuri Gagarin.

Now Saturday’s Observer brings us similar broadcast.  A fading superpower rides the high and mighty humanitarian horse of generosity, compassion and moral imperative into crisis. The good nation sends heavyweight envoys to demonstrate commitment.  They make thoughtful, pained pronouncements on the terrible suffering of the innocents.  The good nation scolds other actors into stepping up the response.   The good nation even organizes a conference to help stabilize the country, because it’s a very messy place.  Then, lo and behold, it turns out there is oil to be found underneath that mess; a failed state whose failure doesn’t bode well for extraction industries based in the good nation.  The countries?  The UK and Somalia.  “And now you know the rest of the story.  Paul Harvey.  Good day.”

I doubt very much that The Rest of the Story broadcasts would have lasted over thirty years if they contained such an anti-climactic finish as that one.  Sorry, you probably saw in coming.  And I have no doubt there will never be a self-contained “rest” of the story for Somalia. 

Appearing on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show, Andrew Mitchell, the UK’s International Development Secretary, strenuous denied the accusation, awarding the Observer’s journalist “the prize for the most cynical piece of journalism this century”. 

Unfortunately, sexy accusastions resonate a lot better than predictable denials.  (Odd, isn’t it, that the one thing retractions don’t have is traction?). Somalis will be repeating for two generations that we humanitarians were sent to their country because of the oil. Here’s Bashir Goth’s take on it:  “No politician and especially a British for that matter flaunt naked objectives. They have to be sugar coated with diplomacy and altruism.”  So billions of dollars of work is reduced to the colorful exterior of an M&M.

Apologies for repeating the message of the previous blog.  But humanitarian don’t need more nails in the coffin of our perceived integrity.  As if the good doctor were not enough.  A government like the UK working to advance its military, economic and security interests is, well, what a government like the UK is supposed to do.  

What is maybe more interesting is the rest of the story.  We humanitarians are often in search of our own oil, in search of the donations we are able to extract from our (marketing claims of an effective) presence in the Horn crisis.  Humanitarianism is increasingly constructed on this basis of extraction and exploitation.  Using misery to mine gold.  That doesn’t mean it fails to deliver good.  Ditto for the UK government in Somalia.  But we need to make sure Somalis like Goth aren’t writing the same thing about us.

Critique of Aid

The Good Doctor Calls

3 Comments

“Dr. Shakeel Afridi is the unsung hero of the war on terror.”  So sings U.S. Congressional Representative Dana Rohrabacher in nominating Afridi for the Congressional Gold Medal.  (You can read his full speech here).   Humanitarians are well familiar with Dr. Afridi’s exploits, though perhaps somewhat less likely to heap praise:  Afridi is and will continue to be the unsung cause of a lot of deaths.

 Who is Afridi?  He’s the medical doctor who engineered a fake vaccination campaign in a certain part of Pakistan, allowing him to enter the house of Planet Earth’s #1 most wanted bearded man.  It was the good doctor’s intelligence that supported the U.S. commando raid that killed Osama bin Laden.  In essence, Afridi did for the widely held (and wildly exaggerated) belief that we humanitarians are spies or soldiers what Monica Lewinsky did for rumors of Bill Clinton’s philandering.  So when the al-Shabaab militia group in Somalia accuses UN agencies and NGOs of being the enemy, using that as an excuse to expel vital aid organizations from famine-stricken areas of Somalia, it is easy to label the Shabaab callous or insensitive or even murderous, but you can’t label them nutters.

 Afridi’s exploits create a shot heard round the world, the well-hyped example which transforms an obscure event into common knowledge.  I have a feeling it will live on.  For anybody with a sense of skepticism or suspicion, for people who need to trust their doctor, it’s a simple confirmation  that humanitarians aren’t what they appear to be.  Confirmation that the conspiracy theorists, gossipers, rumor mongers, and anybody else with a interest in stopping aid work aren’t just people with a loose screw. 

 About the only upside is this:  if people only suspect that we are secretly working for the CIA, maybe they won’t notice all the other ways in which we humanitarians do the bidding of others, be it a specific government, institutional donor, or that amorphous bogeyman, Global Power.  Thanks, Dr. Afridi, for improving our street cred as spies.

Our Western Identity

The New Black

Leave a comment

Apologies for the long delay between posts.  I’ve been busy taking care of a few little matters, like getting married and going on a honeymoon…

Returning to Heathrow yesterday, tired, I finished the 18-mile trek from the gate to the passport control hall.  Picture that cavernous space, vacant on the right (some unmanned desks) and largely empty on the left, where my wife was heading with her British passport.  In the middle, a dense block of humanity, switchbacked through the maze of ropes guiding non-EU citizens to their inquisitors. 

The block was not only dense, it was dark.  Suddenly it clicked.  The gates next to our Alitalia flight (we were returning from the Puglia region of Italy – the heel of the boot – which I can enthusiastically recommend) were filled by two planes from Jet Airways, another two from Kingfisher and Air India, along with Arik Air, which a Google search confirmed is a Nigeria based airline.  There was also an Etihad plane.  That’s not the same thing as a mix of passengers from Delta, Qantas and Air Canada.  That dark block would move slowwwwwwly.  It looked like 90 minutes of frustration. 

These aren’t the sort (read: color/nationality) of people who get waved through after a perfunctory passport check.  Sad but true:  years of experience in queuing for passport control all across Europe and North America informs me to pick the line with the fewest dark faces.  Also to be avoided:  turbans, skull caps and headscarves of any kind (save yarmulkes), and (increasingly) Chinese faces.  (Assuming the oh-so-wrong idea that there is such a thing as a Chinese face).

[At this point, I need to make a disclosure.  I asked an attendant if I could be put in the Fast-Track lane, usually reserved for the doddering and doolally or the 9-month pregnant, in order to catch up with my wife.  I was then surprised to learn that if we were travelling together, I could join her in the queue for EU citizens.  Yes, an official benefit of being married! I sailed through with her, 5 minutes max.  Another disclosure:  in my youth, I may have felt guilty, or even stood as a matter of principle with the downtrodden.  But I am no longer young.]

Back to humanitarian action.  Administrative delay already impairs aid work in some countries, including outlandish difficulties to obtain the necessary visas and work permits for entry.  Long gone (mostly) are the cowboy days of driving around Country X without first getting a few signatures.  The trend strikes me as interesting.  Will the growth of non-Western humanitarian NGOs allow aid recipient nations to institute a two-track system, with us inching forward in a snaking line of uncertainty, enviously watching others whizz through? (Much as exists today though in our favour, for example, in obtaining UN or institutional funding.).   What happens when our identity, our identification as White/Western/European/Northern agencies, increasingly acts as a steroid pump up for the iron fist of administration gripping our collective throats?  Will queuing sap our drive and verve and effectiveness?  Will we grow to resent our hosts as they don’t appear to welcome out gifts? 

Those are relatively pragmatic questions.  More importantly:  will we learn to accept the indignity of second-class citizenship?  It boils down to this: in humanitarian action, white is becoming the new black.  And how will we manage being black?  Here’s my guess: not very well at all.

Critique of Aid, Politics

Birthday Declaration

2 Comments

On this morning’s BBC Radio 4 broadcast Andrew Mitchell, the UK’s Secretary of State for International Development, talked about the situation in Somalia.

Presenter – But as long as there is no effective government in Somalia, it’s very difficult to see how it will be sorted out […] and I quote ‘ Britain is going to deepen its involvement in Somalia’ is that right?

Mitchell – Well it’s right that we should deepen our involvement because Somalia is a very direct threat to the security of the UK.

Not content with explaining Britain’s commitment to saving lives in Somalia, Mitchell thought it important to scare us with this factoid:  there are probably more British passport holders in Somalia training to be terrorists than in any other country in the world.  

What?!  Security used to justify aid?  OK. Cue it up.  Here comes another pissy rant about “blurring of the lines”.  About how if something like food aid is in the interests of British national security then it will be in Al Shabab’s interest to block it.  About the ultimate arch villian of all aid workers, the dreaded “erosion of humanitarian space”. (Note for you blog fans who are not insiders: we’ve easily passed the million mark on publications, conferences, workshops and papers discussing the erosion of humanitarian space.  My research has shown that any actual erosion is the consequence not of aid’s politicization but of all the people who left aid work on the ground – you know, giving stuff to victims – in order to talk incessantly about why they can’t give stuff to people.).

Anyway, you guessed wrong.  I’m going cold turkey.  No more banging on about the fact that the military is building schools to win hearts and minds. Here’s a quote from my reflections on MSF’s 40th birthday, posted yesterday:  It is now, in middle age, that we acquire the maturity to accept what has always been true: it is ridiculous to expect governments, rebel groups, insurgents, criminal syndicates or national armies to adopt the benevolent positioning of a charitable organisation, and that the abuse of humanitarian aid is an enduring and inevitable component of the landscape in which we operate.

You should read the full piece, here at the Huffington Post (UK edition).  Shameless plugging.  Here’s another.  MSF published a new book, called Humanitarian Negotiations Revealed, which the French think is a catchy title.  The book delves into MSF’s compromise, the well-hidden part of our work where we “angels of virtue” (my favorite Paul Theroux term) sacrifice principles like independence and integrity at the altar of access, in order to deliver aid in perverted landscapes like Nigeria, Sri Lanka, Congo (or, more cynically, to ensure our own institutional relevance). 

You want proof of the book’s quality?  They didn’t accept my proposed submission.

Happy holidays to everyone.  Have a great new year.  We’ll be back, bigger and badder and funnier and more provocative than ever in 2012.  Sound familiar. That’s right friends, I have become aid itself, promising to finally get it right if you please please please keep believing in us.

Our Western Identity

The New Young Turks

1 Comment

Having finally trudged through the post-holiday backlog of email, I ignored the pile of freshly printed reading to surf the crisis in the Horn of Africa.  I found an Al Jazeera story which I would call interesting on two counts.  First, for the fact of it.  And second, for the invisibility of that fact (i.e., that even people following the aid biz didn’t seem to notice).

The story is a fairly simple one, and I recommend reading the author’s full analysis. In August, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan visited a camp for starving IDPs in Mogadishu.  Can you imagine being equally unaware of a Sarkozy or Cameron visit to Somalia?  Or a UN ambassador like Angelina Jolie?  I mean, there’s more coverage of Obama eating a hotdog (actually, a chilidog, which is definitely more macho).   The visit was the move of a true world leader.  Not only the first non-African head of state to see Somalia in over 20 years, Erdogan took his wife and daughter, a clear statement that the war-torn capital of Somalia is not necessarily the Call of Duty shooting gallery we make it out to be.

The fact of this visit, though, is more interesting than the media non-coverage.  Here is the new direction not just of Turkey, but of the next wave of world players.  Countries like India, China, Qatar, Brazil and South Africa.  Countries that are heading to Africa for profit, influence, minerals and for the prestige long accorded to powerful Western nations/leaders doing the philanthropic waddle.  Erdogan’s visit was accompanied (already some weeks ago) by roughly $250M in Turkish donations to the crisis, mostly from the Turkish public.  I think (too late for dinner to research it) that’s more than UK public donations.

That fact alone speaks of a world that is changing faster than we imagine or plan.  I think of non-Western governments increasing their humanitarian spend, but actual public compassion and donation?  That’s supposed to be our Western genome, a unique manifestation of our goodness and superiority.  Apparently, there are even Turkish celebrities who play the humanitarian ambassador role, meaning you can see non-terrorist Omar Sharif looking guys visiting camps as well.  (Please don’t comment, I know Sharif wasn’t Turkish or a terrorist and I don’t really believe that all guys with thick black mustaches look alike).

To me, our Western thinking on aid still hasn’t grasped the sheer acceleration of the entry of other actors – governmental donors, aid organizations, and concerned publics – to the global arena of humanitarian action.   These actors don’t have colonial histories, don’t suffer the white man’s burden, don’t seek to moralize about human rights violations, and don’t necessarily subscribe to a model of aid based on charity.  All good news.  I’m thinking there could even be a job in this after MSF, working for one of the new global humanitarian leaders.

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity, Politics

Jubilation in the Streets

Leave a comment

Back in youger days (not exactly youth, but pre gray hair) I decided to escape the tedium of law school by volunteering for the American Red Cross.  I ended up spending Wednesday nights driving around New York, providing coupons for assistance (temporary shelter, replacement clothes and furniture, food, etc.) to people affected by house fires.  A little known program: the ARC visited almost every fire in town almost right after the firetrucks left.  The acrid smell of wet, burned furniture used to hang in my nose for a day or two.

Fires practiced an active discrimination along class lines, so we spent the wee hours of the morning driving to high rise projects in the Bronx, crack den infested row homes in Bed-Stuy, or a part of the Rockaways nicknamed “Dodge City” by my colleague.  These were parts of town I’d never seen, and would not feel safe to visit even in the afternoon.  Streets pulsing with drugs, dereliction and anger; teeming with people right off the grid of basic citizenship.

To my disbelief, the ARC logo on our jackets and car provided the sort of shield humanitarians can only dream of (not to mention a license to park on the sidewalk).  It took a little while to get used to this freedom of access where my eyes delivered pant-peeing images. Once inside the building, we would visit the site of the fire and then the neighbors, including two or three floors above, to assess smoke damage, and three or four floors below, to gauge water damage (I’d never thought of what happens when you blast thousands of gallons of water into a 15th floor apartment). 

In those visits came the revelation; the clarity of my misjudgment of the local reality.  Leaving the mayhem and violence on the street, knocking on doors, resident after resident after resident opened a minimum of three locks to reveal small neat homes crowded with religious icons and proud photos of high school graduations.  These were the quiet poor, by far the majority population of those neighborhoods, who seemingly bunkered themselves to survive the night.

That’s more or less where I came to believe in the 5-95 principle for urban neighborhoods, where the density of people meant that a mere 5 percent rate of dysfunctionality reflected close to 100 percent of the visible inhabitants at night.  I guess it’s another variant on the “tip of the iceberg” problem, except that the ice below the surface probably looks pretty much like the ice on the top.

Cut to Tripoli yesterday, where we watched or read about scene after scene of jubilant crowds, rejoicing in the departure of Colonel Gadaffi.  Some of these (mostly under-30 male) celebrants were also feting the arrest of Gadaffi’s third son, Saif al-Islam, except that he showed up to later in the day, and apparently had addressed his own jubilant crowds.  Aside from the war, then, Libya seems awash in jubilant crowds.  What I wonder about is the invisible majority we don’t see.  Where are they and what do they think?

There’s nothing new in the way TV images can distort reality on the ground, whether it’s an impression of overwhelming contempt for Gadaffi, or the way in which a focus on 200 protesters becomes the prevailing image in a perfectly calm metropolis the size of Luxemburg, or how the media-and-NGO-selected starving baby show generates a public who expect all African children to be severely wasted.  No, nothing new there, and a fairly duh blog if I stop here. 

What interests me more is, first, the way in which we seem to accept these distortions when they conform to our world view.  I’m not talking about the public here, I’m talking about us insiders, sunburned aid workers, savvy diplomats, and perhaps even the media themselves.  We are quick to accept the truth of the jubilant anti-Gadaffi crowds and suspect foul play – a propaganda exercise of paid supporters! – when the scene is reversed.  There’s a lot of cultural bias in our filtering of info!  Hence, what interests me even more is the degree to which we base our program decisions on an understanding of the world that is shaped by our penchant for misperception, for believing our eyes even though we know that we’re seeing only the 5 percent (and that’s if we’re really really lucky).  I’m worried about the way a manager based in London might impose a curfew on a field team having watched a news report showing images of rioters in the center of the city, but even more about the way we seem convinced that Gadaffi is so universally despised within Libya that we’ve taken sides and are hungrily expecting peace and harmony to follow the “mission accomplished” moment of his demise.

Critique of Aid

Stop blaming aid for the failures of aid

2 Comments

Lots has been written about aid over the past few weeks, and the public commentary can be vitriolic in response.  Some people seem to be absolute nutters, believing that letting Somalis die is a solution to their underlying problems.  Hmmm, I’m not quite sure about the logic there.  But more common are people who seem furious that more money should be sent to a place like the Horn of Africa when aid has been such a failure.  As you may have noted, I’m skeptical about the capacity of development aid to meet its objectives; to transform societies.  But isn’t the public  wrong to judge the potential success of humanitarian relief by the failures of development?  Assuming that people can get to a proper medical center or feeding program, it’s relatively easy to save that child’s life.  Of course that doesn’t solve issues of corruption, desertification, and decades of brutal conflict.  But that’s not the goal.  In other words, not all aid is created equal.

In my professional alter ego, I’ve tried to take this up on in response to an editorial in today’s Guardian (see here).  But this negative discourse links into wider issues of public perception of aid, and in particular a failure to grasp the unavoidable complexity and need for a certain level of capacity to mount a successful response to poverty or crisis.  J at the Tales from the Hood takes on this issue. I’ve put an opinion there, again differentiating between humanitarian and development. 

I’m curious to hear other opinions.  I don’t believe for a minute that you can look at a given context and say X is a development situation, while XX is an emergency situation.  The world isn’t so tidy.  And what of all that other stuff, like post conflict and transition and pre conflict and early recovery etc etc?  But aren’t there clear or even irreconcilable distinctions in theory, in the ideas behind development and humanitarian action?

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity

Let Them Eat Hippo

10 Comments

“Do the local people eat hippo?  Hippo, lechwes [a kind of antelope] and the other game?” 

I was on safari with my octogenarian parents.  After all those years working in Africa, my first real safari.  We were in the Okavango Delta, which (without the two octogenarians) I would recommend visiting to any humanitarian who wants to see African wildlife other than mangy goats and one-eared dogs.  Of course, I’d also have to recommend robbing a bank first.

One of the safari guides was explaining traditional food to us over the evening meal.  That’s when Ron asked the question.  Ron was clearly an intelligent guy.  New York banker working for a venture capitalist group, articulate and engaged, owner of the newest top Nikon SLR.  In short, somebody who would place in the upper percentiles of just about any set of social indicators.  He probably laughed at Jon Stewart and would be above average (for one of us Americans) on the scale of being politically informed.  I’m sure he considered himself a responsible voter.  Oh, and he was Keanu Reeves handsome to boot, so I disliked him intensely.

Look again at that question.  Let me rephrase it:  Did the people who lived in the middle of this game-rich delta eat game?  Or rephrased again:  Were all the people practitioners of vegetarianism?   If not, does one of these densely forested islands hide the local equivalent of my local Ginger Pig butcher shop selling butterflied leg of lamb and ground pork loin burgers?  Is there a supermarket nearby?  Because if these weren’t the questions he was implying, what is it he thought traditional people ate in a place like the Okavango Delta?

Smart as he was, Ron seemed wholly unacquainted with the basic rules of human existence.  How could traditional ways have included the people here not eating the game that surrounded them? 

Now back to the aid world.  We know that our donor base, even those who keep well-informed, tends to think of people in Africa and aid workers as, respectively, more impassively victimized aid and more heroically productive than reality.  But we also believe, and must to a certain extent require, that the public has some generalized understanding of the way it is.   For our newletters and “protection” reports and situation updates to have any meaning, readers must be able to hang them onto some sort of foundation.  Otherwise, it would be like me attending a graduate school lecture on molecular biology.  The difference, of course, is that I would quickly recognize my confusion, whereas I’m concerned that our public is unwittingly getting it dead wrong.

Well, the Rons of this world are our donors.  They are our constituency.  It’s OK that they don’t get it 100 percent.  But what if it’s more like 10 percent?  Forget about meaningful engagement in the public debate on foreign politics, military incursions into unfriendly countries or the (current in the UK) discussion on aid budgets.  Forget about the idea that the people who give us money actually support – as in agree with – our work.  It all adds up to an Antoinettesque “Let them eat cake” level of comprehension.