Tag Archives: Funding

Politics

Typhoon Daze

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Can the blogosphere survive another set of random thoughts on Typhoon Haiyan?

1.  Check out any decent post-Armageddon flick. Try The Road.  Or for a classic, and one of the first great zombie flicks, try The Omega Man.  How do the heroes survive and feed their families?  It’s an old routine.  They help themselves.  No way Charlton Heston would do it if it were looting.  The guy was Moses and then President of the National Rifle Association.  That gives him more law and order cred than Wyatt Earp, Serpico and Judge Dredd combined.

I’m glad to see some journalists questioning the use of the term “looting”, as if bread for a child on Day Five without food were somehow akin to a burglar’s cartoon sack marked $$$. We can’t condone guys walking out of shops with plasma TVs. But without aid, without food, shelter, water or information on when/how it is coming, can we really equate this scavenging with acts of lawless criminality?  More importantly, can we base policy choices on it?  (hint hint, see below).

2. Ever watch news coverage of rioting or protests in your home town and have others call to see if you’re OK, when you were out having fun with friends?  Images of localized, small-scale disorder, demonstration, crime create a perception of the situation that is distorted well beyond reality.  More than that, we seem to imagine ourselves in those places and (a) feel the fear all those millions of people must be feeling then (b) cry out for somebody to put an end to it.

Note here the entry into the perception game of Western society’s own hyperbolized sense of security and risk (see e.g., my post on helmets for babies) and a view of the Global South as primitive bedlam-filled Bongo Bongo lands.  So my mother wants me to stay inside and lock the door when 200 protesters at Parliament toss stones, and she wants a soldier on every corner in Tacloban.

This distorted image matters.  Law and order are indisputably important.  But threats to law and order have a long history of provoking overreaction on the part of authorities, whether for political gain against enemies or simply to preserve face.  As is often the case, in these early stages of catastrophe response prioritization has to be spot on, and it has to place saving lives at the top. With heavy loss of airport capacity coupled with the necessity of an airborne aid armada, every flight counts.  Every cubic meter of cargo, every ton of supplies, every single landing slot has lives attached to it.  So what does it mean to fly in armoured personnel carriers and security forces?

Cue here a story of prisoners breaking out so we imagine the islands of the Philippines resemble the anarchy of life in a Mad Max movie, and are grateful for soldiers “retaking control” of the place. I am not at all against priority given to military relief capacity, I’m talking about the idea that life-saving assistance must be displaced to establish law and order (a particularly ironic conclusion where a primary driver of “crime” and “disorder” is the absence of aid). Perhaps it is necessary for aid to flow.  Perhaps it’s not, and aside from a few hot spots the impact quite minimal.  Hence the weight on figuring out to what extent is this real and to what extent is it misperception and a knee-jerk reaction to fears.

In Haiti, arguably, the world got that balance wrong.  Fears of looting or the descent into anarchy were exaggerated, decisions consequential (e.g., see here on WFP reports of looting being “overblown”, or this MSF denunciation of its surgical capacity circling overhead and then diverted to Santo Domingo while the US military landed planes full of troops). My experience is that disasters force communities to come together, that people are remarkably supportive of one another and fair. The people in Cebu and Samar are neighbours and families.   Social networks distribute relief with stunning efficiency and effectiveness and zero fanfare.

Of course there are criminal gangs.  Of course water distribution to thirsty people can resemble a scrum.  Experienced aid agencies deal with this all the time, delivering aid in war zones and in the midst of sectarian violence or everyday desperation.  We do it all the time because waiting for somebody to put an end to the war and violence is, well, absurd. Aid delivery in crisis will always be imperfect.  Nobody wants aid convoys getting attacked, but the risks are often manageable under far worse conditions than in the Philippines.  So unless the threat is substantial risk, establishing “law and order” to ensure the arrival of assistance may come with a heavier cost than benefit to those who are waiting for said assistance in frightened, rain-soaked desperation.

3. On the surface, the aid industry is treating the typhoon emergency as the second coming of the December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, with all the expectations of another once-in-a-decade event.  In other words, expectations of all-hands-on-deck to get aid to the millions of desperate Filipinos, of a large dose of the aid circus and calls for better coordination, and of a fundraising/branding extravaganza.   Certainly some of the destruction we have seen on our screens warrants such an investment in the emergency response.  But other factors instil us with an uneasy feeling:  the creeping signs that the worst of the destruction affects a large but not massive number of people coupled with a world that is no longer helplessly waiting for the NGO saviours to arrive – first, because the Philippines is not Haiti and second, because other actors, most notably the military, are now in the saviour business.  Will we succeed in being the stars of the show?  Tune in these coming weeks.

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Politics

Big Numbers

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[After that heavy post, how about a light one, for Friday the 13th?]

Two weeks ago I was sitting in our lovely expat residence in Goma, Lake Kivu lapping at the back garden.  It would be hard to be any closer and further at the same time from the grinding violence, fear and misery that affects much of the Eastern DRC.  And, at least for me, it would be hard not to think that what DRC really needed was not more humanitarians but more Yul Brynners. And Steve McQueens.  And Charles Bronsons, James Coburns, Robert Vaughns and Horst Buchholzs.  Yes, we need the Magnificent Seven (sorry, can’t remember the seventh).  If you prefer low culture – because the Magnificent Seven is decidedly high culture even if Bronson grunts most of his lines – then think of it this way: what Congo needs is the A Team.

We need some tough guys.  Sort of.  Actually, there is a major surfeit of tough guys, but they tend to be criminals, rapists and butchers, which has its drawbacks in terms of being a force for good, though certainly hasn’t stopped the international community from funding programmes to incorporate them into the army.

So we need some tough guys who are also good guys.  Instead, the Kivus have armed criminal gangs, various sorts of mai mai forces, ethnic “defense” gangs, armed criminals, security companies and the official armed criminal gang, the national army, more renowned for their profiteering, military ineptitude and sexual violence than for defending the population.  And then there is MONUSCO: 20,000 UN Peacekeepers from places like Uruguay, India and Tanzania.

There is already plenty of critique and analysis of UN peacekeeping. Has it helped keep warring parties apart in some places?  Undoubtedly. Has it provided breathing space for peace negotiations?  Undoubtedly? (Are peace negotiations in Congo a well-funded yet industrial-sized scam? That’s another story).  But as I watched an extremely expensive refrigerated truck lumber up the non-road between Mweso and Pinga – Patagonian beef for the Uruguayan troops? – one couldn’t help marvelling at the fantastic cost of it all.  Think of what it takes to build a complete military infrastructure of bases, communications, supply, etc., fly in 20,000 of soldiers from around the world, pay their salaries, and another few thousand advisors and sundry specialists…

Well, for the coming year it will cost almost $1.5 billion. Do the math. That’s enough money to pay $5,000 each to 100,000 of the worst criminals, rapists and thugs, provided they sit and play foosball all day, or eat steak that doesn’t have to be airlifted from Argentina.  Oh, and still have a billion left over to build schools and hospitals.

A more startling example of math: instead of spending $2 trillion for messy wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the US could have just givenv20 million pissed off militants each $10,000 to hang out at home watching reruns of The Rat Patrol.  And still had $1.8 trillion left over to end poverty in South Asia.

I do not think we as humanitarians comprehend the scale of military expenditure.  The numbers are interstellar. Ditto for the bailout of banks. And ditto even for Presidents like Clinton or Obama, who certainly understand the lives of the poor, and yet who would chip away at the funding for a $10 million schools programme while signing into action a $250 billion military foray into futility.

There is a lesson in there for the international community.  Something about scale. Something about what and how Save, MSF or Oxfam spend on operations versus the meaning of that money in a place like DRC.

BTW, the Magnificent Seven?  They cost $140.00. Total.  For six weeks.  And they killed all the bad guys.

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity

Show me the money.

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Go back three decades (or so).  Question to WWF champ Bob Backlund:  What could possibly persuade a man to earn a living by getting his brains beaten out while wearing a Speedo?  Answer:  I make more money than the President of the United States.

Bob has me beat.  The salary of charity execs has been tearing up the media this week.  Here’s Ian Birrell, in an excoriating piece, sending some special love to Save the Children’s CEO: “The fat cat charity chiefs include [Justin] Forsyth, whose £163,000 salary means he earns £20,500-a-year more than David Cameron.”  For the record, this year I will earn less than half that.

The Telegraph broke the story. Numerous takes popped up.  For a balanced argument, try Oxfam’s Duncan Green here.  Here’s another spin.  And another.  Far more revelatory than the stories themselves, take a look at the reams of commentary (the Telegraph piece alone has over 600).  This topic touches a live wire.  The public vents shock and anger at us charity bosses.  I want the public to like me.  And I don’t want to work for peanuts.  So what’s up?

Maybe we should blame ourselves. As far as I can tell, perhaps too many people have been listening to what we charities say.  Unfortunately, what we say doesn’t chime with fat salaries.  Perhaps we’ve told you that every £££/$$$ you send will be used to [fill in blank] and save fly-covered orphan Maria, end the persecution of polar bears, or fix a world of broken smiles.  Never mind that it’s often a whopping fudge, it sets high expectations.  Or perhaps you’ve internalized the subtext of our messages: that we merchants of charity are not like bankers or businessmen; that we are – look at all our sacrifices and good deeds – agents of pure virtue.

Apparently, neither virtue nor efficient use of donations mix well with being paid six digits.  Reading the commentary, lots of you devote time to charity work, and you do it for £184,000 less than the British Red Cross’s CEO’s annual pay.  So you know all about charities, don’t you?  That is one obvious rub.  Public anger betrays a major misunderstanding about the nature, especially, of overseas aid work.  A remarkably idiotic comment from “Normalwoman” sums it up: “it doesn’t take a genius to give money to the poor”.

Actually, Ma’am, we aid NGOs could use a boatload or two more of geniuses. I mean, if I can make it to the job of CEO/director then it is clear the talent pool is thin.  Four decades of development aid to “bongo-bongo land” can hardly be deemed a success.  And in many cases humanitarians haven’t managed better, in spite of our lower ambitions.  Aid is complex, even if our fundraising narratives scrupulously avoid any mention of struggle, ineffectiveness or failure. Now, under attack, the aid agency litany has about-faced: this is a tough job, a really tough job.  So we need talented people, and they don’t work for free.  It’s not just complexity, it’s responsibility:  you can’t ask Saturday volunteers to take life or death decisions (e.g., sending staff into Somalia and Afghanistan), or close programs that are vital to entire communities.

No matter how many ways it is said, though, these defenses sound, well, defensive.  In that vein, Forsythe inked the high-water mark, managing to suggest his salary was somehow related to “the biggest ever fall in child deaths from preventable illnesses such as pneumonia and diarrhoea”.  Oh my.  Defending high salaries by reference to our good work is one step closer to claiming an entitlement. And yet so much of the public backlash aims to trash aid altogether, not high exec salaries.

Besides, who am I to judge? At this stage in my life, I’m not sure if I would not have taken this job for a salary of, say, £40,000 per year. And let’s be clear, that is still a lot of money and there are many people who would be thrilled with such an offer.  You can deliver a lot of vaccines with that kind of money.

Here is the key.  The defensiveness – and I feel it myself – in our voice originates in the same place as the public’s anger.  We both believe that NGO employees, especially leaders, should be agents of virtue.  We should be thankful for the fact that the public still sees a strong moral quality to aid work.  They do not want it to be a business. They do not want their NGO bosses to covet generous salaries.  They do not want a banker’s mentality at the helm of an aid organization.

[Diversion alert! It is perfectly logical to answer that we need capable leaders to perform a tough job, isn’t it?  Worryingly, this response falters under close scrutiny [thanks J for this kernel].  What is the evidence that these high CEO salaries actually enabled organizations to hire talent otherwise unavailable?  In particular, any evidence that it enabled them to hire talent better able to lead an organization to the promised land of effective aid?  Or is it more true that boards look for leaders who are an asset to the balance sheet of the organization, meaning people with the skills, experience and personal qualities to woo major donors and ensure substantial government funding?]

So where will all this end?  Being called a fat cat doesn’t feel good.  The story and keen public reaction seem like another shovel of dirt on the grave of our fundraising ambitions.  I see two lessons.  We aid agencies must counter not with a defense of salaries but by showing what we do.  Public sentiment must more closely align with the reality of aid work, including the warts.

I fear, however, that the real lesson in this story has little to do with our Western publics.  More broadly, this is a story about what people expect from aid workers, and what they find unfair/dishonest.  And like it or not, the societies in which we work also have expectations and a sharp sense of fairness.  If Western publics do not expect their donations to go towards the salary of a CEO, then the people in the countries where we work do not expect those same donations to end up in our large offices, top-flight hardware, homes, restaurant tabs, Landcruisers, televisions, yoghurt, R&R trips etc.

We’ve shut our ears to the critique that we asked people to donate to save, say, the Sudanese, and then we spend it on ourselves right in front of those very Sudanese.  What happens when that gets vented?  In other words, what is the cost of so visibly sabotaging our own position in the battle for moral respect?

Critique of Aid, Politics

The Ugly Marriage of Moral Responsibility and National Security

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Brouhaha.  The evil of trading “schools for soldiers”.  That was Oxfam’s Max Lawson, firing  a bow shot in what became a full day barrage of Downing Street and DFID.  World Vision chirped in, as did Christian Aid and Save (though hard to tell which side they were on) and even small fish NGOs who usually keep their mouths shut.  Seems that NGOs in the UK have found their bite now that Andrew Mitchell is no longer reminding them of whose hand does the feeding.

The cause.  David Cameron’s statement that he would be “very open” to using some of DFID’s aid budget to fund Ministry of Defence projects.

The problem. Once again, and in a loud public voice the UK’s highest authority (OK, realistically DC is probably closer to sixth in terms of influence, after the Queen, Kate Middleton, Boris, Becks and Cara Delevingne, who is poised to change the shape of the British eyebrow) okayed the idea of development money sliding from DFID to fund MOD stabilization projects that deliver on the UK’s national security interests.  Loud and clear for the Taleban and al Shabab:  aid is for national security. Loud and clear for the communities where we work, planting that unhelpful chestnut of distrust as to NGO motivations.

What he didn’t say.  He didn’t say he wanted to buy weapons with aid money, or anything close to it (transcript here).  The level of hyperbole in Lawson’s “hospitals and not helicopter gunships” quip makes for great radio.  It also makes for a big fat lob pass to all those ready critics of aid, defenders of Tory policy, and friends of Dave (not to mention again aid agencies apparently trying to curry favour by defending the government).  Dismiss the point by making the lot of us look like self-serving nags or wrong on our facts.  Even MSF over-reacted, publishing a rather straightforward statement under the screechy tag of the aid budget being “hijacked”.

What NGOs didn’t say.  Our disclaimer: As a member of the aid community I hereby pledge that we aid agencies are motivated solely by the desire to defend the principle of independent aid.  We stamp our collective feet and in a piercing falsetto reject any accusation of there being even a soupçon of self-interest in this sudden vocality. It is pure coincidence that this involves funding for our future programs going to our good friends at MOD.

What nobody said.  Aid agencies are dead right to be critical of this public marriage of aid and national security interests / defence.  We need to complain about this more forcefully.  But in the real world  — Why wouldn’t governments prioritize political interests and military objectives (e.g., winning hearts and minds in hostile territory) over the moral pursuit of foreign aid and development?  NGOs, on the other hand, might be expected to conduct themselves differently.  And yet the much-decried “blurring of the lines” (between aid and military) is not simply the work of governments/armies.

NGOs have accepted funding from governments to work in places like Afghanistan or Iraq, where those very governments have been a belligerent party in the war.  Like a Pakistani NGO taking money from al Qaeda to run a clinic in Sussex.  Doesn’t look good.  Afghanistan also provides a textbook example of NGOs, even while not accepting funds directly from warring parties, simply and without sufficient questioning setting up their aid programs on only one side of war, delivering aid to areas within Western military or Afghan government control.  This lopsided aid effort effectively supports the NATO/US/Karzai plan.  It aims to build the legitimacy of the Afghan government and popular gratitude to the Western invaders.  Bottom line:  it doesn’t look like aid to the guys with the guns on the other side of the fence.

What I previously said. Can you imagine the Daily Mail headlines if it were reporting on this same story elsewhere?  What if Robert Mugabe decided to use its own HIV and education budget to fund Ministry of Defence projects?  What if President Goodluck Jonathan decided to reassign a DFID grant to Nigeria’s military peacekeeping activities in Mali?  Whether or not there is a perfectly acceptable legality to the UK government’s manoeuvring, corruption is the word we’d use if the Tories were African.

What I think. Aid and defence mix well in a political analysis, poorly in a humanitarian one.  And we can probably conclude that the hard-boiled world of political opportunism seems like a right stench compared to the perfumed corridors of aid.  Then again, so does the whiff of NGO opportunism.

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity, Politics

Development vs. Independence

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When a pseudonymous filmmaker put out the laughable, execrable Innocence of the Muslims, did anybody foresee a KFC getting torched?  Not to mention a Hardees.  (Which begs the question:  When was the last time anybody outside of Tennessee even noticed a Hardees?).   Apparently, these heart disease outlets are symbols of the USA, a nation that is being held responsible for Sam Bacile’s vile film.  Just yesterday on BBC, a British military expert referred to it as “the U.S. film,” as if it were an official product of the State Department.  Funny that sort of attribution.  Seems unfair.  Like holding the entire Muslim world responsible for 9/11.

There is no link from bad fast food to American foreign policy (let’s not quibble about U.S. Govt efforts to help U.S. corporations establish overseas markets).  Yet the perceived link is as real to rioters on Lebanon’s “Arab Street” as salt in a Big Mac, isn’t it?

That’s the lesson for independence in humanitarian circles:  we NGOs can’t fully control perceptions; we can only improve our chances.  Independence is factual:  being able to make decisions and then implement programs in such a way as to ensure impartiality trumps political opportunism (i.e., that aid goes to those most in need).  And independence is about what people think.  What does KFC have to do with the American government?  And what does the American government have to do with Bacile’s film (“Sam Bacile” and “Imbecile”:  curiously close!)?  Sometimes, it doesn’t matter.

ALNAP’s recently released State of the Humanitarian System report raises the concern of a growing split between “traditionalist” actors, like MSF and the ICRC, and multi-mandate organizations, like Oxfam or World Vision. (Scroll down on ALNAP’s site if you want to see a video of yours truly in action).  Tellingly, it concludes that “many humanitarian organizations have themselves also willingly compromised a principled approach in their own conduct through close alignment with political and military actors” (SOHS p. 79). Bingo.  That’s your first step to a burned down chicken shack.   But what does this compromise look like up close?

There is the obvious acceptance of funding for programs, especially for work in war zones, from Western governments that are one of the belligerents.  Most international NGOs really struggle with those decisions, attempting an impossible calculation between benefits of the program versus negative consequences for the NGO.  Will “they” shoot at us if we take U.S. Govt money?  Will “they” give us access?

Less obvious for some reason are the ways in which agencies go further than accept government funding.  Responding to the recent Cabinet shuffle in the UK, here’s what Christian Aid had to say about the departing head of Department for International Development (DFID):  “Andrew Mitchell can leave [DFID] with his head held high. He has been a passionate defender of the need for the UK to help people living in poverty around the world.”   That sort of asskissing is so commonplace many NGOs no longer even register its existence.  Here’s Save the Children’s UK CEO, saying that he “completely” trusted David Cameron’s Conservative government on aid and development.

In an astute blog, Jonathan Glennie casually concludes that “Pandering to power is an inevitable part of being a large international charity or research organisation these days; it’s where much of the money comes from.”  Say what?  Inevitable?  Like death and taxes?

The issue goes beyond money.  It goes to achieving organization objectives.  And the relationships go much deeper than offering public praise (which, btw, DFID strongly “encourages” for NGOs receiving funding).   This is not self-promotion, this is partnership.  Many large NGOs must actively cultivate a public, political relationship with a government.  In 2009, Save UK hosted the Conservative Party’s launch of its aid policy.  Right now, Save is preparing to host the Labour Party’s annual conference on int’l development.   Another example:  Islamic Relief co-hosted a Ramadan dinner with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (that’s not the aid bunch, that’s the politicos).

Beyond partnership, there is the co-mingling of staff.  Lots of NGOs hire directors from the ranks of the political world.  This is a matter of hiring skilled, connected leaders.  Positive impact?  Loads.  Negative impact?  Hard to measure, but a full 30 years after Bernard Kouchner left MSF, the organization still had to issue press releases to distance itself from his actions as French foreign minister.

Let’s get something straight.  I’m not being critical.  Really.  Well, sort of.  This “partnering” has become a policy, not just a practice.  In other words, one NGO’s pandering is another NGO’s advocacy strategy.  Check out journo Peter Gill in his excellent Famine and Foreigners: ‘The intimacy between Oxfam and the Labour government was defended on both sides […] An impressive national consensus was built in Britain around the merits of aid which after decades of [Conservative party] scepticism was endorsed by […]David Cameron.”  (pp. 179 – 180).  Gill was critical of the relationships, but he’s right to realize that they proved an effective vehicle for change.  And lest the sanctimonious pretend they are different, here’s MSF showing some love for none other than the heavyweight champ of drone missile diplomacy, pushing the agenda for HIV/AIDS funding.

The problem lies in the multi-mandate status of most large humanitarian NGOs.  When it comes to development programs and policy campaign objectives, creating a close and public relationship with key governments is crucial to ensuring success (e.g., adequate aid flows, effective policy).  The cosier the better – politics makes for mundane bedfellows as well – even if their new best friends also happen to be shooting up a few war zones.  Put simply, there is little imperative for a development organization to safeguard the perception of independence. The oops factor comes from the fact that development is only half the story of some NGOs.

In the end, the difficulty for big charities to demarcate and safeguard their independence from government blots out the NG in NGO.  In the UK, carrying the Minister’s bag means carrying the bag of the man who said “Using the UK’s aid budget to secure progress in Afghanistan will be my number one priority … Well-spent aid is in our national interest. Nowhere in the world is this case clearer than in Afghanistan.” (UK Minister for Int’l Development Andrew Mitchell, July 2010).

That sort of co-mingling has an effect.  Look, not even people in the same country will trust your motives.  When Save recently highlighted the problem of hunger in Britain, people uncomfortable with that message undermined it by suggesting there was a rat loose.  As reported in the illustrious Daily Mail, “Conservative MP Brian Binley told civilsociety.co.uk he had general concerns as Justin Forsyth […] had worked for the last Labour government”, and suggesting that the report’s alarm over hunger in the UK was part of a “political agenda”.   Turn now to people in foreign lands.  With guns.  Or a sick child.  As I have written before, in the midst of humanitarian crisis, independence goes to the heart of aid, to its integrity.

Which brings us back to KFC.  Bad enough that independent Western NGOs may be targeted as a way of venting anti-American or anti-Western suspicions and anger.  What happens when it turns out that these NGOs actually helped fry the fowl?

Critique of Aid, Uncategorized

The Race to the Bottom

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At the risk of diminishing the heroic status of all those who work in humanitarian organizations – of all those who toil hour upon hour in an effort to save every last life possible on this Kurtz-ridden planet – let me confess that on occasion, right in the middle of the work day even, my computer screen begins to show articles about the Philadelphia Eagles football team.  Once in a while, articles about the fascinating life of celebrities also pop up.  My computer tends to do this more often during the football season, but also during the approach to the NFL draft, training camp, and, well, on just about every day I’m in the office and hence tiring myself to the bone to save the world or, on days when that seems too tall an order, reading over the 12th draft of the office annual plan, sorting the pens in my desk drawer by color, etc.

For those who regularly read humanitarian agency reports, you probably understand.  The brain needs a break.  It needs regular refuge from the horror.  I unwind with dose of the Eagles, the greatest team never to win a SuperBowl.  Since about two weeks ago, though, my respite has been effectively cancelled by Amina and her nameless invaders.  Surrounding an article about the contract extension of a promising young running back, peeking from the banner, the blitzkrieg begins.  Starving babies.  Grotesquely contorted, ribcage-clad babies.  The enlarged skulls of the emaciated.  Faces in pain, eyes set right on mine.

This isn’t just disaster porn twanging my heartstrings. This is disaster porn combined with new technology, meaning I can’t just turn the page because some big aid agency, let’s call them HAL, has its hooks into my cookies.  Click to a new story.  There’s Amina. Click again.  Here’s that misery-distended face and the floating caption: “No child should be this hungry.” Click again, and one of these kids rolls up from below my screen, like horror-movie fog seeping under a door, asking for £10 now.

Such is the brave new world of Google.  I must have looked at HAL’s website recently, and they know it, so now they are hitting me up with a retargeting campaign.  Where are the ethical limits on exploiting the privacy of web users?  I don’t know.  All major agencies use this technology to enhance fundraising results.  It’s called prospecting.   And like prospecting, one tries to pick a spot that looks good.

In other words, it makes sense to show your appeals to somebody who has recently read stories about aid, or articles about the places we work, or visited our websites.  Note that the NGO also purchases the target audience and the frequency with which its ads appear.  Once per week?  Every two days?  Fairly often?  Where does one draw the line?  Again, I can’t say exactly where the line should be, but surely it should be drawn before creating the appearance of stalking me, and long before any sane person would prefer to set fire to his cash, stocks and bonds rather than allowing even once cent to end up in HAL’s pocket.

Of course, this isn’t just about new technology.  It’s an old one as well.  There are standards.  There have been papers and conferences and workshops and all manner of effort to ensure that photographs and imagery used by humanitarian agencies is respectful of our beneficiaries.  There’s even a code of conduct that is designed to eliminate the merchandizing of starving babies.

I can hear one potential response:  Mind your own business.  Nobody elected you the moral police of UK’s humanitarian aid community.   Is it good enough to leave this up to the market?  Do we leave it up to the public?  Is stalking and exploitation OK because it has proven results?  The cash flows (even if I doubt HAL ever bothers to calculate the cost of pissing so many people off).

But what about my God given right to self-righteous moralizing?  After all, one might expect humanitarians to be slightly less mercenary than bloodsucking automated telephone sales companies.  [Insert fist thumping].  One might expect them not to exploit children!  [Insert more strident fist thumping]. And this campaign might poison the well of public generosity for all of us.    No wait, it’s worse than that. [Insert preachy voice].  This cynically mawkish and manipulative appeal might spark the end of humanitarian assistance as we know it.

Or, it may also be true that none of us are any better; that we simply cling to our own set of arbitrary distinctions that allow us to feel that we’re different.

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity, Politics

The Narrative Divide

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Check out this trenchant writing from Kenyan author/journo Binyavanga Wainaina on the perception bias infecting western media (and here’s another take on that topic).   He rather hilariously bull’s-eyes a spear in the gut of Western journalism, their spouses and their tennis partners, we do-gooders at the big aid agencies.

Coincidentally, his rant covers some of the same territory as my recent post on Chinese model of “charity”.  Glad to see he doesn’t get sucked into a romanticization of Chinese exploitation.  Rather, his point seems simpler:  many Africans would prefer to get screwed by Chinese businesses than patronized or sanctimonyized by the proverbial whites in shining armor of Big Aid.

Wainaina rages and we humanitarians seem high on the hit list.  That can’t be good.   It is easier to counter the pampered elites of the Western intellectual critocracy than someone born and raised in one of the nations we’ve been so diligently saving these past forty years.

Moreover, his view of aid seems reinforced in many of the 199 comments on his piece.  Here’s Cornhil on June 4:  “You would have thought that after the disaster that is and was the post-earthquake agency bonanza in Haiti, a little humility would be appropriate from the Aid Industry, but apparently not.”

Damningly, even some who take umbrage with his “stereotyped” or “sneering” diatribe remark that he is of course spot on about the aid workers of this world, almost as if it were to be taken as a given.  Ouch!  Defending the West but leaving the aid industry out in the cold.  Where’s the love?  Where’s the understanding?  Where’s our money going to come from?

(A digression: “In 1991, Africa ceased to exist. The world was safe, and the winners could now concentrate on being caring, speaking in aid language bullet points.”  That’s an almost perfect summation of the intermingling of politics and aid — the establishment of governance through the imposition of a world welfare state.].

Wainaina is at his sharpest showing our collective Western understanding of Africa to be based upon the most preposterously stereotyped terms.  Hold that thought and flash back to the fit of humanitarian arm flapping at Kony 2012’s volcanic success.  As I blogged, the criticism of Invisible Children’s vanity video went pretty viral itself.  In that outburst of backlash I failed to grasp the significance and weight of Ugandan voices criticising a Western organization in the Western media.  What gives?  Weren’t Ugandans supposed to be invisible?

Recently, I heard digital media expert Paul Conneally challenge us humanitarians to avoid becoming an analogue enterprise in a digital age (see his speech here).  The entire humanitarian arena is abuzz with the potential of digital technology to improve its work.  From SMS health messages to patients (“Please remember to take your ARVs now”) to real-time satellite mapping of epidemics to a fundraising blitz of mobile phone chuggers, we are fast imagining a new golden age.  But Conneally’s core message wasn’t about technological advances of NGOs  – a reform in how we do our work – but in the transformation driven by the digital empowerment of the beggar/victim/beneficiary/target population.

People who will want to talk about our work are going to have access not only to information, but to the means of producing it.  They will have access not only to our opinions, but to our opinion platforms.  In other words, the helpless victims of Africa, like the Ugandans who outed Kony 2012’s disdain for accuracy in depicting the reality of Uganda today, are going to take away our western monopoly over the narratives defining their societies.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, white ears and eyes will consume the stories of brown people as told by brown people themselves, not white visitors to brown places.  In the process, these browns may have something to say about all those starving baby fundraising appeals.  They may even have something to say about all the appeals, letters, articles and interviews from the agencies whose guidelines prohibit the use of starving baby images and so sleep well in the self-evidence of their enlightenment, beneficence and narrative integrity.

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity, Politics

Battle of the Models

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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

Model Business

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The last post left off with the glow of my wife and I as givers; our sense of satisfaction, borne in the awareness of having done a good deed.   Let’s come clean:  this human sensation of good-doing pays my mortgage.  I suppose that’s old news.  The financial structure of the charity business places a primacy upon the organization’s relationship to the donor over its relationship to the beneficiary.  In terms of cash, the latter is perhaps a matter of image.  The former is a matter of existence.  The people (donors) who buy our product aren’t anywhere near the people who receive it, and that distance allows for a lot of bad aid (a well-beaten theme in this blog).

The money will flow so long as there’s a story or two, compelling photos, or a reality TV star so surprised to find poor people dying due to crap healthcare that he’s willing to sell his Ferrari and give the money to a hospital in Zanzibar.  As a business model, that’s pretty hard to beat.  Not sure, then, if I understand the stream of critics saying we NGOs need to learn from the private sector.  How many businesses have developed a model where cash comes in regardless of product quality?  Not Nike.  Not Apple.  Not Carnival Cruise lines.

The aid model is even trickier than just being able to sell an invisible product.  To begin with, there’s the religious push, imploring people to give in order to get to heaven.  Check out the Bible:  … and to remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how he said, It is more blessed to give than to receive (Acts 20:35).  Or Islam, which consecrates Zakat as one of its five holy pillars. But there’s more!  It turns out giving goes deeper than a trip to paradise, which is a good thing considering the ascendancy of hedonism.

It seems humans are hard-wired to give.  Researchers believe that giving has a positive health effect on the giver (hmmm … taken to the extreme:  donation to a medical charity may improve the donor’s health more than the beneficiary’s?).  As UCLA psychologist Naomi Eisenberger puts it: “Because of the importance of support-giving for the survival of our species, it is possible that over the course of our evolutionary history, support-giving may have become psychologically rewarding to ensure that this behavior persisted.”

Turns out money can’t buy happiness, but giving it away can.  As other research shows, regardless income level, those people who spend money on others report greater happiness, while those who spend more on themselves do not.   I guess that explains the glow.

But the charity model’s biggest strength is a tendency for givers to overestimate the value of their gift.  At the consumer level, Christmas turns out to be a black hole, devouring value:  a billion of spending on gifts produces about 800 million worth of value to the receivers.  That’s bad math.  Even worse math in aid terms, because a fat chunk of giving gets nowhere near the beneficiary.  There’s my mortgage, for example.

So does giving destroy value?  Well, yes and no.  It’s a lopsided equation because it focuses exclusively on value to the recipient.   We could look at it differently.   Here’s a quote from another researcher, Arthur C. Brooks, from Syracuse University:

What many organizations misunderstand is who the “needy” truly are. In addition to those in need of food, shelter, education, the needy are also those who need to give to attain their full potential in happiness, health, and material prosperity—which is every one of us.

Giving to a charity as the moral equivalent of retail therapy!  Surrounded by beneficiaries, we humanitarians give blankets and cooking oil to the wretched and in the process give contentedness and self-satisfaction to the blessed.  Hmmm again.

I wouldn’t focus on donors, though.  I would focus on me.  On the aid worker.  We’re not exactly donors, but we are professional givers (assistance, help, protection, healthcare, solidarity, training, etc.).  Problem 1:  we therefore overestimate the value of our gift.  No wonder so many aid workers believe in the goodness of their work as a matter of faith, not measurement.  Problem 2:  If we are hardwired to derive pleasure from our work (which is far more than job satisfaction), doesn’t that create a powerful self-interest in our interventions?  In our self-perpetuation.   Now that’s a great business model.

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On the Limits of Doing Good

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OFFERED:  Used dog ball and toys

I found that gem on my local Hackney Freecycle, a terrific website designed to unite people needing stuff with people getting rid of stuff (see lessons learned on British plastic bags for a glimpse into the exciting world of marital bliss).

Can you imagine the dog whose owner collected on that offer?   Maybe a pug or Chihuahua accessory to an East London vintage girl; or perhaps some adoring chocolate lab at the heels of her strapping student master.  Imagine now its utter shame, entering the gate to Victoria Park, a hand-me-down dog ball for a toy. What latte drinking dog owner could be so cruelly cheap as to save the price of a dog ball?

But that’s only the start.  These are dogs, not people.   Imagine the poor dog’s pulse quickening in fear, its master blithely cocking his arm to toss the ball.  Imagine the fear of that poor dog!  It knows.  It knows from the holes in the used dog ball and it knows from the ball’s scent.  That ball belonged to a rotweiler. Or maybe a raging Doberman-pit bull mix.  That ball belonged to 50 kilos of canine killing power and there now is his owner, about to toss that ball out into the park. Imagine that poor dog scanning the horizon, scanning scanning scanning for the ball’s former owner to cock his head at the first whiff of his long lost toy and the simpering runt of a pooch running after the thing.

Now, where do I go with this?  How about the topic of fear?  We humanitarians struggle to convey what is often the most damaging element of life caught in crisis, the years of waiting for violence to leap out from behind the curtain of poverty and desolation.  It’s relatively easy to convey starvation, disease or actual violence , but for the most part, protracted, pervasive fear remains invisible to medical data and escapes capture in a photo.  Recall that time somebody appeared behind you on a dark street?  Now elongate that momentary distress over years.  Or maybe it’s the life of a Palestinian child who wets himself every time an olive branch bangs against the zinc roof of his home.

 That was a diversion, a case of indulging my solemn side. 

I’ve seen lots of oddball stuff on offer at Hackney Freecycle – pavement slabs, broken darkroom equipment, 17 assorted felt cuttings – but that used dog ball takes the proverbial cake.  It struck me as an icon for the limits of do-gooderism.  It’s a story of how the feeling of goodness surpasses actually having done some good.

My wife and I have been experiencing the sense of being good as a result of our giving.  It took me by surprise, as I’d been getting more and more miffed as time constraints killed off my plans to sell much of it.  So up onto the Freecycle website went the items we couldn’t carry over to the Salvation Army.  Often, the phone rings almost immediately, so eager are people.   

These are people with stories:  Joe, binding a stack of heavy duty moving boxes for his garden (??) and then carrying on the train to Dagenham; Enrico, starting a new business, sputtering off with a heap of ring-binders; or the fantastic Veronica, heading to the bus stop with our 180 cm tall book shelf (translation for the metric-impaired from showing-off American:  approx. six feet), the first piece of furniture for her new apartment.   A bookshelf on a London bus!  I wonder if the driver dared challenge her determination.   These are people who are grateful and seemingly thrilled with the idea of getting something useful for free. 

And there stood my wife and I, like proud parents, our furniture going out into the world, each piece a helping hand in the untold thousands of fresh starts happening right here in our little corner.  We basked in the glow of the giver, modern day Johnny Appleseeds.  Somewhere, a former dog ball owner is doing the same.

Next blog:  Part II on this topic, because that sense of doing good is what pays my rent.