Tag Archives: Funding

Critique of Aid

Charity as a new black cocktail dress

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Case 1. Sitting on Aer Lingus flight 247 to Dublin.  Tape plays the usual appeal for money for the airline’s partner Unicef.  As the flight attendant shambles down the aisle, a not negligible number of people fisted money into the collection envelope, including Passenger 18A, seated next to me.  I couldn’t resist.  After introducing myself as a charity exec, I turned to this middle-aged Irish businessman and asked why he donated.    “To tell you the truth, the main reason is I know I have a lot of change in Sterling in my pocket and we’re headed for Ireland.”  (Please note my magnanimity:  I graciously swallowed my tongue when he asked for my opinion of the agency.  So I did not suggest that his sterling coins would contribute to the salary of somebody in Geneva drafting a new clearance procedure for changes to the child-friendly space protocol or maybe another measles vaccination campaign that somehow doesn’t prevent measles from ravaging the community two years later.)

Case 2.   Menswear retailer The Officers Club went into administration earlier this week.  Did anyone notice?  Would any of you even admit it if you did?  The All Saints line of clothes stores are also in trouble.   (My quality guarantee to you the reader: I have never stepped foot in one of these stores).  Blame, of course, is placed squarely on the financial crisis, economic turndown, recession and the no-doubt fatal condition hidden by the jargon of “low footfall”.

Case 2 is the one that got me going.  Is it really fair to blame the economy because people no longer purchase piles of overpriced made-to-fall-apart-but-even-more-quickly-goes-of-style clothing on a weekly basis?  Financial meltdown might explain why people can’t wallow in sartorial narcissism, but the real problem seems to be the expectation that people would continue to buy crapola ad infinitum.  The stuff in those shops had no purpose.  No necessity. As for Passenger 18A, his behaviour wasn’t exactly a ringing endorsement of Unicef or the idea of giving to a charity. 

Coming more to the point (or, if that’s a bit of an exaggeration, at least orienting this piece in the general vicinity of a point), is it really the economic woes of middle England that we can blame for the fact that people are giving less money to charity?  Case 3, then, is the charity fundraising sector for international aid organizations.  Talk to any fundraiser and you’ll hear all about how the downturn is of course due to things beyond his/her control.

So the question drops:   Are we a meaningless luxury?  Is a donation to a charity somehow no more of a moral endeavour than paying £129.00 for a pair of stiletto heeled cocktail shoes?  Or (less expensively) a strachiatella gelato in the caff next to the shoe store?  Of course the downturn in the economy has made it difficult for some people to support us, and it has made prospective donors more reluctant to sign up, but aid agencies need to do more than blame this on the financial mess.

It comes down this:  What is the nature of commitment we build with donors?  Why do they give?  Do we attach them to the necessity of our work?   Arguably, that is not the case.  Arguably, we use those starving baby images or glowing annual reports to push a different set of buttons.   Namely, the instant gratification of the donor.   We don’t sell the sometimes ugly help being delivered on the far end of the deal.  Instead, we sell feel-good moments.  That’s why people were so angry at being told not to give to Japan (see, e.g., the comments under this Felix Salmon post).  We don’t sell our sweat and blood, we sell the charity business equivalent of retail therapy.  And if I’m really honest, I’m not sure if I haven’t bought into it myself.

Critique of Aid

The Old Bait & Switch

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From the GiveWell Blog, check out this interesting post on the way in which aid agencies are feeding off of the Japan emergency to stock their coffers.  There’s more elsewhere.

The bigger  issue, though, isn’t whether Japan needs the money or not. The bigger issue is integrity.  Mercenary fundraising by NGOs marks our descent into the sort of fine print tactics one expects from a used car company. NGOs have abandoned ethical standards and constructed a legally defensible escape clause, usually well hidden compared to the appeal itself, basically saying that any unused funds for Japan will be used elsewhere.  In the world of supermarkets and department stores, this is the bait & switch tactic.  Advertize a huge sale on an item, get people into the store, then switch.  “We’re sorry, that item has sold out, but you might be interested in…”

We should ask NGOs:  Right now, what percentage of the collected funds do you reasonably expect ever to go to Japan? Is it even 50%?  In the end, the genuine outpouring of empathy for Japan will pay for office furniture in quite some other locations.  One might have expected more from the self-proclaimed moral leaders of the world.

Critique of Aid

Say goodbye to the gravy train: Part I, An Inconvenient Truth

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Continuing my flirtation with futurology, what about the way aid as a business seems to be acting like aid as an idealistic pursuit?  I mean, why the quasi obsession with perceived threats to our principles and access — Has the “erosion of our space” gone platinum yet? — while largely ignoring the much more potentially ruinous erosion of our market share? Why worry about the inevitable securitization of aid when global warming, the private sector, and non-Western NGOs are going to steal our hallowed seats at the head table? 

Pope Urges Young to Care for Planet – Headline in the IHT, 3 Sept 07, p. 3

Did this rather dull report on the meanderings of Pope Benedict XVI catch your eye?  It should have. The golden age of humanitarianism died that day. When the Pope himself jumps on the environmental bandwagon – when the Holy See decides that spiritual salvation matters less than the carbon footprint of the Popemobile – then it’s not only a bandwagon, it’s the beginning of the end of humanitarianism as we know it.

The Seventies and Eighties marked the golden years of the development industry. A patchwork coalition of Western nations, academics and eager volunteers set out to eliminate starvation, disease and poverty, and generally to make the Earth a better place to live.

It wasn’t working so well (still isn’t), which left the turf (and donor pockets) wide open for the onset of the humanitarian juggernaut.  In a relatively short span of time humanitarians became the new heroes. Forget about trying to establish a private sector agrarian economy in a desert like Burkina Faso. Our message held the sexy promise of immediate gratification:  let’s save lives and alleviate suffering right now!

That was the end of development organizations. Their money dried up. Some NGOs dried up.  Others, simply swapped hats. They began calling themselves humanitarian organizations while running income generation or literacy projects.  The word “humanitarian” itself became synonymous with doing good.

Why blog about this new bandwagon? Because we sit at the precipice, blissfully unaware that over the next ten years the exploding global environmental movement is going to bury humanitarianism. In our focus on the competition among us, nobody seems be thinking about the competition between brands of goodness.  Nobody is talking about an upcoming 25% crash in donations. Or maybe it will only be 15%.  I don’t know. I’m just making this up.  But the bottom line is clear:  People who want to do something good with their money will progressively opt for a different generation of NGOs. Once the money starts, the graduate degree programmes and NGOs will follow. Then the celebrities, politicians and the media. Then the rest of the donors and maybe even Angelina Jolie.  And all that time, the effort and enthusiasm of youth will be siphoned away.

Many “humanitarian” organizations will again change their hats. They will prioritise the war on global warming over the war in Darfur.  They will write reports about the needs of populations in 2050.  Other organizations will resist, retaining focus on saving human lives in the present. Their days are numbered.  Trees may not sound so important, but how do a few thousand lives way over in Congo or Afghanistan compare to our planet? That’s what the people with the money will say as well. As Pope Benedict XVI so aptly put it: We need a decisive ‘yes’ to care for creation. 

So it won’t be the West’s politicisation of aid or the erosion of “humanitarian space” or even the way bureaucracy has pummelled the idea of compassion right out of our work that killed off we humanitarians. In the end, it will be the loss of our market share to the planet.  In the end, it will be Al Gore.

Our Western Identity

Opening Salvo: Ask the poorest for funding

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How does one inaugurate a blog?  If I wait for that deep inspiration, some 3 paragraph reflection that cuts to the bone of the humanitarian aid industry … Well, now you understand why I didn’t get this going last year.  The other strategy is to opt for a more simple debut by just starting.  

Forget DFID (oops: UKaid).  Forget USAID.  Forget even CIDA and SIDA.  Humanitarian aid agencies should start seeking funds from the foreign offices in the countries where they work.  Need money for a cholera treatment centre in Zimbabwe?  Why not ask Botswana, Congo and Ivory Coast for funding?  Need to mount a measles vaccination campaign in Nigeria?  Why not ask the government in Sudan for funding. 

Well, one rather obvious answer would be the unlikelihood of actually getting any money.  And we all know it’s all about the money.   One can only imagine the confused faces of Zambian bureaucrats when a billion per year INGO rep asks for money to run its projects in Bangladesh.   But one other answer, and the answer you’ll likely receive from these governments and INGO HQs themselves, is fundamentally wrong.   The poorest in the world will have turned an important corner when we all get rid of the answer:  “Because we are poor.”

Did anyone notice the news last week that South Africa will launch its own development aid agency?  (See the IRIN article here:   http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportID=91651).  South Africa joins emerging powerhouses such as India, China and Brazil as recipients of aid who are now entering the hallowed ranks of the aid business.  Whether a ploy to boost the standing of the country, part of a strategic investment in foreign relations, or, contrary to that rash of cynicism, the governmental embodiment of compassion for those in need, I think it deserves a couple of thumbs up.

In other blogs, I’d like to examine this as part of salutary trend towards ending the Western hegemony of what we refer to as aid.  The Western donor-INGO duet could use a little competition.  But I’d like to focus on something else.  The act of standing up.  In the IRIN article, Ivor Jenkins, of the non-profit Democracy for Africa (IDASA), has this to say about the SA announcement:  “I do think it’s important for us as a country to start to have a sense of responsibility, and giving and not only receiving as we have for many years.’”  

Sense of responsibility.  That just about nails it on the head.  Western aid agencies have been taking increasingly damaging and certainly well-earned straight rights to the chin on their neo-colonial and/or neo-imperial attitude.  {I’ll be writing about that in future blogs).  We swagger through other people’s homelands, delivering the aid to the victims of the state’s own failure towards its people.  States don’t mind the aid, but aren’t quite as keen on the swagger.  Imagine that.  But some governments have had an easy time of playing it both ways, finger-pointing at neo-colonialism while hiding too easily behind neo-colonyism, the international relations equivalent of a Stepin Fetchit routine.  Poor countries as beggars who must shuffle through the corridors of the rich nations, whose economic and historic superiority impose an expectation of  moral duty to ship their money South.

The stereotype creates an existential split.  Not between wealthy countries and poor countries, as if those categories determined who should and should not give aid.  Certainly not between nations actually capable of sending aid to other nations and those incapable (Should Ireland be sending its cash anywhere?).  No, this is a split between those nations assuming the role of beggars or victims and those who assume the position of lord and savior.  More than acknowledging a sense of responsibility, SA’s move is a declaration that poverty is no excuse for the incapacity to help nations, just as wealth is hardly a guarantee for either compassion or generosity.

So future kudos to the first aid agencies that stop reinforcing the existential victimhood of governments in the developing world.  Let’s treat every government as sharing in the responsibility to come to the aid of people in crisis, both within and without their territory.  Let’s stop acting neo-colonial and ask governments to stop acting like neo-colonies. 

And kudos to the government of South Africa for embracing a lesson already being taught by poor people the world over.  If you look closely in places like Haiti, Darfur and Eastern DRC, you’ll find not places where the Western aid enterprise has saved helpless masses of people, but where the WFP convoy-sized gap in aid (2200 kcals per day!) is filled by the countless invisible acts of kindness between families, neighbours and strangers, all part of the same community of the abject poor.