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Critique of Aid

Another Perfect Storm

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Western aid agencies, especially those here in the UK, have spent the last two weeks fanning the media flames of a fundraising campaign for the Horn of Africa.  Merlin even went so far as to call it a “global food crisis” but seems to have recoiled to the idea of an East Africa Food Crisis.  Let’s start by stating the obvious.  The situation in parts of Somalia, Kenya, Uganda and Ethiopia seems desperate, and humanitarian aid is needed to save lives right now.  To question whether or not this is the Drought of the Century is not to deny the gravity of the situation and the need for emergency aid. 

But I don’t really want to debate whether or not aid agencies are hyping drought in order to stuff their pockets.  Of course there is hyping.  Of course agencies use weasel words, at the same time painting a picture of saving stick-legged children from starving right now while being clever enough to avoid claiming that it is already a famine or mass starvation.  Nope, those things could happen.  Writing in The Times, John Clayton makes his opinion clear:  “By hyping up a localised “drought” and playing down the real causes of the turmoil in Eastern Africa, the aid agencies are crying wolf. What happens when there’s a real emergency? Will we believe them?”

On one point, it is easy to agree with John.  It’s a sad reflection of public attitudes towards aid, but people like the idea of giving to the innocent victims of El Nino rather than to the not-as-innocent victims of clan violence, war, and greed-fueled bad governance.  It’s amazing how even somebody purporting to set forth a list of factors somehow miss out:  “High food prices, fluctuating rainfall, a rising population and ever dwindling natural resources have created the perfect storm,” said Leigh Daynes, director of communications for Plan, in the UK.   Oops.  Forgot to mention conflict in Somalia.  Oops.  Forgot to mention corruption in Kenya.  About like forgetting to mention Ghaddafy in an analysis of the situation in Libya. 

But let’s not be too hard on these agencies for omitting the ways in which locals themselves could be blamed for their own suffering.  By definition, humanitarian aid is based on need, not worthiness, because being a human being possesses inalienable worth enough.  Besides, the entire point of the media campaign is to raise money to pay for the relief effort and save lives.  So let’s not moralize about painting a picture that is skewed towards being effective rather than depressing to the average punter.

That said, let’s moralize anyway.  Let’s moralize not about the fact that the perfect storm of factors missed conflict, missed corruption (kudos to UK AID for suspending bi-lateral aid to Kenya on account of the lack of integrity), or missed the way in which drought has some very local and human causes (on this point, check out Paul Theroux during his Africa overland odyssey ten years ago, quoting a diplomat on the situation in northern Kenya: “Right, it hasn’t rained in the north for three years.  Whose fault is that?  They cut down the trees for fuel, they sold them to loggers, they destroyed the watershed.  And they’re still doing it.”).  No, let’s moralize about the fact that the aid agencies’ perfect storm of factors forgot one key factor:  aid agencies. 

Inside Somalia is a different story, because aid agencies have little access there.  But the rest of the Horn?  Kenya?  Ethiopia?  Uganda?  For decades, aid agencies (and the Kenyan government!) have been all over these places, practicing what they call development.  They collect a lot of money for this work and they have been pumping out glossy reports describing their glorious success in helping communities become sustainable, in helping to protect the environment, in building the capacity of people to cope. Etc etc.  So where is it?  Where is this development we keep hearing about?   Surely people have been helped.  But as the current disaster in the area would seem to suggest, at the big picture level all this development work didn’t amount to squat. 

What we have, then, is a perfect storm of irony.  Aid agencies are asking us to fund humanitarian relief work (and I admit this is also an assumption, because we don’t really know what sort of program will receive their money).  We should do that.  People need it.  Lift the veil, though, and what they are also asking the public to do is to fund their own failed development policies.

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity

Let Them Eat Hippo

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“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.

Politics

Weapons of Mass Erection II

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The story is back!  [See my blog below, dated 2 May].  More charges that Col. Gaddafi is distributing Viagra to soldiers in order to encourage mass rape.  This time, we have the chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Court, Luis Moreno Ocampo, making the claim.  He asserted that Gaddafi is buying containers of the drug to enhance the possibility of mass rape.   “[Viagra is] like a machete,” Ocampo said. “It’s new. Viagra is a tool of massive rape.”

At this stage, it is rather impossible to judge the veracity of the charges.  Pfizer wasn’t too pleased.  They addressed the issue back in May, and have trotted out the same line again.  

That highlights the simple fact that these sorts of allegations have consequences.  A major pharmaceutical worries about its pocketbook and the ICC wades into new territory, where a drug that helps men produce and maintain an erection (but, notably, does not increase sexual drive) is likened to the instruments of Rwandan genocide.  I’m not so concerned about Pfizer or Ocampo. I’m concerned about people, and what if means to them to live in fear.  And I’m concerned for the deterrent power of treating rape in war as a crime.

Rape being used as a weapon of war is probably as old as dirt.  It destroys the enemy community from within; a most visceral communication of dominance.  Rape being officially recognized as a weapon of war, though, is in its relative infancy.   Really, only in the late Nineties, for example with the 1998 decision in the Akayesu case before the Int’l Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, finding that mass rape constituted a form of genocide, or its codification as a crime against humanity in the statutes defining the ICC (becoming law in 2002). 

Legalities being what they are, many people still see rape as inevitable in war, like muddy boots or trampled fields.  After all, soldiers are men, and men deprived of female companionship fall prey to their own pent up desires.   Even more shocking is when women themselves feel this way, that rape is a bad but without the conviction that it is wrong.  Rapists akin to locusts rather than criminals.

My concern today is with the future course of the transformation of rape in war from collateral damage to crime.  If charges of mass rape become part of conflict’s landscape, if the propaganda machines of the two sides routinely cry systematic rape, for how much longer will the charge retain its force?  How long before falsified charges of rape give credence to future denials?   To brutal dictators shrugging rape off as the self-serving bleats of politicians like Ocampo and Rice?  So while hoping that nobody has been raped at all, I also have to hope that Ocampo’s charges are based on actual evidence, because victims of rape will be the big losers if the ICC has been chasing a ghost of WMD.

Health

A Fat Tax on HIV+

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How many others missed this early April news gem?  Arizona Governor Janet Brewer proposed socking obese Arizonans who are enrolled in Medicaid or Medicare with a $50 surcharge unless they adopt a supervised weight-loss program prescribed by their doctor.  (Smokers will get nailed as well.). 

Congratulations to the Gov for the world’s first “Fat tax”.   

The Gov’s arguments run pretty simple along the surface:  unhealthy lifestyle choices and behavior eat up the healthcare budget, so let’s make these miscreants and self-indulgers pay.  After all, why should the public subsidize bad behavior?  Looked at differently:  If some guy like me wants to bicycle the streets of London without a helmet, running the lights, why take money away from cancer research to pay for his brain surgery? (It’s a slippery slope:  skiers and joggers are always breaking ankles, and that costs a lot of money, but taxing them would bring us right back to the obesity risk of blogging from the couch all day.).

If the Arizona governor sounds confused on the workings of blame here, as if people choose to be obese the same way our guy chooses to cycle recklessly, it’s because any debate on the merits or not of the fat tax as a public health policy is misplaced.  This is about trimming budgets, not waistlines.  Ha ha. From a health policy standpoint, blaming the sick sounds perverted, though I guiltily admit somewhat less so in light of estimates that the cost of obesity is the US range from $150 to $270 billion.  Isn’t that more than the continental budget for healthcare in Africa?  Anyway, from a financial standpoint, the fat tax is the sort of decision that will be increasingly more common as politicians and health officials scramble to save cash.

 Now flip to HIV/AIDS.  I recently visited MSF’s HIV/AIDS project based in Khayelitsha township, on the outskirts of Cape Town.  It’s an impressive programme, one that has led to a great deal of innovation on the treatment/delivery side of things and, more importantly, to a sizeable scaling up of HIV+ people receiving anti-retroviral therapy.  Depressingly, I found the decade of advances in HIV treatment have been unmatched by advances in preventing transmission.  It’s simple:  too many men refuse to wear condoms and they certainly aren’t interested in abstinence. 

During my visit I listened as young outreach and community education workers exhorted others on the need to do education in the taxi stands and drinking places, or called for opening hours in the evening, etc. etc.  Essentially, the same hopeful exhortations I heard 10 years ago.  As if a “new” or “improved” community messaging will actually produce a sufficient enough change of behavior to reign in this epidemic.  Aside from the fact that it doesn’t work well enough or fast enough in a context like South Africa, I’m still a fan of this sort of health education.  But limits need to be recognized.  The problem isn’t solvable through education because it’s not caused by ignorance.  That is a topic, though, for a later blog.

For now, back to Arizona.  How long before the logic of the fat tax will be applied to men and prostitutes in South Africa?  There, masses of people knowingly engage in high risk behaviour – becoming infected and (quite different from obesity) infecting others – and then fall ill.  They then assert a right to treatment.  So how long before the “no condom tax” or a “surcharge on unprotected sex”?  How long before money is switched out of HIV treatment into other health priorities at the ministry level, as is already happening on the global stage?  In the end, the Arizona fat tax heralds the coming day when budgetary pressure on the state forces a false distinction between “good” sick people and “bad” sick people.  After the obese, after the smokers, will come the reckless, be it the helmetless riders or rubberless fuckers.

Politics

Weapons of Mass Erection

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If you managed to snatch some news on Friday not involving the “Kate loves Willy” theme, you might have come across this item:  wartime propaganda took a 21st Century turn when Susan Rice told a room full of UN diplomats that Colonel Gadaffi was supplying his troops with wonderdrug Viagra in order to encourage rape.  In what appears to be an example of the truth catching a break, most of the reporting includes opinions of doubt by experts.  And aside from the well-publicized charges by Iman al-Obaidi, I haven’t seen analysis suggesting that rape by government soldiers is prevalent in the Libyan conflict.

I suppose one could dismiss Rice’s claim as only the most recent example of such fanciful propaganda.  Remember those stories of Iraqi soldiers tossing Kuwaiti babies out of their incubators?  Or the bizarre detail that Uday Houssein’s briefcase contained stacks of money, underwear, a single condom and a vial full of Viagra (not, to my knowledge, a hoax, but still curious for the details released).  The difference is that those stories possessed little potential to cause much harm in and of themselves (even if they indirectly fuelled the war effort). 

Mass rape as a strategy of war is neither fanciful nor joke-worthy, so I apologize for the catchy title of this post.  The Sudanese government’s reaction to MSF’s 2005 report of rapes in Darfur highlights the power of the charge of rape to humiliate and to polarize, even where charges of mass killings do not.  Governments have little trouble explaining major war crimes to their friends – “we bombed base camps of rebels, not villages of people” or “we are fighting a war, so it is inevitable that civilians will be killed accidentally” or “it’s not torture”.  But rape in war is impervious to justification.  It is never accidental and always a violation at the level of religious, community and personal mores.  In short, better to be accused of other war crimes than of rape.

We can only hope that Rice’s comments prove baseless and, almost as importantly, find as little traction among the men and women of Libya as they did among UN diplomats.  As any humanitarian worker in the midst of victims of conflict can explain, the weight of constant, pervasive fear can be as damaging as bombs and bullets.  This then is the true nature of terrorism – to propagate dread and fright far outstripping actual threat of harm. 

Rape is a crime, singular and unparalleled.  Falsely instilling fear of rape is not.  The deliberate manufacture of terror, though, should be.  What is both strange and sad is that this form of terror usually comes from the likes of thug militia groups such as the RUF or the LRA, using fear as a weapon against a population and against their enemies.  In Susan Rice’s accusation we have an example of a politician causing terror on her own side as a sort of collateral damage in the effort to win the battle for public support.   Thankfully, it has caused little stir on the worldwide stage.  I can only hope it has had as little effect in the minds of the people of Libya.

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity

Three Cups of Me

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Greg Mortenson is starting to look like one of those empty school buildings his NGO dropped into the middle of the Af-Pak quagmire.  Lots has been written (see this list at Good Intentions Are Not Enough)  since Jon Krakauer and since 60 Minutes torched this American hero and his Central Asia Institute (CAI). There’s plenty to feed on here.  Publishers converting delusionally inflated heroism into a major bestseller?  American military brass transforming a crock of crap into a blueprint for the use of aid to convert the hearts and minds of hostile Central Asian populations?  The persistence and popularity of aid with neither transparency nor independent audit?  Another nail of cynicism in the coffin of the public’s faith in aid NGO claims of success?  Or maybe just a textbook illustration of how hard it is to do aid well?

Prior to its implosion, Mortenson’s Three Cups of Tea was a powerful, inspirational tale of how one determined, charismatic man could change the lives of children in a place that is arguably the world’s most visible crucible of poverty and unrest.  This is not just a story, though, about make-a-differencism gone sour or the popped balloon of Mortenson’s valor and pluck.  It’s also not about the CAI’s suddenly naked ineffectiveness (am I the only one whose suspicions are aroused by the CAI – CIA anagrammatic similarity).  In so many ways this is a story about us, about what we deeply want to believe.  

Mortenson’s story is American (and, to a lesser extent, Western) goodness incarnate.  The plot is simple: a politically well-connected blend of individual effort, pioneer spirit and can-do attitude helps to transform the lives of the downtrodden by constructing school buildings.  School children across the States collect their pennies for peace.  After all, these impoverished children (read: target beneficiaries) are the children of Afghanistan and Pakistan, who’ve grown up in a society wrecked by foreign interventions and interference, in communities on the wrong end of bullets and drones and protracted  violence.  So CAI’s work is about the need for us to see ourselves, as nations not just (ineffectively) battling bad guys but battling the uncivilized garden of ignorance, backwardness, abuse and Islamic bloodthirst. 

In the end, Mortenson and CAI have sold us what we wanted to believe.  What we wanted to believe about aid.  What we wanted to believe about simple solutions to immensely complex problems.  More importantly, what we wanted to believe about the people in that part of the world and what we wanted to believe about ourselves; namely their desperate need to benefit from our virtue.  In that sense, then, Mortenson and CAI are not alone in the NGO world.

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity

What Sudan and Who-ville Have in Common

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Forget about Linda Polman.  We humanitarians need to listen more to Lt. General Omar el-Bashir.  Of course, we do care about Ms. Polman’s crucifixion of the aid business.  After all, she’s hitting us in the gut and in the wallet.  She’s on the same airwaves as many of our donors, telling everybody that aid doesn’t work.  Ouch.  But Bashir doesn’t mince his words either, and he’s on the same airwaves as the people who control our access.

A little over two years ago I was sitting in Khartoum, helping our teams deal with their non-expulsion after the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for the general.  Motivated, I am sure, by nothing other than a desire to shed light on the role of INGOs in Sudan, he let loose with a series of accusations.  He called us thieves, adding that we take “99 percent of the budget for humanitarian work themselves, giving the people of Darfur 1 percent”.  He called us spies in the employ of foreign regimes, interfering well beyond the remit of aid work.  And then there’s the charge that humanitarian NGOs essentially worked for the ICC.  Apparently fed up with the likes of us, Bashir spoke of “Sudanizing” voluntary work in Sudan (both humanitarian and development).  He politely suggested a new and improved model for international cooperation:   “If they want to continue providing aid, they can just leave it at the airport and Sudanese NGOs can distribute the relief.”

Neither NGO nor international community blinked.  Instead, we countered with legions of arm flapping, demanding to be unexpelled.  Then we shielded ourselves from even 10 seconds cogitation on his accusations with the unquestioned logic that he was a mad dictator and war criminal and simply poking back at the West for the ICC having ruined his vacation plans in Las Vegas.

It is rare, and somewhat disconcerting, to find myself possessing an ear not entirely unfavorable to the ideas expressed by President Bashir.   Even if we discount a former girlfriend’s accusation that I’m a self-hating critical bastard, it’s not difficult to suppose that if I can find some good sense in Bashir’s rants, he will have the ear of whole nations of people.

 Thieving?  Strong claim.  We’ve pushed the message that humanitarians saved Darfur.  If you consider fundraising initiatives based on a “help save Darfur” motif, communication/exposure, and just plain old reinforcement of the image of humanitarians as rescuer-champions, it’s easy to see how Darfur saved the humanitarians.  And from all that money that came in on the back of Darfur, how much of it made it past our headquarters, past our expat-driven approaches, past our expensive lifestyle in capitals, past our project teams and directly into the hands of Darfurians? 

ICC mole?  We know that NGOs passed mounds of info to the ICC.  The only question is whether humanitarian NGOs cooperated so directly.  Or maybe this is not even an issue at ground level, because how many armed groups in a place like Darfur could distinguish between the human rights crowd and the humanitarian crowd?  Add to that the impact of our well-publicized “protection” activities, our so-called advocacy reports.  Seems to me “violence”, “attacks”, and “rape”, are words more closely associated to the humanitarian voice emanating from Darfur than “nutrition,” “shelter,” and “healthcare.”   Against this accusation we may be teflon in our own minds, but we’re more like flypaper out there where it counts.

Sudanization?  There is a strong element of Sudanese pride in all of this mess.   We radiated our superiority in Darfur – the virtuous provider of aid to the helpless victims of an evil regime.  You can’t spend years treating Sudanese officialdom as perpetrators of violence and obstruction and still expect them to love us.  There’s equally a major dose of sovereignty.  You can’t humiliate a people without sparking a drive to shake off the yolk of the West, to build Sudanese spirit and independence into the sort of state that does not require the largest exercise of humanitarian charity in the world. 

 In that non-Western mind, to whom Bashir spoke, we humanitarians were not simply the enemies of the state, we were a blight upon its pride.  Do we hear this message? Any of these messages?  My advice to NGOs:  Make like Horton and listen to the citizens of Who-ville, even if they aren’t all fluffy and cute.

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.