Category Archives: Critique of Aid

Critique of Aid, Politics

World Update: It’s Big and Small

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[Originally posted September 12 and lost due to website issues. Apologies to those whose comments have been lost as well.]

Monday marked six months since I stopped working in the humanitarian field – I left the insulation and employ of MSF and headed off to parts unknown. Actually, I headed off to parts known, the USA, and spent most of the half year with my wife, immersed in the day to day. Road trip. Chilling out. Taking a break. I recommend it.

We passed through spectacular natural scenery, ate sublime meals at diners whose steady disappearance is as tragic as DRC, and interrupted my 15 years living abroad to spend a full month with my aging parents. Even without its day to day excitement, the trip would have been wonderful simply for the fact of spending so many months off the grid. The phone didn’t ring. The email didn’t stack up. Stress seeped into the ether and sleep came in deep doses.

Did I find myself? Discover the meaning of life? Nope and nope. I did manage to attain nirvana in the tiny town of Webb, Mississippi. This perfection came in the unlikely form of neckbone stew at Vera’s café, with sides of cornbread, mac & cheese, and okra. That’s it? The secret of life is high-cholesterol Southern cooking? It may well be. Beyond that, this is the most I can say. First, the world is a really big place. Second, the world is a really small place.

The world got bigger the moment I left MSF. The adrenaline rush of emergency aid causes a narrowing of vision. Aid agencies churn limited ground. Outside, the world is full of joys and marvels and realities like the miserable, inexplicable poverty of many Native American communities. Or take Syria. At the time of my departure it was a daily point of focus. During my first few months in the States I never once heard somebody mention it in conversation.

The fact of the world seeming suddenly so much larger says something about the worlds in which we live. The world became quite small as well, at one point not much larger than our campervan. That is partly a function of snugness, the age old feeling of comfort or refuge in our own world. In one way, I had replaced MSF’s porthole with another, but at least stress did not fix my gaze. It felt easy at first to join the big world again.

But beyond my road-tripping, the smallness of the world is partly a new phenomenon, as internet information and social networking shrink rather than expand our understanding of issues, and solidify polarized points of view. See this fascinating piece on data visualization of Twitter action during the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: “We’re most likely to only talk to people like us”.

Since coming back on the grid, the news portrays a world in even worse shape than only a short time before. 2013 was bad enough (see my New Year’s Day send off in Huffington Post). Now add Putin’s Ukraine invasion, Ebola, the atrocities of the Islamic State, Israel’s recent attempt to rubble-ize Gaza, Libyan strife, etc.

The twinned trends of a world getting larger and a world getting smaller are not unrelated to this horrific state of affairs. For example, the more misery that piles up in the world, the more (for example) Sudan, CAR and Haiti gather into a white noise of faceless crisis, meaning these specific realities are rendered invisible from our small worlds. Or this phenomenon: in the face of all that bigness – in the face of seemingly inexorable economic and cultural massification on a global scale — there is a retreat into the local. Self-determination at the atomic level, whether it be the selfie, the slow food movement, or Scottish desire for independence. The discourse of nationalism is on the rise. That can be a good thing – ethnic pride. And that can be the success of the Islamic State or Boko Haram.

This self-determination is not only a longing for freedom or power. It is not only political in nature. It is also the self-determination of right and wrong itself. Reversing 500 years of trending enlightenment, “truth” in the form of political conviction is becoming more localized; naked self-interest more shielded as opposing views no longer enter the fortresses of small world opinion. The internet promised the globe and has in many ways delivered the (isolated) village. Safe in those narrow confines, POW slaughter is justified by religious edict and drone assassinations by self-defense.

Contrary to my hopes, 2014 suggests that 2013 was no aberration (again, see link). Of specific concern to humanitarians should be international law, human rights, and humanitarian action. These have all formed part of the world getting bigger – a concerted effort to globalize respect for certain norms and standards. Now, their meaning and hence their potency has been drained by the steady erosive forces of self-interest, exceptionalism, and realpolitik of the flag bearers.

In the aforementioned Huffington Post piece I wrote there were a “mounting number of places that have reached a critical mass of disrespect for international law and universal ideals, or their outright rejection; and where rudimentary compliance is no longer deemed useful.” My primary concern is not the upsurge of bad actors – there will always be bad actors – it’s the very public destruction of these laws and standards by the good actors, or at least of those who typically advertise themselves as good. In the long game of establishing rules against summary executions or slavery, the act of a jihadi beheading a journalist is a call for strengthening international law; the act of the US government torturing prisoners in Abu Ghraib is a knee-capping of it. What is good for the goose is good (easily justified by) for the gander.

(Diversion alert) The US government should take a lesson from Charles Barkley, who understood there are insidious consequences when the public anchors their beliefs and aspirations in the wrong place (see clip): “I am not a role model”. Sadly, such public self-awareness is not the stuff of nations. Here is Samantha Power a few days ago, banging the drum of international order against Mr. Putin’s Ukraine transgressions: “These rules and principles that have taken generations to build, with unparalleled investment – countless lives have been lost to establish and defend these principles.” Ouch. There falls another brick in the house of international law, crumbled as the world’s biggest pot calls Putin’s (pretty big) kettle black. (Diversion ended)

I do not know what happens to humanitarianism in the face of the world getting bigger and the world getting smaller. Aside from shrill press releases, what course of action to take if we believe that our access to people in crisis (Somalia, Iraq, Syria, Congo…) depends in part upon a strong respect for international law and norms? Where it concerns us, I know that we aid agencies have trumpeted ourselves as flag bearers in the international order. We are the goose too. So I know that we who define the humanitarian project must break from our own growing trends of self-interest and living in too small a world.

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity

See No Fogeys. Hear No Fogeys. Help No Fogeys?

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Ten years ago I visited our projects in Pool Province in Congo-Brazzaville.  It was during Pasteur Ntumi’s armed, mystical insurrection; a time when military groups chose videogame names like the “Cobras” or “Ninjas”.  I heard more than once that Ntumi could levitate. But that is a different story.

We lurched down the ersatz road, passing many villages. They looked quiet. They looked abandoned.  Empty, I kept being told. Empty. But they were not empty. Everyone under 45 had long bolted for the IDP camps, but the elderly hadn’t left.  Occasionally I would see a skinny man, somewhat dishevelled and gray, carrying a bundle of wood or wandering the dusty alleys between houses.

If terms of vulnerability, those community guardians must have registered off the charts.  And we weren’t touching them.  We were driving by without seeing them, or seeing their absence in our busy health clinics.

This is not uncommon.  A “neglected generation”, as HelpAge research shows. Or see here. MSF has concluded that aid programmes miss the elderly even though we all intuit their vulnerability.

It shouldn’t be that way.  Impartiality dictates to humanitarians that we make decisions based solely on the needs of people, not their life expectancy after treatment or value to society.  Attaching value to human life is inimical to humanitarian action. Ditto for medical ethics. We don’t value people based on age. Grannies are absolutely equal in value to toddlers. We don’t try to justify differentiation by arguing cost effectiveness in terms of life value.  That kind of thinking will lead you down the path to hell, to saving the owner of the factory over the workers, the teacher over the vagrant, the NGO expat over the NGO local staff.

Impartiality implies that you have done a proper assessment to identify, in this population and in this crisis, those most in need. In a place where the needs overwhelm resources, it implies choices will be made.  As the research shows, though, we don’t do a good enough job of assessing needs when it comes to the elderly.

The problem is not one of mere choices, but of the underlying subconscious preferences; of blinkers. Some of these blindspots have evolved within our work.  For example, we use shorthands to target people/areas of greatest need:  “under fives,” “IDPs,” “pregnant and lactating women” are typical proxy indicators of greatest need.  And with good reason. It is true that you will find higher burdens of needs among these target groups, or overlapping needs (e.g., sick child plus no shelter or clean water), or greater severity of needs (e.g., on average, a toddler with malaria is more at risk than an adult with malaria).  But has looking for proxies meant not seeing others?

The way our brains work, it seems that if you are focused on one thing you will not see something else.  (Here is a great test of selective attention). The elderly have different needs from those of children, and you need to look in a different way. For example, as a starting place, you need to make sure that your assessment tools are able to ‘see’ elderly people. Much of MSF data collection puts people into boxes: < 6 months, 6 months to five years, 5 – 14 years, and > 14 years. We literally lump teenagers in with octogenarians. Where else would that happen except in wedding photos?

With data like that – with the conceptualization of our target population underlying those numbers – busy teams miss those who do not arrive.  That gap in spite of understanding that elderly have special access issues. It’s sometimes really simple. If you’re sick and seventy, trekking 10 km to find healthcare is not ideal.

Research leads to calls for paying attention; for systematic consideration of the elderly in humanitarian response.  But why are the decks stacked against impartiality in the first place? One reason is the way we think about children in our own societies, and in particular the way we think about their well-being. There’s a certain tragic disposability of children in places where birth and mortality rates are high.  And in the West, a tragic overvaluation, with children raised in porcelain towers.  (See my blog on baby helmets).  Apologies, this is the slippery turf of sweeping cultural generalization, but you get what I mean.

In the end, it is not accidental that the humanitarian project prioritises children. What is the UNICEF equivalent for the elderly? There is none. Why is Save the Children so much larger than HelpAge? The quantity of Western NGO resources essentially devoted to children in other parts of the world reflects a very Western valuation of children. That institutionalization of our value system produces a certain set of programme activities, the organisations that deliver them and, ultimately, that thing we call the humanitarian system.

Inherent in those values is the feminisation and infantilisation of victimhood. Powerlessness plus victimhood equates innocence, and that underpins why people give money to a cause. You can sell starving babies – we do it all the time. Try geriatrising it.  Pause the camera on the face of an old man.  You won’t run a billion-per-year NGO on that face.

Critique of Aid, Politics

Keep it Simple, Stupid

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Poor George Clooney.  He’s such a busy guy.  What with making blockbusters, Nespresso ads and all those mystery women, it’s a wonder the actor has had time to throw himself into the quagmire of Sudan.

South Sudan isn’t doing too well these days.  Arguably, the mess is George’s fault. If we hadn’t all suffered the delusion of Sudan’s bright future, we might have been busier dealing with its complex faults.  That’s what Daniel Howden insinuates.  He takes Clooney (among others) to task now that the South Sudan house of statehood has collapsed faster than Anthony Weiner’s political career.  Howden writes that “actors were highly effective at communicating a narrative about the new country that borrowed from a simple script.” That narrative (i.e., all problems were caused by the Wicked Witch of the North) was, unfortunately, “part truth, part wilful misunderstanding” and “deeply flawed”.

Let’s give George some credit. He is not a phoney when it comes to playing savior.  He didn’t just show up at a fundraising dinner, or make one self-aggrandizing visit.  The man has invested something of himself.  He even got arrested for the cause.  But there are limits to that credit.

Howden is right to call out the overly simplistic narrative, but let’s not blame actors for the superficial script.  As I’ve blogged (e.g. cleansing conflict from the ‘perfect storm’ of factors causing famine in Somalia in 2011), the entire international community – politicians, aid NGO agencies, UN officials – seems dependent upon simple scripts.  The only time we embrace complexity is in explaining our failures.  (Of course, academics ply a healthy trade in the complexity of places like Sudan, but who really listens to academics besides other academics?).

You can’t sell complexity.  No funding, no donations, and no political support.  It’s even a hard sell within an agency.  Try getting MSF to add some nuance to its analysis of Syria!  And maybe that’s not such a bad thing, given the need for action rather than endless deliberation. Complexity is a cousin of perfection – it can be an enemy of the good.

As for Clooney and the celebrification of the aid business, maybe I’ve been wrong in the past. Maybe it’s wrong to begrudge him the attention he and other celebrities get.  Sure, NGOs across the spectrum have sold out to the celebrity culture in the hope of increasing attention to our causes. But maybe celebrities really do make more effective champions than we activists.  Maybe humans are hardwired to follow the opinions of celebrities. See this article.   Apparently, it has to do with something so academic sounding as the anthropology of prestige.

How about that! Evolution has left us biologically inclined to follow the political analysis of celebs, not to mention their fashion tastes, recipes and personal grooming tips. Can somebody please get Miley Cyrus to say something about CAR?

Critique of Aid, Politics

Depoliomacy

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Having swapped his political fez for the humanitarian beret of the International Rescue Committee, David Miliband is calling world attention to the spectre of polio outbreak in Syria. He has seized on a tragic development.  Rising polio numbers play out like a dead canary in a coal mine. At once powerfully symbolic of the calamity of Syria today and a frightening omen of Syria tomorrow.

Coincidentally, polio confirmation comes just as chemical weapons inspectors have declared that equipment for producing, mixing and filling chemical weapons has been destroyed.  Cut to fist-pumping Western nations?  I mean, progress on CWs is relatively good news, no?

In an astute exchange on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme (yesterday, around the 2:10 mark), Miliband and John Humphries aired the rather stunning conclusion that the world has breathed a sigh of relief since the chemical weapons deal has been made.  Guard down.  Attention elsewhere.  Result:  in the hoo-hah around chemical weapons – well-deserved though it may have been – Assad found a “licence to carry on what he was doing – slaughtering an awfully lot of people” (Humphries).  This analysis, shared by many others, makes for a cautionary tale.

The only law left standing in Syria today may be the law of perverse consequences.  MSF played an instrumental role in sparking attention/reaction to the chemical attacks (see my previous blog).  As if Western governments justifying potential retaliatory strikes were not enough of an unintended consequence, there is also the sidelining of a truly unprecedented humanitarian crisis.  As Christopher Stokes eloquently explains:  Syrian people are now presented with the absurd situation of chemical weapons inspectors freely driving through areas in desperate need, while the ambulances, food and drug supplies organised by humanitarian organisations are blocked.

Absurd?  Yes.  Predictable?  Why not?  What chunk of this hindsight should not have been foresight? We all knew that U.S. or French militaries would twist the outcry against chemical weapons to suit their own ends.  We should also consider it no surprise that Western governments, desperate for a chance to demonstrate action/resolve/victory will jump on any issue that masks their protracted, utter inability to do something about the horrors of Syria.  Action is generic in that regard.  Action acts as a pressure release.  Action is solution.  No need for further attention.  Chemical weapons?  Sleep easy. Mission accomplished.  You could airlift 2 million ab-tronic exercise devices to Syria and the US public would coo in the comfort at good being done.

And it is not just governments. It is no surprise that the media needed a new angle to this Syria tale, that NGOs needed to show success, that we were all emotionally drained by trying to think of the ever-worsening big fat disaster.  In other words, did we not know enough to understand that one major risk of speaking out against chemical weapon attacks was that the international effort would be diverted away from the millions of starving, abused, sick, wounded and frightened people? Absurd = perverse, does it not?

Now: what of polio? In one breath, Miliband laments the negative impact of chemical weapons as distraction and then raises the issue of polio.  Obviously, it may turn out differently.  And obviously, dealing with polio is a good thing.  But this is Syria 2013.  We ignore the law at our peril.

In the end, it is quite sad that ten cases of polio are able to generate more attention, and perhaps more momentum for change, than massacre after massacre, month after month, million after million.  A new outcry:   Stop the killing! Humanitarian ceasefire! We need to stop the polio!

Miliband is shrewd.  He comprehends the symbolic value in a polio outbreak.  He trumpets the potential for a polio campaign to give rise to a new “humanitarian bridgehead” inside Syria.  Polio vaccinations as a silver bullet?  That makes for a nice soundbite, but it ignores the governing law of the land.  The risk is that depoliomacy produces a great campaign and an even greater distraction.


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

Friday shorts: Syria, sixpacks and status

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Today, a treat for the reader.  Instead of my meandering approach, I’ll spare you the long-winded digressions and the spectacle of my beating a dead horse.  Here, a few short(er) posts.

1.  In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.  In a land with only one horse, even a lame nag looks like Secretariat.  And so the political leadership of the world piles human hope and diplomatic muscle into a Geneva conference on Syria.  I certainly wish Kerry and Lavrov well.  In the realm of impossibility, even a half-baked solution seems like E=MC2.

The reality is that the Syrian conflict poses an existential threat.  Seems to me that the rush to self-destruction challenges the value of liberty, or freedom or democracy.  Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death” makes for a great battle cry.  It sounds profoundly noble.  But at what point should either Assad or the Syrian opposition surrender?  Not militarily defeated but a recognition that the price of victory is too high.  That is not, obviously, a question for me to answer.

Yet I am reminded of King Solomon (in the Koran, Sulayman), a wise man for Jews, Christians and Muslims alike.  When faced with two women each claiming to be the mother of an infant, he threatened to cut the child in two.  The true mother, who loves her child, cries out that she would rather see it pass to the other than perish at the sword.

2.  A lot of magazines dealing with the NGO/charity sector cross my desk.  The recent cover of Charity Times holds the title “Measuring Impact”.  That is the not-for-profit sector’s equivalent of “Twenty Days to Sixpack Abs”.  I mean, is there even one issue of any health journal that does not include an article about how to get better abs?  Is it really possible that there are literally thousands of ways to say exercise regularly and eat less?  Apparently, there are.  I vote for a new research agenda:  Measuring the impact of articles on measuring impact.

3.  NGO. It is as much a title as an acronym; as much a declaration as a status.  What does it mean in a world where those bearing the NGO label are massively funded by governments?  And where governments  dictate so many of the terms of engagement?  I mean, if 75% of your field expenditure is financed by the likes of DFID, ECHO and USAID, the label of NGO seems deceptive.  Ditto where half of your management team used to work for the government.

NGO is an anachronism, a mark of distinction from days gone by, created by the UN to distinguish state actors/bodies from citizen groups.  Those distinctions are now hopelessly blurred.

Defining oneself through negation is a tricky business.  (If I had paid better attention at university, I might even remember what Sartre had to say about it).  Lots of organizations are non-governmental.  Technically, the Mara gangs and the International Fan Club of Rihanna would qualify as NGOs (probably more NG than CARE or even MSF).  But for many organizations that are not governmental there is no necessity or identity to be found in distinction from government.  No confusion between the Mara Salvatrucha and a delegation of foreign ministers (I know, I know, between the Mara and typical governments there is an identical imposition of a monopoly of violence to further economic interests, but that’s another blog, one which includes digressions).  So it raises the question of whether times have changed.  Do we now need additional acronymed credentials?

In honor of the tectonic shift towards social entrepreneurship – the transformation of the development NGO into a patron of the free market system – and marking the recently well-promoted “collaboration” between Glaxo SmithKline and Save the Children, I hereby initiate NCO.  Non-corporate organization.  To create distinction from organizations promoting corporate interests.  And for places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia and (soon enough) Syria, how about NMO?  Non-military organizations.  To create distinction from organizations that are directed via belligerent funding to achieve “soft” military targets (talk about a gap re measuring impact!).  A bit clunky on the tongue — “As an NGO/NCO/NMO, we believe…”  — but the distinctions are vital.

Critique of Aid

Risk Transfer

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Apologies for the long gap since the last post.  Apparently, there is a general opinion that blogging about ideas should not displace my real work, which involves processing 3-sentence emails.

Aside from not keeping up this blog, busy people like me become addicted to the flatteringly-named ‘executive summary’.  In fact, I’d venture to say that you can define the rise towards leadership by the ability to take decisions based on a greater and greater abstraction (i.e., ignorance of the actual situation).  Anyway, someone recently sent me a report from Insecurity Insight.  They crunch data on the kidnapping and death of humanitarian workers.  Kudos: most of their analysis seems like actual science. Meaning: it reads like a foreign language to me. I’m more at home in a world of authoritatively-delivered opinion dressed as fact.

Knowing I don’t read, the friend who sent me the article copied out the key conclusions.  A surprise:  their analysis questioned “risk transfer”.  This term refers to a vitally important discussion, one we humanitarian organizations need to get right, and one which will require far greater data and analysis than currently available.  In short, there is concern that the rising numbers of national staff victims in security incidents may indicate a risk transfer; that we agencies are disproportionately pulling expat staff out of harm’s way, leaving national staff to run programs in situations.

Risk transfer is far from my area of expertise, so allow me to rush forward with a few unsubstantiated opinions.  First, this is sensitive stuff.  The pressure to keep projects running and the pressure of insecurity upon those projects have never been greater.  Second, it is uncomfortable for Western agencies to think of themselves as engaging in a strategy which passes risk from one party who does not wish to shoulder the risk to another party who takes it on.  If you don’t recognize that arrangement in another guise, it’s called insurance.   In the insurance biz, of course, the insured party pays a premium to the insurer to take on the burden.  Insurers do so willingly and knowingly and to great profit.  So we good Samaritans squirm at the prospect that the salaries we dispense, so vital to our staff and local partners, may equate to an involuntary premium to absorb risk; a deal they don’t feel empowered to challenge or refuse.

(Clever folk that we are, rationalization allows us to justify risk transfer: we do it for the beneficiaries (of course).  Compared to national staff, the impact on programs of the death or kidnapping of an expat is more serious.  Western agencies are forced to make greater changes.  Perhaps programs will close or scale down across an entire region, and not just with the affected NGO.  Or, an even more fishy driver of NGO decisions – funders may pull the plug.  And that doesn’t even broach the increasingly likely threat of litigation back home.  So it is clear, isn’t it, we need to protect expats in order to save the beneficiaries?).

As I said, murky waters.  So you can well imagine the collective sigh of relief at Insecurity Insight’s bold-printed announcement that our guilty fretting over risk transfer may not be necessary at all.  Their research announces that the phenomenon is questionable.  Busy, I almost stopped reading there.  Very glad I didn’t.

Here is the actual quote:

However, it is questionable whether this reflects a conscious decision to transfer risk from one category to another. Rather, this pattern more likely reflects an increasing reluctance to place international staff (who may be more exposed than local staff) in danger, as well as considerations regarding the cost and effectiveness of national staff who receive lower salaries and are assumed to have greater local acceptance.

Read it a few times.  In the annals of reporting across the sector, that may be the top piece of sophistry I’ve ever spotted.  Let me get this straight.  Their analysis is that there is no conscious decision to transfer risk to national staff because that is a mere by-product of being reluctant to place expats in danger.  Isn’t Insecurity Insight confusing the absence of intention with a get-out-of-jail-free card?  Their report suggests a complete abdication of responsibility for the direct and predictable consequences of decisions.  Let’s paraphrase:  “It is questionable whether Biff’s driving reflects a conscious decision to run over baby prams.  Rather, his accidents more likely reflect Biff’s increasing reluctance to drive at slow speed.”

Critique of Aid, Politics

Syria: Slippery Slopes for Humanitarian Action

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Syria today is a killing field.  Human bodies stiffen in the rubble and – equally – the lofty ideals of men and women plummet to earth like quail at a shooting party.  Human rights?  Crashing down in the face of sectarian executions and shuttered schools.  Geneva conventions?  There they go, felled by indiscriminate shelling and the withholding of aid to civilians.  Humanitarian principles?  The same. Nose-diving. Full of buckshot and broken trust.

Humanity?  It is probably the only principle still intact. The attention to the Syrian population has been strong.  We humanitarians are aware of and paying attention to the situation inside Syria. There is immense fear, deprivation, disruption, and then the weight of untreated malnutrition, illness and wounds.  Our compassion, however, is starkly contrasted by our absence.  Independent operations inside Syria by the multi-billion pound humanitarian system?  Almost non-existent.

(Digression alert!)  Put differently, our fat compassion is sharply contrasted by our thin skill when it comes to establishing operations inside the wicked (complex), violent contexts of today, as has been the case in Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia. Over the past year, MSF has been one of just a handful of global humanitarian organizations running direct operations inside rebel-held Syrian territory (as opposed to smaller, diaspora-based interventions). These projects are fragile, geographically limited (predominantly in the north and close to the border), and fall woefully short of the need.  As agencies, we have invested heavily in the capacity to communicate about our actions; increasingly we lack the skills and experience necessary to be active, to be humanitarians where it counts. (End of digression).

Independence?  Neutrality?  The Damascus government has granted the ICRC, several UN agencies, and a few NGOs permission to work in government-held territory.  Those with permission must channel assistance through the Syrian Arab Red Crescent or other government-authorized organizations.  (Read: control). As the New York Times reports, this aid might be doing more for the Syrian regime than for the people.  Here is one rebel’s view: “Food supply is the winning card in the hands of the regime.”  Or one can work through the other side, through groups of Syrians and aid networks aligned with the opposition.  As MSF points out in its recent report, aid is “thereby subject to the political agendas of these actors.”  Bottom line for the “humanitarian effort”?  Neutrality does not exist.  Independence does not exist.

In some ways, that is the “easy” discussion, the obvious-to-everyone compromises on principles.  The debate over the military and political impact of aid moving through Damascus-approved channels or rebel networks is necessary.  It also obscures consideration of damage to that other grand principle, impartiality (aid should go to those most in need, and cannot be based on ethnicity, religion, clan, etc.).  In toxically polarized conflict, local partners or channels are synonymous with ethnic or geographic bias, political agendas and allegiances, co-optation by power brokers and armed groups, and is anything but needs-based.   Syria is but the latest example.  For instance, in the Pakistan flood response, one major evaluation noted that loads of assistance ended up with those who were the “least vulnerable” but who were “close to feudal landlords or connected through certain political affiliations” (p. 36).

A key element to delivering aid according to need means knowing where the aid ends up. Impartiality is not a matter of intent.  It is not the target which counts, but where the arrow lands.  You have to see it reach the individual.  Sadly, even in good times, NGOs tend towards what David Keen (in his book Complex Emergencies, p. 121) sees as dispatching aid towards targets, “usually with relatively few resources allocated to monitoring the fate of relief”.  The resulting situation reinforces local power structures and means that those most in need will fail “to stake a claim to relief for precisely the same reasons that they were exposed to famine and violence in the first place” (Keen again).

That is in good times. In bad times, in bad places where you can’t deliver your aid yourself, aid according to the principle of impartiality (aid based on needs alone) becomes an exercise in blind faith.  At what point, though, does it actually become an exercise in suspending belief?  When does the aid (and hence the organization) shift from being essentially humanitarian in character to solidarity-based or partisan? We humanitarians need to ask and answer those questions, because an exercise in compassion alone is an exercise in peril.

[Big thanks to KW for help with the research].

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

Feeding the Fire

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[Apologies for the absence.  Just back from two fascinating weeks — our anniversary! — in Egypt.]

Just last week I was climbing the seriously magnificent Temple of Hatshepsut with my wife.  Its sheer beauty absorbs one’s attention.  Even my peripatetic gaze.  At least until a discordant note in the form of a young Polish woman in a micro sleeveless dress descended the stairs from the first courtyard.  Her dress was day-glo orange.  All of it. And fully radioactive in the noon sun.  In my entire life, I don’t think I’d ever seen clothing that color, save for road crew vests. Not even Dennis Rodman in his lunatic prime.

In the late morning of November 17, 1997 a different sort of scene unfolded on the terrace of that very same temple.  Armed with automatic weapons, six Islamic militants aligned with Al-Gama’a al-Islamyya massacred 62 people, mostly Western tourists.  They unleashed a Breivik-esque melee, for example hacking and dismembering a few honeymooning Japanese couples.  (Tangent alert: Doesn’t it seem less than coincidental that the attack took place at the temple of the first woman pharaoh?).

Those militants understood the enormous value of tourism to Egypt.  It seems they also despised the equally enormous Westernizing impact of tourism on the predominantly Muslim country.  Today, even with an elected President from the Muslim Brotherhood, more stringent Islamic groups in Egypt still take aim at tourism.  The people earning filoos kateer (gobs of money) from Egypt’s tourism, not to mention the people scraping by on its leftovers, simply curse this kind of thinking.  The government, for its part, have put in place greater security.  The question for me:  Why the hell was day glo orange slinking down those steps in the first place?

The point is not at all that women wearing mini-skirts are legit targets for attack.  The point is not to suggest an actual justification for their actions (i.e., women who dress provocatively aren’t “asking for it”).   The point is that some behaviour – disrespectful, abusive, neo-colonial, whatever – creates a justification in their minds.  Gimme a reason! You got one.

The message was consistent in all the tourist books, and in the advice we received:  show respect.  To do that in Egypt, dress and behave conservatively: women and men should cover flesh, don’t walk around the streets snogging, boozing, etc etc.  (In one café that served beer, they asked us not to sit near the door – essentially a tactic of not rubbing the public’s nose in alcohol).  But those with the most to lose in the long run seem the least concerned in the here and now.

The Red Sea resort tour companies offering blitzkriegs of Luxor or the Pyramids seem to be the worst offenders if measured by the sheer volume of people being disgorged from their buses who don’t give a shit.  The scene:  sunburn-glowing Poles, Germans and Brits, dressed for an appearance on Baywatch, mobbing past Egyptian families dressed in galabiyahs.  In close second place were the fat Nile cruise boats, moored along Aswan’s corniche, gleaming white hulls matching the jellified flesh prancing around the pool deck.  In third place, as a matter of unscientific impression, were the French, cloaked as always in the self-assurance of being French.

The point is that Little Miss Day Glo wasn’t just an insensitive tourist. She became a recruitment poster, fiery sermon topic and a rallying cry all rolled into one.  To anybody with an anti-Western agenda, she’s ammo.  So if I were those tour operators, I’d be making sure people who got on the bus weren’t dressed to insult.  Not because it will matter to the militant.  You can’t stop the militant.  But you can stop ordinary people from listening to the militant.  You can stop people from joining the militant, or having sympathy for his cause.  You can stop making the militant’s job easy.  In the end, there is something fundamentally wrong with the everyday Egyptian left cringing, clutching the family closer, one hand across their children’s eyes.

But I’m not a tour operator.  I work for a humanitarian organization.  And yet I ask the same questions and reach the same answer:  What about our behaviour as aid workers?  We need to stop wearing the day glo orange.  We need to stop making it easy.