Month: September 2008

Things I believe in #14 – writing all your documents in clear, simple language

By Alanna Shaikh | | 0 Comments |

There are two big reasons that clear writing is important. First of all, it lets as many people as possible understand what you have to say. Secondly, writing clearly forces you to think clearly; it improves the quality of your ideas.

Using jargon-free writing appeals to the largest possible audience. Experts in your field can still comfortably read your reports, but non-experts can understand them, too. It takes a little more work to find understandable terminology for technical ideas, but doing your best is well worth it. Your donors, staff members, and the people you serve probably don’t have the background to read a jargon-dense article, and these are your most important audiences. There may be a few highly-targeted documents that need to be heavy on technical terms, but even then you can still write well.

Using jargon-free writing also forces you to think about what you’re saying. Jargon makes people’s attention – even your own – slide away. If you write that you are going to “include stakeholders in decision-making,” you don’t have to stop and think about who, exactly, you will include or how you’ll make them part of your decisions. Jargon is an obstacle to good planning. Clear, specific language, on the other hand, leads to clear, specific thinking and plans.

(Here’s a tip: if you are so far into the belly of the beast that you can’t tell what is jargon any more, read your writing out loud. Anything that stumbles off your tongue should be removed.)

Ethics and International Development

By Alanna Shaikh | | 1 Comments |


On the surface, relief and development seems like the simplest, most ethical work in the world. Helping people in need looks easy. Like most work worth doing, though, it’s extraordinarily complicated.

These are just a few, representative, ethical dilemmas:

1. Giving stuff instead of training and capacity building creates a culture of dependency. People rely on what you are giving them instead of finding a way to get it themselves. They get in the habit of looking outside their communities for positive change. And when you stop providing aid, they’ll have lost the skill of providing for themselves. Providing training and technical assistance requires huge amounts of money to be paid to outside experts, while leaving immediate needs unmet.

2. Hiring your staff locally and paying them well distorts the local labor market and pulls local talent away from government, local NGOs, and other domestic institutions. Paying market average salaries makes it hard to recruit and retain staff. It leaves your staff struggling to survive, and guarantees resentment of expatriate employees. Programs based on expat labor don’t help the local economy, and they cost a fortune.

3. Following host government policy will often require you to move so slowly that people suffer, waiting for your programs to get going. You may be forced to use outdated models for your programs. Ignoring host government policy erodes local capacity and weakens the government, which can lead to mass suffering if the government loses control of the country.

4. Paying bribes to get things done promotes a culture of corruption and is illegal under US law. Refusing to pay bribes will get you kicked out of the country, abandoning your partner communities.

5. Working with institutions such as orphanages and homes for the disabled provides help to the most vulnerable segments of the population. Orphanages and institutions, however, have been conclusively demonstrated to be the worst approach to care. Your assistance in improving these places may help to keep them in existence and encourage placing children in them.

I am not telling you to get depressed and give up. I’m really not; doing nothing also has terrible consequences. I am telling you to think about the choices you make and what those choices mean. Look for the unintended consequences of your programs. Do your homework. Red about similar efforts, what went right and what went wrong. Talk to your local staff and other NGOs.

You will have to make choices that cause damage. Make sure your positive impact is exponentially greater.

(photo credit: edmittance)

Jargon of the day: Women’s time poverty

By Alanna Shaikh | | 0 Comments |


Jargon: Women’s time poverty

Translation: Women in the developing world tend to have substantially less time than men do, because of the burden of household chores and child care. This means that women have more difficult accessing medical care, for example, because they cannot spare the time to go to a clinic.

What we can learn from graffiti

By Alanna Shaikh | | 2 Comments |


Let’s talk about graffiti. May Karp, a Toronto photographer, went around taking pictures of legally-produced murals and other outdoor graffiti art. Then she blew up the photos very large and displayed and sold them in a gallery show, without providing context or the names of the artists. To her shock and disappointment, the graffiti artists whose work she’d photographed were furious. They banded together and had her show shut down despite her protests that she just wanted to share their unique art with the world. The artists, it seemed, didn’t want to share their talent with the world. They wanted credit and fair pay. (Full story here.)

The really fun part is that this has happened before. A New York dentist collected graffiti photos into a book called “Tattooed Walls,” which also met with outrage from the artists. He also hadn’t thought to credit the artists involved or compensate them.

This is the kind of thing that very easily happens in development work. It’s the kind of blunder made by well-meaning Westerners, especially small NGOs and social entrepreneurs. It’s easy to come in, see a “problem,” and work to solve it instead of taking enough time to listen and learn the true situation. The thing is, though, you have to provide what people actually need. If Ms. Karp or Dr. Rosenstein had made contact with the graffiti artists and asked if they wanted to be part of their projects, they would never have run into trouble, because the artists would have told them no.

If you actually want to help, make it useful and don’t assume you know what useful is. Ms. Karp and Dr. Rosenstein were either too intimidated by graffiti culture to reach out to artists, or too arrogant to even remember their existence. Neither of these are attitudes that lead to useful work.

(Side note: I suspect them of both. Dr. Rosenstein said, “I wanted to bond with them and become friends with them,” but claimed he couldn’t locate the artists. Ms. Karp said she wanted to “preserve these amazing works from the outdoor elements, from the white-wash brigades, even from other artists who paint over them. It is now possible for artists who follow the principles of good art to come in from the outside and show their work on gallery walls.” Since many graffiti artists are shown in galleries, this was breathtaking condescension.)

Finding out what people actually need is an art and a science. There’s a huge body of research devoted to it, which I won’t drag you back through. (Here are a few resources.)

It pretty much boils down to 1) asking people what they need and 2) getting real, quantitative and qualitative data about the situation. It takes some time and effort, but it’s not difficult to do, and it makes the difference between a city full of angry graffiti artists and a treasured labor of love. Once someone tried to talk to them, it became clear that the helpless marginalized artists that Karp and Rosenstein wanted to help and support were neither helpless nor marginalized.

(Art Credit: Artwork by Reyes, Photo by funkandjazz)

The ferry from Nuweiba

By Alanna Shaikh | | 0 Comments |


In spring 1998 I was sitting in a dusty Egyptian ferry terminal waiting to go to Aqaba. On the bench across from me, there sat a man, two women (his wife and her sister, I thought) and a small baby being passed between the women. Eventually, after a flurry of distressed-sounding Arabic, the two women decamped in the direction of the bathroom, leaving the baby with its father. The man held the baby for about a minute, propped in his lap, starting at it and looking discomfited. Then he stood up, looked sheepish, and handed the baby to me. He returned to his newspaper. I sat with the baby, more than a little confused.

I came to the conclusion, while holding that child, that in his own culture, the father had done nothing wrong. In his world, men were bad with babies, inherently. Women were good with babies, inherently. The safest, kindest thing he could do for his child was to hand it off to a woman until mommy returned. A little baby simply did not belong with a man. If he wanted his child to be happy, the best he could do was give it to a woman. I was pretty pleased with myself for figuring this out, and for not letting my American cultural biases blind me.

Then, the wife and sister came back, exclaimed with distress at the sight of a strange woman holding the baby, grabbed it from me (with, to be fair, apologetic looks) and spent the next 20 minutes berating the father for his idiocy.

Cultural differences are larger than you could ever imagine, and they matter tremendously. But it’s not always a cultural thing. Sometimes people are just jerks.

(photo of the Aqaba-Nuweiba ferry by Ashraf Al-Mansur)