Author: Alanna Shaikh

Christmas

By Alanna Shaikh | | 1 Comments |

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I spent quite a while working on a Christmas post, and finally decided I’m not going to write anything better than last year’s. Last year’s post:

The Christmas story is one of the defining stories of American culture. The fact that I’m Muslim didn’t keep this story from shaping me. On Christmas, I think about the story and what it means for my own life.

Sometimes I think the story is about being just good enough. The innkeeper didn’t throw out an important customer to give Mary and Joseph a room – he wasn’t a hero. But he didn’t send them back outside, either. Instead, he offered them something small. A warm place to sleep. The best he could do without trying too hard, and that was all it took. Jesus was born out of the cold, somewhere safe and friendly. Somewhere good enough.

But the story could be about the animals, whose friendly presence makes the barn a warm and loving place instead of cold and frightening. About the way that ordinary beings, be they people or livestock, can offer extraordinary help to others when they get the chance to do so.

Maybe the story is about the wise men, and the shepherds. The ones with the perception to recognize a miracle when it occurred. How many of us are actually recognize the important things right when they happen?

Mary and Joseph might be the heart of the story – poor, struggling parents just trying to do their best for their child.

I’m not really sure who the most important character in the Christmas story is (beyond the obvious), and I’m not sure there is just one. All great stories have multiple meanings.

I wonder, though, which character I am. I suspect I’m the innkeeper, just trudging along at good enough. Or the parents, since I’m a mother. Or both; I can be more than one character. But most importantly, who do I want to be?

–Merry Christmas to all who celebrate it–

Jargon and Its Discontents

By Alanna Shaikh | | 27 Comments |

I need advice.

A friend of mine is going to be doing some training for journalists on aid and relief work. She asked me what jargon I think journalists need to know, what aid clichés I hate seeing, and any pet peeves in general on reporting about aid work. I had some answers for her, but I thought I could probably collect a lot more by asking the readers of this blog.

So, let’s hear it: What are the words journalists need to know? What are the words to avoid? And how can journalists find the real stories in the aid world?

Here’s my list, to help start the conversation:

1)      Not paying attention to the money. An aid group’s freedom to act is heavily dependent on their donor funding. It’s easy to blame an aid agency for not doing X, but if they’re funded by OFDA to do Y, then X isn’t an option for them.

2)      Lumping all aid groups together, as though they have the same motivation, skill set, and competency.

3)      Getting hung up on either a savior narrative that focuses on one person as a hero, or a villain narrative, that decides all aid is a failure and picks a single agent as scapegoat.

4)      Declaring aid a success or failure without looking at similar aid efforts in other years or locations for context. Not having an actual idea of what success would consist of, yet still declaring failure.

5)      Spending the whole article giving visual descriptions and leaving out actual content.

6)      Taking donor press releases as gospel. Or, alternately, ignoring them.

(photo credit: jovike)

Fundraising and who does it

By Alanna Shaikh | | 8 Comments |

There’s been a lot discussion in the development blogosphere lately about fundraising and the images we use to trigger donations. It’s a serious conversation, and one that interests me. Exactly how much damage do we do when we use condescending portrayals of poor people in NGO ads? Tales from the Hood has an interesting take on it. So does the Good Intentions Are Not Enough blog. Aid Thoughts has a whole series, and Waylaid Dialectic has the iconoclastic view.

But you know that? The whole debate is irrelevant to my life right now. It’s not something I have to think about in my work. Because I work for a company. An employee-owned company that works for the public good, but an actual profit-earning company.

People complain a lot about involving the private sector in development aid, both as donors and as implementers. But I will tell you this: my employer never runs ads featuring scrawny, weeping, big-eyed children. We never have to make sure our logo is in the picture when we take a photograph. Our organizational development department just writes proposals and applies for contracts. No fundraising appeals. No donate link on our website. We don’t send anybody address labels and you sure can’t sponsor a child through us.

International development companies do have to market themselves. But that marketing is a very different game; it’s about looking competent, reliable, and professional in everything they do. They are selling their own skills, not someone else’s pain. (And let’s be fair here. NGOs don’t use heartbreaking pictures because they like to demean people. They use them because they are proven to work. It’s what they have to do to get their funding.)

I’ve worked for NGOs, and the US Government, and universities and the UN and all kinds of places. (I was a consultant; I got around.)  No particular tax status makes for a perfect employer: companies can’t do advocacy the way NGOs can, the UN’s got bureaucracy like fast food has French fries, and universities treat minor politics like blood sport.

On the other hand, for-profits don’t need photo ops. Universities access a nearly bottomless human resource pool and access to cutting edge research. UN agencies have moral authority and sector clout no one else can match. NGOs that do a good job of fundraising can start moving money really really fast when they need to.

This is our field. It has a lot of very different players, with different strengths and weaknesses. I like that. NGOs are not inherently virtuous. Companies are not inherently greedy. It’s a all mixed bag of human beings organized in different ways, attempting to do good things. Doing effective work matters a whole lot more than tax status.

(photo credit: #1millionkittensforAfrica)

The usual disclaimer: I am speaking for myself. These are my views and my views alone. I am not in any way speaking on behalf of my company. I believe in what we do, but I do not speak for the company in this or any other instance.

Five Essential Readings for People Working in Development

By Alanna Shaikh | | 3 Comments |

These are not the books that teach you about development. These are the books that crack your head open so you can start (or continue) to learn.

1.       Anything by Graham Greene. Doesn’t have to be The Quiet American or Our Man in Havana, honest. The Comedians or The Heart of the Matter will do fine. But his take on the world will help guide your own perspective in a way that’s useful. The Portable Graham Greene, while not actually portable, is a nice start.

2.       Biggest Elvis, by P.F. Kluge. The important thing to remember about this book is that it’s not just the narrator who is unreliable, it’s the author. But read it and if you’re paying attention, you’ll see yourself. It’s a warning and a gift of insight to everyone who thinks they know how to help.

3.       Anything by Nahguib Mahfouz. I actually find his writing a little dry in English – Mahfouz’s true genius as an author is the way he uses the Arabic language. But he also writes deeply felt, emotionally resonant stories about the lives of poor people, set in one of the world’s biggest, oldest, poorest cities. Children of the Alley is a good example, and it’s faster than reading the whole Cairo trilogy.

4.       Prague, by Arthur Phillips. Okay, the Amazon reviews really hate this book. But I think it’s a dark and brilliant reflection on expatriate life and it has changed the way I see my place in the world. (Not necessarily for the better.)

5.       Orientalism, by Edward Said. Surprise! Nonfiction! I’d say about 50% of development programs that go horribly wrong do so because of orientalism on the part of the foreigners involved. Even programs outside the Middle East. Said is writing about the Arab World, but the larger issue is about how we perceive the other, and that’s a universal problem. This book is considered one of the most important of the 20th century, and I totally agree.

Note: these are affiliate links. If you’re going to buy a book, I may as well get a miniscule percentage of its value.

(photo credit: Lin Pernille)

More Pie: Some Thinking on World AIDS Day

By Alanna Shaikh | | 4 Comments |

Pumppie cake

(Two delicious pies baked into a cake. We should think big.)

The most common complaint about World AIDS Day goes like this – HIV already gets the lion’s share of global health funding and attention. Why don’t we pay attention to diarrhea/pneumonia/NTDs/indoor air pollution for a change? Ten years ago, I would have agreed with that argument. Diarrhea and pneumonia and NTDs and indoor air pollution do need more funding and more attention. It’s infuriating that they don’t get it.

But here’s what I have figured out in the last decade: we can have more pie. Differently put, global health is not a zero-sum game. We can increase the funding that goes to it. In the last ten years, we have. The Global Fund and the Gates Foundation have radically increased the resources available to global health. The private sector has started funding global health, and government donors have increased their commitments.

There is nothing wrong with so much attention going to AIDS. HIV gets exactly as much attention as it deserves. It’s the second most terrifying pandemic of our time. (I really think first place belongs to MDR TB.) About two million people a year die from AIDS, and there are about 33 million people currently infected with HIV. It is devastating to communities, families, and nations. It is worthy of every red ribbon, activist, and dollar of funding it receives.

What is wrong is that other health problems don’t get as much attention. And that’s not a problem we solve by ignoring HIV. It’s a problem we solve by bringing more attention to the rest of the world’s serious health problems. We should learn from the publicity for HIV, not complain about it. What we need is to get that kind of attention for everything that deserves it.

I wanted to post this on World AIDS day, but ended up writing for two other blogs instead. (End the Neglect and UN Dispatch, both worth reading, I like to believe.)

The Words I Don’t Use

By Alanna Shaikh | | 42 Comments |

International development is infamous for its constant, jargony, changes in vocabulary. It’s not the third world, it’s the developing world. It’s not the bottom billion, it’s an ascending market. They’re not people living with AIDS (PLWA), they are people living with HIV (PLHIV). It seems ridiculous, because it kind of is, and we all get tired.

But I do believe in the power of words to shape the way we think. It’s easy to laugh at each new acronym update, but vocabulary does affect how we frame things. So there are a few words and phrases I never use, because I think they lead us in the wrong directions:

1) Beneficiaries – I never use this word unless I am contractually obligated to do so. I know that it serves a useful purpose as a standard term for the people a project serves, but I don’t like it. It implies that people are sitting around passively waiting for a savior to help them. No project works if they don’t have partners to make it work. Even handing out lollipops to children requires children who’ll take candy from strangers and parents who’ll permit it and get the children to the lollipop distribution site.

Your partners might be a community, a local government, or a community organization. But those people are not passively benefitting. They are helping make the project happen.

2) Individuals – This word is just a synonym for “people.” But it’s a cold, formal word that helps you forget that the individuals involved are actual human being people.

3) The Poor – Pretending that poor people are a homogenous collective is poor thinking, and dehumanizing. People fall in and out of poverty for a whole range of reasons, and they cope with poverty in different ways. Fighting poverty requires that we recognize that, and terms like “the poor” are a barrier. (That bring said, two great books – The Poor and Their Money, and Portfolios of the Poor – use the phrase.)

4) Africa – Okay, there are appropriate ways to use this proper noun. Like in a discussion of continental geography. Then there are all the other ways: lumping all the nations on the continent together, as though Senegal and Somalia are exactly the same; using “Africa” in the name of your tiny MONGO that works in one village in Uganda; getting confused and lumping China, Russia, and Africa together as though they are equivalent political units. Let’s stop.

Photo credit: thinkretail

Please let’s stop talking about PPPs

By Alanna Shaikh | | 6 Comments |

As you might guess, I didn’t originally write this post for this blog. But no one else wants it, so I’ll publish the poor orphaned post myself.

The term public-private partnerships don’t get explained much. They partnerships a lot of attention, but it’s such common vocabulary that no one ever stops to explain it. That’s okay, though, because it’s a useless term.

A public-private partnership is any collaboration between public bodies – like a government, the UN, or an NGO – and a business entity. That’s all. Public organization working with a private one. A pharmaceutical company donating drugs to UNICEF or a developing country government. A consulting firm offering free services to the Global Fund. A local government providing start-up capital to a business that may serve a public good.

Personally, I think this piece of jargon has pretty much outlived its usefulness. It doesn’t describe an unusual situation, help corporations understand their role, or serve as an accurate or specific term. We should retire it.

Ten years ago, when private sector business rarely got involved in development, we needed special vocabulary to encourage them. “Public-private partnership” sounds reassuring. “You’re not in this alone, frightened little corporation! You’re in a partnership. The UN will help you, we promise!” The special term helped to normalize business participating in international development efforts.

Now, though, it’s pretty much become the norm. Businesses get involved in international development and global health all the time. They don’t need supportive language to help them understand that they belong. They have decided it’s in their interest to support global health, and that’s pretty much enough to motivate a profit-making entity.

Because it’s the norm, we also don’t need special exclusive language that sets apart business-funded development work from work funded by government or private donors. Those are not the traditional donors any more; people expect that there will be corporate involvement in global health, for example. So we don’t need to single out public-private partnerships as a special case. They’re just one of the many ways that we fund international development work.

It’s also a term that is so general it’s useless. For all that it was supposed to helpfully describe a special kind of health or development effort, instead it’s meaningless. I mean, what if the US government hires an international development company like Casals Associates to implement a development effort? Why isn’t that a public-private partnership?  If Oxfam buys plane tickets for its employees, why is that not a public-private partnership?

The horse has left the barn. The bird has flown the coop, and you can never get those square foam pieces to fit back into the box once you’ve opened it. The corporation has entered the hen house, and it’s pretty much okay with the hens. Public-private partnerships vary, to a huge degree. It’s not useful to try to lump them all together, any more than it is to assume all official development assistance is the same. This new world of business participation in global health needs a new vocabulary to describe it.