Author: Alanna Shaikh

International Development – a bibliography

By Alanna Shaikh | | 4 Comments |

Here’s my bibliography for learning about international development. It’s not exhaustive – more the very basics as a starting point. Overall, I like books for theory and background, articles for technical information and detail, and blogs for the on-the-ground perspective and a peek into the industry of development. I don’t think theory helps with a sense of how development work actually gets done (that’s my major critique of Easterly, in fact) and I don’t think you can actually do this work well without some kind of background on the picture of what development is and what its goals are.

Books

William Easterly,  The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists’ Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001.

Ruth Levine,  Millions Saved: Proven Successes in Global Health. Washington: Center for Global Development, 2004.

Carol Lancaster,  Foreign Aid: Diplomacy, Development, Domestic Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.

Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom. New York: Anchor, 2000.

Articles

JR McNeil, “The World According to Jared Diamond”

Roger Bate, “The Trouble with USAID” American Enterprise Institute. May 23, 2006.

USAID White paper

Brian Atwood, Peter McPherson, and Andrew Natsios, Arrested Development

Blogs

Chris Blattman’s Blog

From Poverty to Power

Center for Global Development Blogs

World Bank Private Sector Development Blog

Owen Barder

The Bottom Billion Blog

Aid Watch

Does poverty make people cruel?

By Alanna Shaikh | | 5 Comments |

A Tajik colleague told me, quite a while ago, that poverty makes people cruel. It stuck in my mind. The way she said it, as an absolute truism, resonated and reminded me of the cruel things I have seen poor people do. Mothers who sell their daughters in sex slavery, for example, or the horrors exerted on child laborers in Bangladesh. Or even, on a level down, the awful treatment of animals in many developing countries.

It seems impossible to argue that poverty leads to cruel things. Not really an interesting or disputed point. The real question, I suppose, is whether wealth also leads to cruelty. When you consider systemic cruelty, the answer is yes. The factory owner who benefits from child labor is as culpable as the parents who give their children to the factory. Probably more culpable, since the factory owner could make money in another way.

I posed the question of poverty and cruelty on Twitter, and I think that Ian Thorpe gave me the best answer. He suggested that inequality makes people cruel. That explains the people on the bottom end of the pyramid forced into cruel actions and cruel choices, and the people on the top end, so far from poverty that poor people and their problems no longer seem real to them. It’s easy to be cruel when you can’t see your victims. Or when you think their problems are inevitable and can’t be solved. Or when you think poor people make themselves poor or even aren’t quite human. Inequality creates the kind of distance that makes that happen.

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(photo credit: myradphotos)

Chosen because it shows one of the cruelest forms of child labor.

Local vs Imported Solutions, and Ashton Kutcher

By Alanna Shaikh | | 0 Comments |

I just put up three posts at the Global Health blog that Blood and Milk readers may be interested in. There is a two-part series on local and imported solutions to health problems, focused on plumpy’nut and ORS. I also posted a brief rant about Ashton Kutcher and bednets for malaria.

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(photo credit: cliff1066)

The bare bones of prepping for an international career

By Alanna Shaikh | | 23 Comments |

I’ve had several requests lately for career advice and assistance. That makes me think it’s a good time to repeat some basic points. Here are Alanna’s essential five things to have any hope of getting a job in international development:

1. Get an office job while you’re still in school. As I’ve written, most development work is office work. You need to prove you can handle an office every day. Really, the only way to do that is to have an office job. Do it in the summers if you can’t hack it while in school. Office work is not the most profitable way to spend your time, but it will be worth it later.

2. Study something useful at university. For example, technical subjects like nursing and IT are useful. Epidemiology is useful. A master’s degree is more useful than an undergrad degree.

3. Learn to write. I don’t mean you need to be a novelist, but with practice everybody can write a clear, useful report at decent speed. Have writing samples to prove you can do it.

4. Study a second language. You don’t have to get all that good at it, but making the effort demonstrates you are willing to commit yourself to international and intercultural work. If you are already bilingual, you don’t have to learn a third language. People will assume you are good at intercultural navigation.

5. I think this is the hardest one: Have a goal for what you want to do, that’s specific but not too specific. “I am interested in food security and emergency relief” has a good level of specificity. “I want to work for UNDP” is too specific. “I am interested in women’s empowerment, reproductive health, and community development” is too vague. There is kind of an art to this; basically you want to give people a sense of who you are and what you want. Too broad and they don’t have any sense of you. To narrow and you’ve ruled out too many jobs. If you’re having trouble with this, it’s a good thing to talk over with a mentor. (Yes, if you don’t have a mentor, I will help. Within reason.)

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(photo credit: foxtongue)

Chosen because it nicely displays the misery of the job hunt. And it was either this or a bone pun.

How to ride in a white SUV

By Alanna Shaikh | | 9 Comments |

1. Look sheepish, like you would never been in this huge vehicle if you weren’t forced into it by overprotective security officers.

2. Look ill. Maintain a greenish-grey visage that makes it clear that if you weren’t so terribly ill, you’d be on a local bus at this very moment.

3. Ride with someone older than you, and develop a facial expression that indicates you are just the gormless flunky riding involuntarily in the VIP car.

4. Fill your vehicle with boxes and bags, to make it clear that the SUV is hauling important equipment and you’re just along for the ride.

5. Wear your damn seatbelt. If you’re going to cruise around in a symbol of oblivious neo-imperialism you owe it to world to be safe.

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(photo credit: hoyasmeg)

Humanitarian neutrality isn’t dead because it never existed

By Alanna Shaikh | | 6 Comments |

Humanitarian neutrality is dead. The sooner we stop mauling its rotting corpse, the better off we’ll all be. In fact, I don’t believe humanitarian neutrality ever existed. It’s not a corpse at all; it’s a figment of our imagination that we’re finally abandoned. The provision of humanitarian aid changes the dynamics of a conflict situation. It is therefore inherently not neutral, and it was naive to ever believe it could be.

Mary Anderson started talking about do no harm in 1994, and recognized that aid has an impact on the conflict, and is therefore never neutral. It was naive of us to ever pretend it was. Here’s what she had to say: “All aid programmes involve the transfer of resources (food, shelter, water, health care, training, etc.) into a resource-scarce environment. Where people are in conflict, these resources represent power and wealth and they become an element of the conflict.”

The targeting of NGO workers in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia is appalling, and brutally dangerous. But what protected Medecins Sans Frontieres and the International Rescue Committee in Afghanistan in the 90s was not some airy-fairy belief in neutrality. It was the Taliban’s belief that the NGOs were not keeping the Taliban from achieving its goals. Combatants in Afghanistan no longer believe that, or are not organized enough to enforce rules. Mourning the end of neutrality is a dangerous sidetrack that keeps the real issue from being addressed.

All of that being said, I think that a particular NGO or project can nonetheless be known as honest and fair and therefore have a humanitarian space to operate in. But that’s not based on an abstract concept of neutrality or humanitarian space. It’s based on earning the trust and respect of local populations, and on convincing all sides of the conflict that your provision of aid will not turn the tables against them. That’s not an easy game to play, but it’s the only one we have. And, despite histrionics to the contrary, it’s the only game we’ve ever had.

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(photo credit: DVIDSHUB)

Chosen for pretty obvious reasons.

They’re looking right back

By Alanna Shaikh | | 5 Comments |

When I worked for IMC, we used to take our Iraq country director around to meetings in DC and NY whenever he was in the US. It wasn’t just for fundraising or to raise awareness about Iraq. People didn’t tend to believe that you could actually do relief and development work in Iraq, because of the danger and the complexity. We’d take our guy to them and he’d explain how you could do it. His meetings were a powerful tool, much more effective than a report could have been.

One question he fielded over and over was “Do your partners in Iraq know that you’re funded by the US government?”

His answer was always the same. “We have Google in Iraq, too.”

In our interconnected world, you can’t hide from the communities you work with. That’s a good thing. It’s much easier to treat people with respect when you know that they’re watching you. Transparency is part of accountability, whether or not that transparency is voluntary. I think that’s part of development 2.0. We’re not just going somewhere and learning the local situation so we can do our work; they are looking right back at us, and they’ve got the tools to disseminate their views.

On a related note: Development work is slow and frustrating. Community partners can drive you completely nuts. There are cultural barriers you can’t get past, easily-solved problems that never find resolution anyway. It’s easy to get bitter and angry. Whatever you do, don’t blog about it. How would the people in this guy’s town feel if they learned just how much he despises them?

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(photo credit: Onno B.)