Author: Alanna Shaikh

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 You may be forced to use outdated models for your programs.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)

Why donor coordination is so difficult

By Alanna Shaikh | | 1 Comments |


Donors don’t fail to coordinate out of stupidity or greed. Donors fail to coordinate because coordination is really hard.

First of all, donors give for a lot of reasons. Certainly they want to support international development, but they have secondary needs. Domestic constituencies need to support foreign aid, or the money to support it vanishes. A nation may have strategic goals in a particular country or region, and it may have laws governing what kind of aid it can provide. All of these factors mean that nations end up making their foreign assistance plans alone.

When the time comes for donors to coordinate, they can’t just make their plans together. Instead, they’re forced to take existing plans and somehow make their plans fit together. There is very little room to modify or change what’s been developed. More often than not, donors do one of two things. They claim regions of a country, one per donor, or they just make a big list of who’s doing what and where, and call that list coordination.

Everyone involved is making a good faith effort to do foreign aid better, but the institutional roadblocks are hard to overcome.

A lot of people have asked me to write about Accra. I’m not going to – that kind of high-level stuff is not my specialty, and there is an awful lot of good writing out there already. (CGD, whom you know I adore, has a good summary here.)

(photo credit Don Nunn)

What should I study if I want a career in international development?

By Alanna Shaikh | | 8 Comments |


You can go two ways on this (at least) and it depends on your basic skills and aptitude.

The first option is acquiring some hard skills. Engineering, nursing, IT, and teaching or training are good examples. An appropriate terminal degree, combined with a minor in a foreign language (not French or Spanish unless you can become fluent. Turkish and Urdu are good choices for poor language learners as they are a little easier to learn and yet are exotic enough that no one expects fluency. If you’re good with languages, go with one of the major difficult ones – Russian, Arabic, or Mandarin Chinese) or international relations will open a lot of doors.

The second option is to study international development and/or its related disciplines. This will require a graduate degree and it covers a lot of different study options; I’d include international or public health, public policy, conflict studies, “development studies” and the big one, development economics. The trick to this path is that it can be very hard to go abroad with these kinds of degrees, because you’re not really doing anything a development project needs in the field. You run the risk of getting tracked into headquarters-based jobs – academia or think tank if you’re lucky, program backstopping if you’re not so lucky. The best way to mitigate that risk is to acquire whatever hard skills you can (grantwriting is a good one) while in school, and intern as much as humanly possible. Abroad if you can, of course.

Anyone want to talk about their own study and where it led them?

ETA: Ethan Zuckerman commented below and mentioned a big thing I left off – time overseas. If you want a job in the developing world, people will feel a whole lot better if they already know you can hack living there. I talk about this in my Damsels in Success post a bit. One useful thing to say here: STUDY ABROAD. It’s the easiest way to fully immerse yourself in another culture. And choose somewhere tough. Auckland or Paris does not count. I did my own study abroad in Cairo, and I know that employers saw that as clear evidence that I could adapt easily in other places. (And they’re right – if you can live in downtown Cairo, you can live almost anywhere.)

(photo credit: clarkstown67)