Blood and Milk

I was recently lucky enough to receive a review copy of Fighting for Darfur, Rebecca Hamilton’s new book on the Darfur advocacy movement. In the book, she attempts to answer the big questions: what was the impact of the Darfur advocacy movement on US policy? And how much could the US actually influence the situation, anyway?

I’ll put up my review on Tuesday, but I’ll get us started now, with a brief interview I did with Rebecca last week:

AS: What made you decide to write this book?

RH: Genuine curiosity on my part. I was at Harvard being supervised by Samantha Power, talking to the people who believed that creating an outcry would make a difference. As it became clear it wasn’t working, I wanted to know why.

AS: Did writing the book upset anyone?

RH: It was a genuine research question, and the people I was speaking to had similar questions themselves. They also wanted to know if this isn’t working, then what are we doing wrong? It was probably helpful that I came from that movement, and that I really made an effort to talk to people in the advocacy movement. I didn’t come at this with a certain belief. My position was that for the most part, most advocates were driven by good impulses, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be critical of what they ended up doing.

I wasn’t coming into this with an agenda, and people trusted that.

AS: Fighting for Darfur is a book about the Darfur advocacy movement, not necessarily Darfur itself. If people want to read a companion book about just the situation in Darfur, what would you suggest?

RH: A Short History of a Long War, by Alex de Waal.

AS: In the book, you talk about lessons we can learn about advocating on genocide. Are there lessons that international advocacy in general can take from this?

RH: Be clear about what your theory of change is. I think the advocacy community – and I was part of this as a student activist – took too much for granted about what the right theory of change was. It was derived from Rwanda and didn’t update for new context. Not only because Darfur was not Rwanda but because the world had changed and the US position in the world has changed, and pushing Washington was one very small part of the story.

Recognize we are not in a position where the US has ultimate hard and soft power in every situation of mass atrocity. It’s also about how to move other actors in the global geopolitical realm.

None of these things are facts. Part of the problem with Darfur is that we took the lessons of Rwanda and just superimposed them. I hope the message people take away is not just to cut and paste directly onto the next situation. In another decade the may be situations where the US is the best actor.

We have to be very careful about how we apply lessons learned.

AS: Were there subjects you’d like to have covered in more detail in the book but didn’t get the chance?

RH: The draft I submitted was nearly twice the size of what I submitted. I felt hugely constrained by word limits. There was so much. I was already pulling together 2 strands of the story – the advocacy community and the diplomatic realm, so the third strand of Darfur I had to remove. I had to take out broader questions on peacekeeping and what we can expect of peacekeepers.

The other was spending more time on this shifting geopolitical moment, where US influence is not at its height but it’s not clear what role China and BRIC will play in preventing mass atrocities. It would have been nice to keep in those broader questions.

AS: Do you have another book project planned? What are you doing right now?

I have ideas on new projects, but for the moment I feel like I haven’t finished this one. I still have a lot of work to do just getting the messages from Fighting for Darfur out into the public realm, and I want to focus on that.

I recently got an email from a reader frustrasted by how little he has learned after 30 years of being a donor to international developement causes. With his permission, I am posting our email exchange here:

The letter

I have been giving to aid organizations such as Oxfam America and Trickle Up for over 30 years. Yet my thinking has not benefited from 30 years of direct feedback. I have no independent means of hearing from the people served by these organizations.

Recently, it occurred to me that I should focus on a single region in a particular country where there is a program in place. I would see if I could develop direct relationships with people in that region. Then I would be exposed to different perspectives.

Is it plausible to think that using modern forms of communication, I might be able to form lasting long-term relationships that would give me a useful, local perspective on various aid efforts?

I am also wondering if a problem such as malaria might offer a way to partner with others who are working in the target region.

Are these sorts of relationships for two-way learning and long-term problem solving possible? Can individuals learn from each other and not have the learning mediated by the media or aid organizations?

My Answer

You’re up against one of the most frustrating situation for a committed donor: it feels like throwing your money down a well sometimes. You can’t tell if things are changing because they change so slowly, and when they do change you can’t tell how much of it was because of you. I think that feeling is a big part of what drives the current trend toward randomized controlled trials on international development interventions.

In terms of connecting with people who actually interact with aid programs, I think the answer is a qualified yes. Most of the developing world is rapidly coming online and using social media in particular. People are using the internet even when they don’t have water or consistent electricity.

However, the question that comes to mind for me is: what’s in it for them? What is the motivation for a 22-year-old Malawian to communicate with you about aid programs and their impact on her life? You would benefit from getting a local perspective on where your money goes, but how does your dialogue partner benefit? Their time is valuable and internet access is not free – why should they spend that on you?

If you can find a way past that hurdle, then I think yes, interpersonal learning is completely possible.

One final thought for you – are you familiar with the work of GiveWell.org? I don’t agree with all their conclusions, but they do an excellent job of identifying organizations that perform, and share, genuine impact evaluations. You might consider shifting your giving to such an organization.

(photo credit: jaymiek)

Note: I had to restore my site from an old backup to solve a link injection problem. I had to republish this post, and lost all the great comments. I’m sorry!

A subscriber to the International Development Careers List asked me a question that really wasn’t about jobs the other day. I figured I’d answer it here, on the blog, instead of on the list. He asked me

“Reading on to all the writing around how we “don’t know” how to solve / what works for global poverty/issues and that to some degree a lot of the agencies are just trying out methods?”

If I parse the question correctly, he wants to know – are development organizations just making all this up? If we don’t know what works, then why are we doing it?

This is where I stop to point out that I am not a development economist. I am not an economist at all. I took four college-level classes in econ as an undergrad, and I’ve spent the last decade and a bit working for development projects. So all I have is a gut feeling and a resume.  That being said, I do think about this stuff. As does almost everyone I know who works in this field.

I don’t think that anyone is making their programs up. I think that sometimes we delude ourselves about the quality of our evidence. We are so sure we have the right approach that we start mistaking all our intermediate results for actual impact. So a lot of programs end up based on doubtful evidence. Especially big, broad-based programs intended to reduce poverty or achieve some other massive societal goal.

Even if you’re committed to making all decisions based on evidence, it’s hard to measure if that kind of program works. We can end up using proxy measurements that may or may not be accurate.

Next, I think we have evidence for a lot of smaller, targeted programs. We know how to improve child survival. We know how to improve school attendance. We know how to improve the agricultural productivity of small farms. We know quite clearly what it takes to do specific things that we hope will then reduce poverty. We just don’t know that these kinds of specific things actually do reduce poverty.

In the end, I am not sure it matters. While we shouldn’t fund poverty reduction programs if they don’t actually reduce poverty, that argument doesn’t hold true for, say, bringing down the maternal mortality rate. Fewer dead mothers is an inherent good. I don’t really care if it also helps with poverty reduction.

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(photo credit: fdecomite)

I’ve spent a long time arguing that I’m not an aid worker. I do my job in an office; I’m not on any kind of front line. I am not an emergency responder, and I don’t put my life at risk for my job. I’ve always said that I work in international development. I have never thought of myself as someone who “works in aid.” I work in global health, on health systems strengthening. When I’m not doing donor reporting, I don’t think all that much about the source of the funds for my work.

But the fact is, it’s kind of presumptuous to say that I work in international development. As Lee Crawfurd pointed out in response to my last blog post, aid and projects implemented with aid funding are one part of international development. Economic and trade policy are other, more important parts. You can, and do, get development without aid. I’m pretty sure you don’t get it without economic growth.

Lee elaborated on his point in an email to me:

“Policy reforms by the US and UK governments on non-aid issues could have substantially bigger impacts upon the lives of the global poor than all of the aid in the world. We should not be content with just doing aid well, and we should not be giving the impression to the public that they can just donate something and then forget about it.”

So, since I work on aid-funded projects, in my own little corner of trying to promote international development, there’s no real way around it: I am, in fact, an aid worker. When you work exclusively in aid, it’s easy to forget what a small part of the whole you are. (I decided not to edit the last post to fix my language, because if I am going to make sloppy mistakes in public, the least I can do is leave them out there so other people can avoid repeating them.)

Another useful thing that came up in my last post: Matthew Greenall reminded us that there are actually two metastories about aid, not just one. I was writing about the positive metastory. There is also the negative frame: aid doesn’t work, aid can never work, either because everything is too screwed up for any intervention of any kind to make a difference or because all the actors providing aid are stupid and incompetent. We’ve seen that metastory a lot about Haiti.

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photo credit

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)

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.

My final impressions of the MDG summit, the UNGA sessions I saw on the web, and the Clinton Global Initiative boiled down to three main things: optimism, self-interest, and the private sector.

1)      Optimism: there was a relentless focus on the achievements that have been made to date toward the MDGs, rather than much discussion of how far we have to go. We’ve missed the boat already on many of the Millennium Development Goals, and that really didn’t come up all that much. It could be manufactured, as ODI suggests on their blog. Or it could reflect the fact that we all knew that we’d miss the MDGs anyway. It’s not a surprise that we’re falling short at this point.

2)      Self-interest: Over and over, speakers talked about the benefit to the donor of supporting international development. Both President Obama and Secretary Clinton talked about development’s benefits to the United States, and about development as a pillar of US foreign policy. Corporate representatives talked about the benefit of international development to the private sector. Even Greenpeace, at their closing session at the Digital Media Lounger, talked about the economic benefits of green energy.

It seems we’ve given up on human altruism, and now we’re framing our moral imperatives as self-interest. As long as it works to support development, it’s okay with me. But I wonder what happens when development doesn’t show the immediate benefit to the wealthy world that we’ve been promised?

3)      Private Sector: I wrote about this on the End the Neglect blog but it bears repeating. The partnership of business with NGOs and governments was a big story this week. Coca-Cola was everywhere, and other companies were right there with Coke. The private sector has decided it’s in their interest to support development, and governments have decided it’s time to encourage it. This is going to have a huge impact on the way international development efforts are supported and implemented. I doubt that impact is going to be 100% positive.

Disclosure: I attended UN Week as an Oxfam VOICE, which funded my trip as part of an effort to increase awareness of the MDGs.

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photo credit: Francisco Diez