Shit you don’t want to hear
1. The best way to design an aid project is to assume everyone involve will do the worst fucking thing possible and plan for that. If you have a water project, assume people will contaminate the improved water source, and leave the tap running if they have taps. If you build special isolation rooms for the hospital, assume they’ll charge private patients to use them as luxury suites. If you train teachers, assume they won’t actually use the training to change how they teach. If you improve the tax revenue collection system, assume the someone in the government will take the money and hide it in a personal offshore account. If you train doctors in permanent birth control, assume they will do it to people without their consent.
2. How you can tell a baby will die: it cries quietly all the time and its mother tells it to shut up. Especially if she’s a girl baby.
3. Loving your children isn’t automatic. People like to say “We all love our children,” like it unites humanity. Bullshit. Look at what people do to their kids. Loving your children is a luxury and you can do it when you have the money, social support, and cultural context to do it. Otherwise children are just a tool required for social status and support in old age. Or an unpleasant consequence of sex. Some people love their children without those things, but they are the outliers, not the norm.
4. That doesn’t mean international adoption is the answer. International adoption is a filthy, cruel industry with a high tolerance for trafficking of children.
Don’t Speak
Something that really pisses me off today is when NGOs claim to speak for the poor.
See, that’s fucked up for at least two reasons:
1) I have never met an NGO who didn’t speak first and foremost for the donor. I have yet to meet an NGO who, when absolutely forced to choose between the donors’ wishes and what the poor actually needed, didn’t eventually come around to side with the donor. Sure, they hemmed and hawed about finding a “mutually beneficial solution” or some lame bullshit like that, but at the end of the day they came around.
It shouldn’t be this way, but NGOs in fact speak for their donors, and the poor are an afterthought, if they’re thought of at all, when it comes to who NGOs speak for with any kind of real conviction. Don’t bother arguing. Don’t grasp at the straws of that one minor example to the contrary. Spare me your flaccid attempts at conjuring up a hypothetical opposite scenario. You know I’m right on this.
2) Presuming to speak for the poor clashes directly with the aid world value of empowering the poor to speak for themselves. Claiming to speak for the poor presumes, first, that the poor are unable to speak for themselves (sometimes they can’t, true, but not nearly as often as is claimed by NGOs), and second, that the NGO is a legitimate proxy.
Every time I see something about “speaking for the poor” coming out of an NGO it’s either fundraising or internal pom-pom waving by and for the sake of marketers and comms staff who don’t know better. Which is indirectly kind of the same thing as fundraising.
We... speak for the P-O-O-R.. yeah baby!
I grew up being taught that what you actually do is what matters, and that what you say you will do is just words. I spent grad school being taught that we can’t speak for others. And I came of age in the aid world being taught that we need to be listening to the poor. Not talking. And certainly not claiming to speak for them.
I’m sick of this bullshit about speaking for the poor.
Are you an Aid Whore?
Here’s a quick test to help you determine who much of an aid whore you are. Take the test – it’ll only take a few minutes – and then compare scores with your aid/NGO worker friends. And don’t worry if your score is higher than you expected—to be completely pure, you’d pretty much have to never accept donor funding and your student loans would never get paid off.
Here’s the test:
Would you….
1) Accept a second or third round of grant funding to repeat programming you know is lame?
2) Put undue positive spin on an evaluation report because you’re friends with the guy at HQ who hired you to write the report, and you want future consultancies?
3) Agree to a non-best-practice donor funded project on the logic that “if you show flexibility and respect the donor’s wishes this time, they’ll be more open to learning about good aid next time”?
4) Agree to send a shipping container full of item X to project Y in country Q because it’s just easier than arguing with the GIK department?
5) For obvious reasons be willing to let the girlfriend of the son of the CEO of your organization be an intern in your country program for a year, even though she’s utterly unqualified?
6) Use donor funding to pay for travel to a 5-day lessons-learned workshop in a city you want to visit because of the shopping, even though you know you could adequately contribute to in a one-page email message?
7) Accept funding from the US DOD?
8 ) Accept funding from the philanthropic foundation of a massive corporation bent on taking over the world?
9) Take the hot intern to lunch and spend two hours spewing cynical ranting. Charge the tab to your “capacity building” budget.
10) Fundraise for disaster response in a country where any of the following apply: a) your organization has no presence (you’ll implement “through local partners”; b) the host government has said it does not want help; c) the situation is high-visibility in the media but it’s not clear that there is a humanitarian need.
=======================
If you answered “yes”…
to four questions: You little slut.
to three or fewer questions: You lying little slut.
to five to seven questions: tramp…
to eight questions: ho…
to nine or more: AID WHORE!!
I Don’t Get It: Cash on Delivery Aid
As far as I can tell, COD aid is predicated on the idea that governments 1) are capable of achieving development goals 2) have the money to achieve the goals and 3) inexplicably don’t achieve their goals anyway.
This does not occur. In my experience, the situations that occur go like this:
Scenario A
The government lacks the capacity to achieve development goals but is well meaning and would if it could. COD doesn’t help, because it can’t deliver to get the cash.
Scenario B
The government has the capacity to achieve development goals but government officials are too busy squeezing every ounce of graft they can out of the country so they don’t bother to do so. COD doesn’t help, because no one gets to skim the cash when delivered if it’s properly managed.
Scenario C
The government has the capacity to achieve development goals but doesn’t do so because it doesn’t have the money. COD doesn’t help because the cash doesn’t come until afterward.
What am I missing? Owen Barder’s not stupid. Nancy Birdsall’s not stupid. Clearly I am the jackass. But I just don’t see it.
Know your role or shut your hole
The Travesty of aid and development NGO corporate culture is that they have all managed to somehow convince themselves that everyone’s voice matters. No one is every really barred from any discussion. Anyone in the entire organization can “raise a concern” about any decision made, no matter who made it. “Good process” might be state-of-the-art in the field, but it clogs the drains at headhindquarters.
That is total bullshit.
Some ideas are dumb. Some people are dumb. Don’t fight it – it’s a reality.
Another reality: The secretary to the executive assistant to the junior VP of advocacy has nothing to contribute to a conversation about micr0finance best-practices in northern Afghanistan.
The single largest hindrance to effective programming is simply the fact that NGOs cannot bring themselves to ban irrelevant people from the conversation. No, I can’t quantify it. But I’m still right.
Here’s a rule of thumb: if you cannot say in a single, short sentence how you are directly relevant to a particular internal discussion, then the easy answer is that you’re not.
Why I don’t like working with children
Pre-frontal cortex, whatever, that’s Hester’s thing.
This is my thing:
The children always think they are the first one to discove teh awful horrors of the aid world!1!
1. The donor asks us to do things that aren’t best practice. Shock Shock!
2. The fundraising department asks us to take degrading pictures!
3. The program development department asks us to take money that doesn’t make any sense!
4. The media misquotes us! Their picture doesn’t look like the real situation!
5. The media ignores us and the baabies are soooo sick. Help us media!
This is a bad hard job and we are asked to do dumb, shitty things that have nothing to do with best practices. The faster you get used to it and work around that, the more useful you are to everyone. The first job kids spend so much time wailing about sad reality that they can’t think beyond their outrage.
I don’t have time for your outrage. It’s valid, but it’s old news to me. When I feel outrage I put it on this here bloggy thing.
And when you, small child, put your outrage on your bloggy thing, it’s boring.
No, I don’t really know the difference.
Sometimes I identify with Dr. Cox
.
Children
Every year it’s the same damn thing:
A bunch of children who’ve done maybe a year in Peace Corps or something flood the NGOs, convinced that they know all kinds of shit the rest of us who actually work in the field of relief or development must have somehow missed in the last ten or so years.
Or maybe even worse, they blog all kinds of plagiarized from their professors pronouncements about development theory.
See, there’s something called a prefrontal cortext. Google it.
Until you’re at least 25 you haven’t got a fully functional prefrontal cortex (takes even longer for men… who woulda thought?). Which means you haven’t got an “executive suite.” Which means you can’t fully appreciate the consequences of your actions or decisions. Which means that you should not be making decisions or leading action that affects the lives of developing world communities. Which means that you should also not be giving anyone advice on anything. It’s not about how smart you are or whether your mamma breastfed you. It’s about the fact that you physically lack the basic hardware needed to fully process cause/long-term effect dynamics.
It’s also not just me being bitchy. This is MIT’s Young Adult Development Project. Google that, too. Or just click the link.
Your age does matter.
Grow prefrontal cortext. Until then, you have nothing to add to the conversation. So stay the fuck off the air.
Tedious Children
God save us all from self-important twentysomethings.
While I’m at it, could everyone with an aid blog who’s never held a paying aid job please shut up and go home.
No, not gonna name names. I’m aiming for a tiny bit of class.
Why NGO Coordination Can Never Work
Simple. Because all NGOs want precisely the same thing:
To be the undisputed grand wizards of whatever disaster response or third world sub-district is under discussion at the moment.
Coordination may mean admitting you suck ass at something and stepping aside to let others do that thing you suck at. Coordination means acknowledging that your organizational capacity has limits and that you can’t go it alone. Follow that logic far enough and you can arrive at the place of admitting that you’re just plain irrelevant. Which flies in the face of the fact that everyone “with a heart for the poor” is relevant by definition.
Coordination is about making public promises, not to helpless beneficiaries who can’t really do anything about it if you default on those promises, but to other agencies who are always looking for a reason to ride your ass. Coordination is just code for “more accountability”, and we sure don’t want that.
Coordination is the opposite of competition, and this is a competitive business. Coordination is about working together. And there are not many things more counterintuitive to the objective of becoming grand wizard than working together.
Why coordinate? These are my poor people. You go piss off and find your own.
