Time to tell the truth about aid?

The UK public is being sold a story about aid that is entirely misleading and highly immoral – and charities, politicians and journalists are all complicit in peddling the tale.  (And yes, I’m guilty.)

As David Cameron appears to have reneged on his promise to enshrine foreign aid spending in law, we need to realise that the story about aid is being entirely misrepresented.

It’s a story goes as follows:  “Wealthy countries have been charitably giving to poor ones for decades.”  And that’s it – not a complicated story.  It understandably leads people to question whether, when facing difficult times at home, we can afford to continue to be so generous overseas.

But the story’s warped.  The image of aid is a lie.

The notion that resources flow in one direction only – from wealthy countries to poor – is so far from the truth it would be laughable if it wasn’t such a terrible tragedy.

The truth is the rich world has been ransacking what we call ‘developing countries’ for decades, hindering the so-called ‘development’ we profess to support. We have stolen their wealth, taken control and destabilised their governance, fuelled corruption, made it impossible for them to earn a fair living through trade, and devastated their environment.

Each year through practices like tax evasion, unfair trade, debt payments, unethical recruitment of health workers and unfair sharing of the costs related to climate change, rich countries steal far, far more from poor countries than they then return through ‘aid’.

How dare we use that word!  It’s like someone getting away with breaking into my home and stealing everything I have – then feeling a bit bad, giving me a food parcel to feed the kids, and calling that charity.

So let’s not call this payment ‘aid’.  Call it ‘reparation’.  Call it ‘compensation’.  Call it “Giving back a percentage of what we’ve stolen this year” – not snappy, but at least it’d be true.  But not aid.  Aid suggests charity, and we have no right to call it that.

This isn’t just an argument about honesty and good taste.  The point is that the language of aid portrays a false story, and this false story is the one that the public react to.  It has devastating political consequences.

The picture of repeated hand-outs hides the truth from the public.  The truth is that we in the rich world are collectively taking much more from the poor than we give back each year, and really the poor are giving to us.  But the impression given through the language of aid is the opposite.  This misrepresentation – especially when constantly repeated – leads to devastating consequences in terms of public attitudes.  Is it any wonder people are increasingly disenchanted and irritated with ‘aid’ payments?  It’s a natural consequence of the story they’ve been told for so long.

Suppose it had been different.  Suppose that in place of every demand for aid over the last 30 years, the public had instead heard calls for ‘compensation’ or ‘damages’ highlighting specific ongoing wrongs.  After 30 years the response might still be increasing anger, but the irritation wouldn’t be with aid and the ‘needy poor’.  Instead there would be increasing outrage at the continued theft by the rich world – until this outrage eventually forced real change (which aid alone never will).

Those of us who work in the development sector – and I’m one – have much to answer for.  For decades we’ve been complicit, reinforcing this concept of ‘aid’ in our calls for funds to reach the 0.7% target.  We’ve similarly done it in our own fundraising messages.  It’s heinously irresponsible of us, and ultimately counter-productive.

It’s an easy excuse to say we need to keep the message simple and engaging.  But we mustn’t let ourselves off the hook that way.  The truth about poverty is more complex than a simple ask for a donation and an emotive image of a starving African child.  We’re perfectly capable of communicating it in accessible ways – and if we do, we have a far more powerful and engaging story to tell than one of aid and charity.

To be clear, ending the scandal of mass poverty and the suffering that results does require finance.  And for rich countries to cough up at a level of 0.7% GDP to deal with the problems they play such a big part in creating is for them to get away lightly.  These payments should be made – and indeed should be more.

But aid, even if correctly labelled, isn’t the answer to poverty any more than paying victims compensation is a solution to crime.  The only real solution is to stop the theft and exploitation happening in the first place.  That’s the real story – and if we’d told that story as often as we talked about aid and charity, then the public attitude and political context would be very different.

It’s time to start telling the truth.

What are we here for?

Larry Elliott’s piece in Monday’s Guardian highlighted the failure of the IF campaign to challenge the British government on the key issues of poverty, inequality or development, and posed the same existential question as Sunit in his post on this site last month, namely: what is the non-governmental sector actually here for, if it is not to hold government to account? Sally Copley has responded on behalf of IF in the letters pages of today’s Guardian, claiming that the campaign might one day get tough on Cameron but still bigging up the prime minister (contrary to all available evidence) as a force for good in the world. Against this, another letter went in from a small group of us agreeing with Larry, and noting that it was precisely the concerns he expressed that led to our establishing the Progressive Development Forum last year.

The two responses encapsulate neatly the divide in the British international development sector at the present time. On the one side, aid agencies linking up with the British government to create a ‘golden moment’ on hunger while leaving unchallenged the unequal power relations that condemn people to persistent poverty. On the other, social justice organisations and trade unions pressing for positive alternatives to Cameron’s agenda, and openly challenging a government which is wedded to promoting the most extreme forms of neoliberal capitalism, in the UK and abroad. The coming G8 festivities offer an opportunity for NGOs to choose which they feel to be the more appropriate response to government-led austerity and structural adjustment. Watch this space for more details of the full programme of anti-G8 actions and events currently being planned for the week of 8-15 June.

False dilemma: Development NGOs and public criticism

Why do most development NGOs refuse to criticise official donors in public?

One reason relates to the different perspectives that NGOs possess regarding the role of official donors in overcoming global poverty. Those who view donors as largely benign (albeit flawed to various extents) partners in the struggle for development are unlikely to ever consider using public criticism when conducting advocacy.

An alternative view (which I share) understands absolute poverty in the 21^st century as the result of unacceptable failures on the part of powerful actors – including the governments of rich countries and multilateral institutions – to promote development. Furthermore, these powerful actors continue to fail the world’s most vulnerable people to this day, by creating and perpetuating poverty, as well as by not doing enough to reduce it. Unfortunately, even when this ‘power and injustice’ view is accepted, some NGO staff believe that official donors will become alienated if publically challenged. Yet this argument is deeply flawed.

To begin with, entitlements (and other policies that benefit excluded people) are rarely simply provided by those who govern; rather they must be actively claimed by citizens. Regardless of whether change proves to be slow and piecemeal or rapid and dramatic, public as well as private criticism is always necessary to create and maintain pressure on elites.

Moreover, as long as one’s arguments are evidence-based and constructive, official donors should be able to handle criticism. If they can’t, then they have lost the argument before it has even started. In reality, while donor staff probably don’t enjoy being made to feel uncomfortable by NGOs, they tend to understand that the role of civil society isn’t to act as a cheerleader for governments or multilateral agencies.

This brings us to the issue of official funding. A few NGOs in the UK (such as ActionAid, Christian Aid, Oxfam and War on Want) demonstrate that it’s possible to publically criticise the British government and still receive funding from the UK’s Department for International Development. However, even if it were true that donor funding for NGOs could be jeopardised if NGO staff sensibly challenge donor policy and/or practice in public (and there is no evidence of this being the case), then a whole set of questions would need to be answered. What is the price of silence? What are the implications of pretending that the world needs tweaks rather than radical change? Is an NGO getting more money going to solve the world’s problems? How would poor and excluded people feel if they knew that their NGO partners were biting their tongues in order to maximise income?

While it’s so disappointingly rare to see a development NGO speak truth to power in public, I must stress that this is not an ‘either/or’ debate, i.e. the choice isn’t simply either (a) remain quiet or (b) attack donors with all guns blazing. Public advocacy needs to engage with complexity and thus should be multifaceted and dynamic. And of course NGO staff must always act in a professional manner. But beyond this, instead of fretting about hurting donors’ feelings, NGO staff should seek not to be liked by donors but respected by them. Only then will NGOs be able to demonstrate genuine solidarity with those who are marginalised and oppressed. This is critical to the legitimacy of NGOs and thus to their efforts to remain relevant in the 21^st century.

NGOs must be particularly wary of falling into the ‘either/or’ trap when supporting the British government’s commitment to spend 0.7% of national income on aid. Defending this commitment shouldn’t obscure the need to challenge controversial aspects of aid policy or to highlight the wider macroeconomic and governance problems associated with aid dependency. In addition, NGOs shouldn’t refuse to criticise the government’s anti-development decisions beyond aid, which often have far greater impacts on poor countries’ prospects for development. Instead, NGOs need to work together and rise to the challenge presented by both those making ill-informed contributions to the aid debate and those in power when their policies hinder rather than help development.

The cooption of NGOs by donor governments was a hot topic when I began to work professionally in this field a decade ago, as was the increasing efforts of Western governments to manipulate humanitarian agencies into serving political or military objectives (and thus undermine their traditional role in emergencies). It doesn’t appear that these lessons have been learnt.

The reluctance on the part of most NGOs to publically criticise official donors continues to unnecessarily restrict their ability to achieve positive change.

Bill Gates is Wrong

Bill Gates has suggested that the Millennium Development Goals do not need updating. He is wrong; here’s why:

Throughout the world, from Burma to Namibia, Somaliland to Laos, China to Nicaragua, there are communities of people marginalised by the societies in which they live and forgotten by international development organisations. For many of these communities, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have done nothing to improve their situation, and may even have made it worse.

The MDGs are rightly recognised for increasing the overall resources and political energy focused on battling some of the effects of poverty.  However they are flawed. They have not led to the prioritisation of the poorest and most marginalised communities; they may in fact have led to a situation in which resources have been diverted away from these groups of people.

The MDGs focus on aggregate, numerical targets for reducing poverty. This has led to a concentration on reaching the largest numbers of people rather than the most vulnerable, which has all too frequently translated into the easiest to reach, often urban populations or mainstream groups.

If you were tasked with saving the lives of two thirds of the children under five in the country you live in, with extremely limited resources, would you choose to focus on the ones in the capital city near the existing hospitals or the ones living deep in the rainforest whose lives would take considerably more resources to save?

This is the kind of choice governments are forced to make by the development goals in their current form.  But All children, wherever they live, deserve the best chance at life and good health.

The focus on overall targets, rather than on equity and reaching the most vulnerable, has meant there has not been a concerted effort to improve the health and lives of many groups of people.

The focus on aggregate figures also means that the most marginalised groups are not only neglected in terms of resources, but also in terms of monitoring and analysis. Because the success of the goals is only measured at the aggregate level, data on health and poverty collected locally is not broken down by ethnicity. This means there is extremely limited information on how much certain populations have actually been affected by the development efforts of the last decade.  The average figure might have improved, while hiding extreme pockets of poverty where things have got worse.

We now have the opportunity to rectify the problem. Future goals must focus on equity and on the most poor and marginalised. In particular, progress should be measured not just at the aggregate, national level, but data needs to be disaggregated by various factors including income, gender and ethnicity, to make inequities visible and allow better targeting of vulnerable groups.

A second flaw of the MDGs is the way they focus attention on a small  number of selected issues at the expense of others.  What are your chances if your problem isn’t on the list?  In all likelihood resources will be diverted away from your needs to address those included in the goals.  The MDGs have arguably had devastating consequences for massively important areas such as mental health, disability and non-communicable diseases.

Perhaps their biggest flaw of all is that the MDGs have concentrated almost exclusively on the symptoms of poverty, rather than addressing its causes.  It is vital that international development focuses on the reasons such extreme poverty and inequality exists in the first place.  If the global systems that sustain poverty, such as trade, financial markets, tax, and in general the global distribution of power, remain the same, then poverty too will remain – and future generations will continue to suffer.

As the goals come to an end and the world decides what comes next, we have a unique opportunity to improve on the international framework for development, to ensure the new framework works towards development for all.

One of the most inspiring things about human beings is our ability to learn from our mistakes, to grow and improve. As we debate what should come after the MDGs, we have a wonderful chance to work towards achieving a more equitable world.  We mustn’t fail to take it.

Rewriting history: Blair, Iraq and the Gleneagles G8

Just over two weeks to go until the tenth anniversary of the start of the Iraq war, and the Observer launches what looks like a desperate campaign to rehabilitate the reputation of Tony Blair. The vehicle for so doing is the supposed “triumph” of the 2005 G8 summit in Gleneagles, and Blair’s “lasting legacy” to Africa in particular. An encomium from Bob Geldof (a member of Blair’s Commission for Africa) and a self-congratulatory piece from Blair himself are backed up by the findings of a new report from Bono’s NGO One and validated by Save the Children’s Justin Forsyth, who worked for Blair on Gleneagles and awards the summit a generous “7 out of 10″.

It needs to be remembered that this was not the verdict of the Make Poverty History coalition. Whatever attempts are made to tamper with the historical record (and these are not the first), the MPH coalition declared unequivocally that the G8 summit had failed to deliver on its key issues – or, as Kumi Naidoo famously put it in the closing press conference, “The people have roared but the G8 has whispered.” That assessment was reached after each of the three policy constituencies behind MPH (the Trade Justice Movement, UK Aid Network and Jubilee Debt Campaign) had passed verdict on the elements of the G8 package that they were focused on. The call at the heart of the MPH campaign was for justice, not charity, and that call was not heeded by Blair or any of the other G8 heads of government.

The Observer has its own reasons for wishing to deflect interest from the anniversary of the Iraq war. As revealed by Nick Davies in his book Flat Earth News, the paper’s consistent support for Blair and for the war itself was the result of a far too cosy relationship between its most senior editorial executives and Downing Street. Anyone who has not read that story should do so. It is a cautionary tale for all those who seek to work in close collaboration with government on international matters, and not just the fourth estate.

The IF campaign: reactions and politics

The thoughtful leader in today’s Guardian suggests it’s a good time to survey reactions to last week’s launch of the IF campaign, and with it the state of the international development debate itself. As well as the critiques of the campaign’s policy content from Deborah and Owen described in the previous post, commentators from elsewhere in the sector reflected on the need to rethink charity campaigning in the politically charged context of austerity Britain. AlertNet’s Maria Caspani found herself disturbed by the “cliché” of celebrity endorsement at the Somerset House launch event, while Leni Wild and Sarah Mulley expressed concern that aid and the G8 could seem an “outmoded” throwback to the Make Poverty History campaign of 2005. The Guardian fashioned an opinion poll out of a question from Lawrence Haddad’s IDS blog, asking whether NGOs had made clear what they would do differently to end world hunger. The LSE’s Charlie Beckett reflected on the importance of honesty and integrity in NGO communications with a public that is increasingly sceptical of them.

War on Want put up its own statement on the IF campaign’s politics at the end of last week, questioning its endorsement of the G8 as committed to ending global hunger and its (equally unconvincing) promotion of David Cameron as leading the fight for social justice. The true extent of the collaboration between the aid agencies and the UK government has revealed itself not only in the documents released under FOI challenge from the Information Commissioner’s Office, but also in ministerial reactions to the launch. Cameron’s video statement embracing the IF campaign is entirely logical, given the almost messianic billing he is given in its policy document. Following up on the prime minister’s Davos speech, Justine Greening professes the government’s commitment to the campaign’s call for tax justice in yesterday’s Sindy; the reality, as ActionAid can remind other IF members, is somewhat different.

Make Poverty History struggled with the threat of government cooption, as it proved easy for the then Labour administration to appropriate the campaign’s language while doing little to change policy on the structural issues of the global economy. The agencies behind IF run a far greater risk by choosing to choreograph the campaign so closely with government from the start. While such a strategy allows NGOs to boast great influence, as the powers that be are seen to sign up to ‘their’ agenda, it risks legitimising a political elite that has unashamedly championed the interests of the 1% against the rest. For some agencies, that is clearly not a consideration. But we know that others are already very uneasy at the Pandora’s box they’ve opened.

Is IF enough?

There’s been a lot of discussion about the ‘IF’ campaign launch. If I’m honest, I thought some of the overarching messages were good. We saw an article in the Indy that talked about the problem of agri-business monopolies. And there was another on the weekend that acknowledged the problem of concentration of wealth.  But the policy asks don’t add up – nor do the messages. I’ve put my thoughts in a blog for the Guardian here.

As set out on our website, WDM didn’t sign up to the campaign because it wasn’t southern focussed, and failed to acknowledge the issues I lay out in my article. Owen Tudor from the TUC also expressed his reservations yesterday here.