Why I don’t support the Kony2012 campaign

I’ve been struggling to know whether/how to respond to this on my blog. For starters, so many others have done so more eloquently here, here and here. I want to just outline my own personal disagreements though with the campaign (many of which have been identified by others, written about elsewhere etc) but for the sake of clarity, here are the reasons I will not support the Kony2012 campaign by invisible children:

1. It is a branded campaign by an organisation. Invisible Children is making their brand known and shifting the focus AWAY from the real issues it is trying to ‘represent’. That, in my book, is deeply unethical.

2. Invisible children are directly profiteering from said branded campaign, again deeply unethical in encouraging people to think that they can save a piece of Uganda by purchasing a $30 ‘action kit’ . So clearly, making money is a goal of Invisible children, not in a way to sustain valid advocacy work of theirs but to sustain their funding of Ugandan military and future movies in high definition….

3. Invisible Children themselves (as discussed in the many different posts posted online, some of which I have linked here) are up there with some of the most awful charities in existence… to me, the best way this is summed up is by the photograph taken by Glenna Gorden of the three founders of Invisible Children posing holding weapons with the SPLA. The founders responded to this saying they were making a joke because they were so obviously ‘anti weapons’ (and don’t forget, they spend much of their time proclaiming the rights of child soldiers)…. go figure. Ahh I feel so sick just looking at the picture again!!

The next two points to me, are the biggest problems with this campaign:

4. BAD ADVOCACY is worse than NO advocacy (I believe Alanna Shaikh said this first correct me if i’m wrong?) And in this case, there are lots of supporters of the campaign getting in touch with me saying ‘yeh but look, people know about Kony today that had never heard of him before’  Unfortunately though, the issues presented in the film are NOT accurate, and as many people have more eloquently written than I, the war in northern Uganda and Congo is/was so much more complex and cannot be boiled down to a ‘stop Kony’ soundbite. He is but just one man…and though it might seem to be a good place to start, one could argue that efforts would be so much better spent investing in helping people who have suffered from the war rather than trying to vindictively persecute and ultimately kill one man.

5. Ugandan solutions to Ugandan problems (to coin a phrase). Look, it just astounds me that it is still OK to think that we have any right to decide the fate of foreign nations. The ‘white mans burden’ syndrome is almost certainly at play here and unfortunately, it is out-dated and not okay. Watch this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLVY5jBnD-E&feature=share check out this piece in the independent and read Teddy Ruge’s blog response – both very moving, and eloquently put responses.

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What can we take away from all this? Well, obviously, we should recognise  the power of social media (for it can be as good as it can be bad) and advocacy is an incredible tool.. I worked for a human trafficking campaign that, along with other organisations, pressured the big chocolate companies in the UK to go fairtrade and eliminate child trafficking in its supply chain… this was consumer power and this was GREAT advocacy… it is an incredible tool and absolutely, people should give a damn and be active in social justice issues. I.e. people shouldn’t react to this and be like ‘oh well i’m going to slit my wrists now, the world is crap’ (I am quoting a colleague here…)  Most of us (with the exception of this man) are rational and intelligent human beings, so use that and research your issues! In 30 minutes online research (the time it takes to watch the Kony2012 video) we can learn substantively MORE about the situation and history of conflict in northern Uganda…. What has surprised me most about this campaign is the number of people who have blindly endorsed the campaign (sometimes without even watching the film…) and not really looked into the issue anymore. That is dead advocacy, it is pointless and it achieves nothing. Liking something on facebook is not a way of bringing about sustained positive change in a complex political situation in northern Uganda (or anywhere in the world).

We should care, and we should feel passionate about the injustices that have taken place (throughout the world… throughout history) but we mustn’t be so blinded by such an emotive diatribe and let our judgment be clouded. Our heart strings are tugged and rightly so, but our heads should be reminding us to read more widely and respect the wisdom/knowledge of people with actual expertise and experience in this area. Many of the people (myself included) who have been criticising the campaign, have been labelled as Kony supporters and pro-LRA… The reason we question this campaign is not because we seek to defend the actions of some particularly evil individuals but because we want to hold to account the actions of some slightly dodgy characters, who seek to manipulate the good intentions of many.

It is much simpler to sit back and argue that advocacy is better than no advocacy, that even if its done in the wrong way it is still good to get people to listen. It is much harder to actually examine these sorts of campaigns on a deeper level and start to ask more philosophical questions like : why does it matter? why do people think it’s important? is advocacy useful? how does this campaign impact the people it is talking about/claiming to work with? so before you comment defending the Kony2012 brand, have a think: am I really criticising the fact that people are learning about an issue they didn’t know about before? No. Am I critical of the actions of a particular NGO and the way they have manipulated and branded a campaign on the back of making more ‘victims’ of Africa? Absolutely.

There are positive stories, there is SO MUCH AWESOMENESS coming out of the beautiful and diverse continent of Africa and yes terrible things happen, just like they happen the world over, but all this campaign is doing is confirming people’s attitudes that Africa continues to be a dark continent full of poor helpless victims and evil injustices. To those people working hard to dispel these images and shine a light on everything good and positive, this campaign is like taking 10 steps backwards.

So no, I will not support the campaign.

Censoring just makes me mad!

Ok so whether or not you actually agree/support/endorse this Kony 2012 campaign (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4MnpzG5Sqc ) you should be able to accept that if it is ok to plaster facebook and twitter with this video, emotively declaring your whole support and love for this campaign, you should also be able to recognise how ridiculous facebook are for blocking a response blog from another organisation, for being ‘spammy’ (I quote). This has annoyed me, since I think that the points made in the response blog make some pretty astute observations about these mass social media campaigns… so much so, I have recopied the text of the blog into my own because I believe people should be reading all that they can during this ‘campaign’….

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I do not doubt for a second that those involved in KONY 2012 have great intentions, nor do I doubt for a second that Joseph Kony is a very evil man. But despite this, I’m strongly opposed to the KONY 2012 campaign.

KONY 2012 is the product of a group called Invisible Children, a controversial activist group and not-for-profit. They’ve released 11 films, most with an accompanying bracelet colour (KONY 2012 is fittingly red), all of which focus on Joseph Kony. When we buy merch from them, when we link to their video, when we put up posters linking to their website, we support the organization. I don’t think that’s a good thing, and I’m notalone.

Invisible Children has been condemned time and time again. As a registered not-for-profit, its finances are public. Last year, the organization spent $8,676,614. Only 32% went to direct services (page 6), with much of the rest going to staff salaries, travel and transport, and film production. This is far from ideal, and Charity Navigator rates their accountability 2/4 stars because they haven’t had their finances externally audited. But it goes way deeper than that.

The group is in favour of direct military intervention, and their money funds the Ugandan government’s army and various other military forces. Here’s a photo of the founders of Invisible Children posing with weapons and personnel of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army. Both the Ugandan army and Sudan People’s Liberation Army are riddled with accusations ofrape and looting, but Invisible Children defends them, arguing that the Ugandan army is “better equipped than that of any of the other affected countries”, although Kony is no longer active in Uganda and hasn’t been since 2006 by their own admission.

Still, the bulk of Invisible Children’s spending isn’t on funding African militias, but on awareness and filmmaking. Which can be great, except that Foreign Affairs has claimed that Invisible Children (among others) “manipulates facts for strategic purposes, exaggerating the scale of LRA abductions and murders and emphasizing the LRA’s use of innocent children as soldiers, and portraying Kony — a brutal man, to be sure — as uniquely awful, a Kurtz-like embodiment of evil.” He’s certainly evil, but exaggeration and manipulation to capture the public eye is unproductive, unprofessional and dishonest.

As Chris Blattman, a political scientist at Yale, writes on the topic of IC’s programming, “There’s also something inherently misleading, naive, maybe even dangerous, about the idea of rescuing children or saving of Africa. […] It hints uncomfortably of the White Man’s Burden. Worse, sometimes it does more than hint. The savior attitude is pervasive in advocacy, and it inevitably shapes programming. Usually misconceived programming.”

Still, Kony’s a bad guy, and he’s been around a while. Which is why the US has been involved in stopping him for years. U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) has sent multiple missions to capture or kill Kony over the years. And they’ve failed time and time again, each provoking a ferocious response and increased retaliative slaughter. The issue with taking out a man who uses a child army is that his bodyguards are children. Any effort to capture or kill him will almost certainly result in many children’s deaths, an impact that needs to be minimized as much as possible. Each attempt brings more retaliation. And yet Invisible Children supports military intervention. Kony has been involved in peace talks in the past, which have fallen through. But Invisible Children is now focusing on military intervention.

Military intervention may or may not be the right idea, but people supporting KONY 2012 probably don’t realize they’re supporting the Ugandan military who are themselves raping and looting away. If people know this and still support Invisible Children because they feel it’s the best solution based on their knowledge and research, I have no issue with that. But I don’t think most people are in that position, and that’s a problem.

Is awareness good? Yes. But these problems are highly complex, not one-dimensional and, frankly, aren’t of the nature that can be solved by postering, film-making and changing your Facebook profile picture, as hard as that is to swallow. Giving your money and public support to Invisible Children so they can spend it on supporting ill-advised violent intervention and movie #12 isn’t helping. Do I have a better answer? No, I don’t, but that doesn’t mean that you should support KONY 2012 just because it’s something. Something isn’t always better than nothing. Sometimes it’s worse.

If you want to write to your Member of Parliament or your Senator or the President or the Prime Minister, by all means, go ahead. If you want to post about Joseph Kony’s crimes on Facebook, go ahead. But let’s keep it about Joseph Kony, not KONY 2012.

~ Grant Oyston, visiblechildren@grantoyston.com

Grant Oyston is a sociology and political science student at Acadia University in Nova Scotia, Canada. You can help spread the word about this by linking to his blog at visiblechildren.tumblr[dot]com anywhere you see posts about KONY 2012

That warm fuzzy feeling…

A while ago, I wrote about the precarious situation of volunteers and how, in quite a few cases, they do nothing more than fulfil a sense of self-worth and provide a good stock of stories of that time you were ‘living in the bush’ *insert trivial anecdote here*.

BUT, today I bumped into a couple of the girls who I led on a trip to Malawi in the summer of 2011. And, in keeping with wanting to look at positive stories and messages relating to Africa, I want to follow up on my previous post about volunteers with a positive tone! Our team was about 10 strong and we spent 3 weeks in two different parts of Malawi. The trip was a success in my eyes because the team spent time with projects that I was working with long term in my work as a development-do-er (!) and we were only adding to/supporting existing projects rather than trying to start anything new. It was a Christian mission trip, and we therefore spent time with missionaries and their projects (there’s another post in the pipeline looking at the work of missionaries in Malawi). The team were very carefully selected and after previous experience with NOT vetting thoroughly the volunteers ahead of time, I put in place a vigorous process by which we could select volunteers based on their motivations, skills and maturity and also prepare them before the trip by briefing them properly and dispelling any romantic ‘save Africa’ visions they might have (which they didn’t).

Despite all the hard work, when it came down to it the trip was incredible on a lot of levels but particularly because of the maturity and depth of character showed by many of the team. For most, this was the furthest out of their comfort zone they had ever been and yet they acted with more maturity than a lot of people I know (the average team age was 17). Getting to know each individual, and to be a part of their experience in Malawi – for me to share the place I lived, worked, loved with them – well, it was such a privilege and only motivates me to want to lead more volunteering trips in the future. Seeing them now as they prepare to go off to university, and seeing how the trip changed them – well it’s pretty special to be honest. I worked a lot around Malawi and it was obvious to me where the benefits were of what the team did, I could see that we had a positive impact on local communities quite easily, but being away from the UK had distanced me from seeing the change in the team members themselves.

It’s easy to bash volunteers, and it’s easy to get caught up in the expertise that we all have (varying levels of) with regard to development, moaning about how a particular discourse is damaging. It’s good to strive for better, and indeed my experiences helped me to shape the team’s trip to Malawi in a way that I felt was positive for all BUT, sometimes it’s cool to celebrate the small and simple things. Sometimes it’s good to recognise the importance of nurturing a growing plant and watching it become something bigger and more beautiful! In that way then, I dedicate this post to the volunteers that took part in Mission Malawi 2011, for their ‘can-d0′ attitude and their futures that await them. I celebrate the fact that they even GAVE  a damn, for wanting to go somewhere like Malawi (no where near as glamorous or ‘fun’ as Bali or inter-railing round Europe all summer like others that age do in the summer…) and that they have not returned full of arrogance about their experiences, but that they have returned with a better understanding about the world out ‘there’ and a desire to help make it better one day. We can talk about smart aid and have intellectual discussions about how to improve things in the here and now, but how important is it to encourage the younger generation about smart aid and good development practice, to prepare them for a future where they are leading and making decisions? Very, if you ask me…

Green beans and Agriculture : who benefits from Africa’s exports?

A few months back, I went to a debate in a committee room deep in the Houses of Parliament hosted by the Royal African Society jointly with the London International Development Centre. Richard Dowden, director of the RAS, moderated discussions with a panel including Christie Peacock (former CEO of FARM-Africa, now chair of Sidai Africa Ltd), Mark Thomas (Director of Food Retail Industry Challenge Fund DFID and manager of rural development at Nathan Associates) and Karima Ola (managing director of the African Development Corporation). I’m revisiting my original thoughts on this, since I am starting research on a new paper that will look at how agricultural growth can have a positive impact on development in sub Saharan Africa… 

 

The key question was framed as ‘who benefits from Kenya’s exports of green beans and flowers to the UK?’ which throws up some interesting ideas about Africa’s export industry. Lots of people have argued that Africa needs to stop focusing on exports, and strengthen its own internal, domestic markets before looking to trade with the world market. Without wanting to identify too strongly with neoliberals out there, I think that the strengthening of exports and trade between Africa and the world can be a good thing – it can and does lead to growth. Countries like Zambia are pretty switched on at the moment and getting their balance right. Likewise, Ghana is arguably doing very well also. It’s hard to comment on all the successes though given my limited knowledge and understanding of every African country’s agricultural industry….

 

So, we’re looking at agricultural exports from Sub Saharan Africa to other countries (note that this can mean exports within the continent), the potential problems with standards such as fairtrade, and the positive potential that there is for African agriculture.

 

The facts (with some help from the RAS)

Africa’s main agriculture export products are well known; tea, cotton, tobacco, cocoa and flowers. Cotton production in the region has multiplied by five since the early 1970s; about 95% of the regions cotton is exported. Kenyan horticulture exports have grown at over 6% a year for the past 30 years reaching 13.6% of export revenues in 2003. (Although for a balanced argument’s sake, the state of burley tobacco in Malawi continues to cripple smallholders as prices crash, auction floors close etc)

 

The problem is though, mono cropping is potentially dangerous for economies and makes African economies vulnerable. 8 countries in Africa incurred 65% of the $300 million loss in potential revenue in all of sub-Saharan Africa in 2001 due to the poor cotton prices. Diversification is recognised by many leading agronomists as the key to a successful agricultural industry, particularly in Africa where instability of weather, prices and technology put crops at higher risk of failing than in European agriculture where these factors are slightly more stable/manageable. This is significant for both large scale commercial farms as well as the smallholder farmers that make up the back bone of African agriculture. SIMPLY PUT, if farmer X is growing only maize on his 0.25ha plot, and there is poor rain fall, he will get a very low yield on his crop or it will fail altogether. However, if farmer X was growing a combination of maize along with a sturdier crop such as chillies, then at the end of the growing season he would not be quite as bad off.

 

African agricultural production is struggling, and a key question that I am interested on getting answers to is how do you increase productivity in African agriculture? It’s well known that most farmers in Africa farm for subsistence and on very small plots (between .25 and 3ha). Africa produces less food per capita now than in 1960 (interesting correlation here with the rise of development and aid flows to the region?) About 16% of Africa’s soils are classed as ‘low nutrient’ compared with Asia’s 4% (poor soil quality is a common but not impassable problem), yields generally are lower than the rest of the world and similarly fertilizer input is substantially lower but hectare than the global standard.  (9kg in Africa vs 100kg in Asia and 206kg in industrialised countries).

 

But the story isn’t entirely negative! Agriculture in Africa is buzzing with potential at the moment, and it’s important to bring this to the fore in the debate on aid and development (which I find immensely frustrating in its continuous bashing and bitching and lack of constructive suggestions of how to improve things). Of the fastest growing agricultural economies 17 are in sub Saharan Africa (thanks in large part to exports of cash crops like tea, coffee, cashews etc). 60% of the arable land available in the world is in Africa. Long gone are the days of stereotypes of Africa consisting of cracked earth in Ethiopia, Africa is a rich and diverse place with some amazing land that is more fertile than you could imagine. Anecdotally, I remember the most delicious and biggest carrots I have ever eaten, coming from Molo in South Eastern Kenya, where the soil is rich in nutrients and the idea of ‘organic’ is laughable when both the quality and quantity of produce is so exceptional!

 

SO what of this debate, on exports in agriculture? I see them as being vital for several reasons:

1.       Exports such as green beans typically come from larger commercial farms which have the ability to provide better job security to farmers than subsistence farming, and they also have the ability to connect growers to markets (big issue which I’m very interested in having worked for a commercial farm in Malawi doing precisely that). In that sense, the money we spend on green beans in Kenya is doing more for ‘development’ in Kenya than donating to some WFP sponsored agricultural programme, because it is directly supporting agricultural industry in Africa. That’s not to say that large agribusiness is faultless though, and there is a serious amount of work that needs to be done to protect informal worker’s rights and to regulate/implement labour laws.

 

2.       Markets like China are increasingly feeling the pressure to find new sources of food to import (given the poor quantity of arable land in China and the growing population, China is having to look overseas for its food). Brazil and other countries in the America’s are not always going to be able to provide the quantity and quality of food, and this is one part of why China has invested so heavily in Africa. So from the perspective of the Chinese, African agricultural exports are definitely a good thing.

 

Problems with fairtrade

 

Christie Peacock brought up a controversial problem; that farmers are increasingly dissatisfied with ‘Fairtrade’ and its standards. One tea factory in Kenya, we were told, was refused fairtrade status since its drinking water tap was not correctly labelled as drinking water despite all workers knowing that that was its purpose. I have been aware of this for some time, and was surprised that so many people were shocked to hear this. Fairtrade is not the be-all-and-end-all, in addition to the difficult and rigorous standards that they set, there is also the problem with Fairtrade’s main ethos – how much of the extra cost is being passed down the supply chain to the farmer? Isnt this the whole point of fairtrade, I can remember being told about the break up of profits in a regular banana vs a fairtrade one back in Fairtrade’s heyday, but now retailers are increasingly absorbing more of the increased charge on fairtrade goods, whilst the farmer is advertised as receiving a better price for his/her crop. Fairtrade is a great principle, but these problems question how accountable fairtrade is and if their standards are perhaps too rigorous and unflexible given the flexible, informal nature of the agricultural industry.

 

Duncan Green says “Ethiopian women sorting through the coffee beans will have to work for 8 years to earn what I get from Oxfam in one day”. Interesting point, but what about like for like costs? Producing a pound of cotton in Burkino Faso costs 21 cents compared to 73 cents in the US itself. The value of the fairtrade market in the UK reached £493 million in 2007, a staggering sum of money I think.

 

Of course there is also the issue of subsidies, and though I don’t want to spend too long writing about it here, it is a question that comes up time and time again; why do we in the West expect Africa’s agricultural markets to be liberalised and unprotected, when we have such strong systems of subsidies in place in the EU and the US? One counter argument offered by Mark Thomas last night was that we give our politicians a mandate to decide to implement subsidies in our country, and that it’s up to African governments to do the same.

 

Let’s also think about the distortions in infrastructure that are geared more to the export market in African agriculture (e.g. great asphalt connecting unilever tea farm to markets vs the bumpy mud and rock road linking smallholders to their trading centre), perhaps this can be utilised and highlighted as being a great tool for development. The Chinese again have invested (rightly or wrongly) a lot into developing Africa’s infrastructure and filled a vacuum left by Western donors who became more interested in softer development issues in the last 20 years.

 

What next?

 

I would like to see the redevelopment of Government Marketing Boards in African agriculture; they were mostly done away with after independence which is a shame since they provided great opportunity and potential (in theory). Extension services and marketing boards are key in the successful development of an agricultural industry.

 

I would also like to see a stronger promotion of ‘zero tillage’ to smallholder farmers, that they need not work so hard on getting the land perfect in order to gain a good yield. It is integral to the future success of agriculture in Africa to transfer knowledge on zero tillage to the many smallholder farmers throughout sub Saharan Africa – this is a particular role that commercial farms can fulfil in providing systems that better the value chain…

 

Again, anecdotally, I can draw on my own experience working for a commercial farm in Malawi. The company promoted crop diversification; they grow chillies, maize, soya, groundnuts as well as some livestock like poultry and lambs. The company exports chillies internationally as well as supporting domestic consumption by stocking local supermarkets with vegetables and poultry. It is not a huge operation, but is indicative of many small commercial farming operations throughout southern and eastern Africa – the potential is there and tremendous results can be achieved using these commercial farms to connect growers to markets. The company I was working with worked extensively on training smallholder farmers and connecting an ever growing community of outgrowers (we would provide the training and extension services to farmers and also provide the secure market to buy their crop and sell it at a good price, this served the business interests’ as there wasn’t the capacity to grow everything ourselves). Commercial farms can also support subsistence agriculture in Africa by working to provide better storage solutions (wasted and spoiled crops is a big problem in many communities). Some donors like USAID and DFID have been working with commercial farms on storage solutions and developing ‘credit’ or ‘voucher’ style schemes for small farmers to use in storing their product in a central warehouse managed and maintained by a larger farm. The idea being that a voucher is issued to a farmer before he has actually sold his crop (say he harvests in April, but the best price he is likely to receive won’t be around until September, then farmer is issued with voucher which he can cash in at bank/use for credit/collateral and the farm then has the responsibility to sell the crop on and make sure it is properly stored).

 

Coming back to the idea of exports to countries within Africa, I’m very interested in this area and the idea of bringing manufacturing and processing into Africa rather than the model that has existed thus far of shipping primary commodities from Africa to the East/West to be processed and then shipped somewhere else. Plumpynut is the biggest example, the peanut paste RUTF that is used in treating clinical malnutrition – the peanuts are mostly grown in Africa and exported to France where they are manufactured into the paste, then shipped back to Africa to support the WFP and UN’s malnutrition programmes…. Why not cut down costs and boost a local economy by exporting the peanuts within Africa and setting up a processing plant? (Check out AfriNut and Valid Nutrition; as I left Malawi this argument of mine was being put into practice with a local processing plant).

 

These issues aren’t without problems though, and certainly the company I worked for enjoyed its fair share of difficulties. Smaller commercial farms are the world over known as having to work very hard compared to the money they make, this is no different in Africa and the difficulty to turn over a decent profit potentially impacts the level of assistance commercial farms can provide to smallholder farmers. This is where donors need to step in and bridge the gap between what we all say that commercial farms can do and what they are actually doing on the ground. Don’t underestimate the difficulties of working in an environment that is not stable – the fuel crisis in Malawi for example has crippled many businesses and limits your ability to export…this in turn puts off importers abroad as they want to be buying produce from a more stable source and quite often they will look to the East. I’m not sure what the solution is…

 

So basically, with better investment and renewed interest in strengthening extension services and marketing boards, African agricultural exports could increase and benefit everybody – the rural farmer as well as the consumers, at the same time boosting productivity in Africa and potentially helping economic growth on a sustainable and longer term trajectory than previous methods employed…

 

In the broader argument of connecting farmers to markets, the debate concluded by arguing that buying beans from Kenya et al is a good thing.

 

If you are interested in this topic I strongly recommend you get a book by a chap called Stephen Carr, ‘surprised by laughter’, I got to know him in Malawi and he is incredibly clued up on agriculture in Africa after a long spanning career working throughout the continent… If, like me, you enjoy the positive tales of African growth from someone who truly believes in the continents potential…. Read it!

 

I’m quite sure I’ve missed out a lot here, but hopefully these musings are in some way indicative of the need to put agriculture firmly back on the agenda for development (properly, not just rhetorically) and the relevance of African agricultural exports in a broader global debate on climate change and food sourcing (much criticism in the UK recently on the fuel used to get beans from Kenya to UK etc although it has been proven that more fuel is used to grow roses in Dutch green houses and freight them to UK than for the flowers to be grown naturally in Kenya and flown over….)

 

What’s wrong with volunteers?

Another post recycled from my blogspot site, on volunteering.

 

It might seem completely contradictory that I am about to lay into volunteers, given that I a) spent a lot of time being one and b) lead trips of young adults to Malawi. But volunteerism has just exploded in the last few years, and whilst on one level it infuriates me having to listen to people explain how they’ve built a classroom in a really remote and rural village school in Tanzania, it also has some very serious implications for development.

We need to pay attention to it, because ‘volunteering’ can be as much of a hindrance as a help to development efforts. We also need to address the growing number of young people seeking to volunteer abroad, and try and harness their enthusiasm into positive energy; doing something that does more than bring them back home buzzing about their new found love for Africa.

True, civil society relies on volunteers and in our home context – in the West – volunteering can and is a fantastic way for charities to reach out to people and do great work. Those volunteers however, tend to be long term older professionals (think care givers, social workers etc). The kind of volunteering that I am critical of though, is of the ‘i’m 16 years old, I can change the world and I am GOING to Africa’. True, we all have to start somewhere, and in many cases these volunteering experiences are a springboard to a hopefully more enlightened career in various sectors. (And it’s great that young people give a damn). True also that there are some fabulous organisations out there that have years of experience on the ground in the country they work in; organisations that recognise the needs of both projects and volunteers and who place people accordingly with thought and consideration. Say what you will about VSO but they are (or have been) one such organisation.

Different Types of Volunteering

1. Short term tangible volunteering.

Volunteers that go from their home country (in the West somewhere) to a developing country (in the South somewhere) to work on a specific project such as building toilets, classrooms, painting. Sometimes they raise the money to pay for the project, sometimes they just pay for their own expenses.

Why is this detrimental to development? Well, what happens when the volunteer has left? You would think it is widely understood that teaching a man to fish is a better, more sustainable investment than giving him one. But organisations continue to operate along the one fish line! Why does a volunteer need to go and build a school when local communities and labour can be used (and even trained), not only creating a sense of ownership for the local community but also providing a job for someone.

Construction/tangible projects are also problematic because all too often clinics/schools etc will be built with large injections of cash from NGO, but with no set up or training for local people to manage and continue the running of such facilities. I have seen several clinics in remote Mozambique and Malawi that are shiny new thanks to the hard work of pioneering volunteers…. gathering dust because they didn’t bother to build relations with anyone on the ground and leave the project in their hands.

Many people have written much more coherently on this than I, but the point is fairly obvious I think…

Can it work? Yes! If the community is on board with the project (actively involved not just ‘consenting’) then there is less risk of projects occurring and then being left with no support. If teams fund the project, this can arguable be good too as a source of funding for core needs.

2. Short term intangible volunteering.

Short term volunteers going away to say, teach English in a primary school in Tanzania, or solve the HIV/AIDs cultural impasse in Malawi through football (yes it really does exist….http://tackleafrica.org/what-we-do/uganda/hivaids-awareness-football-coaching-2007/ GREAT example….)

Often detrimental when constant change occurs and young kids are exposed to volunteers who aren’t committed to improving the child’s welfare. Lack of consistency does nothing to build trust. Time is wasted continually briefing new volunteers rather than retaining existing volunteers for longer thus maximising their impact. As with the construction argument, why teach kids English? If you are a qualified teacher or you have your TEFL (i.e. a tangible and useful skill to offer other than just an A level in English literature….), for goodness sake go and work with a parent teacher association, or teacher group and HELP THEM in their own English skills, lesson planning etc. Your impact will be sustained once you have left, operating this way. It infuriates me that more of these kinds of placements don’t exist with the big volunteering schemes.

Can it work? Yes; when done through a smaller organisation that has local knowledge and solid relationships, it can often serve as encouragement to local communities who often feel forgotten about. I know this because I have asked plenty of farmers/youth workers/village chiefs who I have taken volunteers to. It also works when people go off the beaten track and search for volunteering opportunities in schools for example that aren’t supported by a massive i-to-i style organisation. I did this with an old link school in Kenya. It doesn’t always work out but you have a better chance of having an impact and building relationships because chances are, if you’re willing to go off the beaten track you’re probably the kind of person interested in genuinely helping without the frills and hand holding that other organisation’s provide…

3. Long term skill sharing volunteering

Bloody brilliant. I have no bad experience of these types of volunteers bar the occasional peace corps fruit loop that slips through the net. The simple concept of someone with a developed career, and a tangible set of skills, taking them to a context where it is beneficial to share these skills and educate. Typically taken up by nurses, doctors, teachers, physiotherapists and so on. I have a lot of respect for people willing to give up their time to train local people in difficult professions in difficult contexts, and not get paid for it.

4. and many combinations of the above….

What future for volunteering?

The passion is clearly there; so many people feel deeply convicted to help put an end to global poverty and limit human suffering in its many forms. Which is great and deserves recognition in a world with plenty of people who are more preoccupied with typically ‘rich’ problems. Where it all falls apart is that efforts to coordinate and channel this passion into something productive, are not good enough. Perhaps there needs to be a coordinated effort to guide and advise young adults in how to effectively volunteer, helping them to avoid volunteer tourism….

Volunteering in your home context? Great. Reflects so much better on your commitment to your own community and helping out on your back yard. Volunteering to build something someone else could do in half the time, for less money and with a longer lasting sense of ownership and care? Not so great.

As with much of aid and development, too much focus is disproportionately placed on accountability, and funding. At the end of the day, there aren’t THAT many people who are interested in going to India with an organisation to simply ‘learn’ about development, soak up the culture with great humility and become enlightened as to how they might individually be equipped to make a difference in the future. What people really want is to play with cute children (it’s hard to resist!) and come back knowing that they can tick off the ‘build a school for poor kids in Africa’ box on their CV. You pay your £2000, and you get in return a very tangible end product without ever looking back. And the result? A continued cycle of dependence on aid in those countries receiving volunteers, whilst organisations continue to send cart after cart of volunteers encouraging them in their bid to rescue people that neither need or want to be rescued.

comment and let me know what you think…. am I being fair? Or am I being unreasonably critical of volunteerism?

Charity in Malawi and fuel shortages…

Another post, this time from July of last year on approaches to giving in Malawi along with a by now familiar fuel update….

I have been terrible at updating this blog, especially as it was originally supposed to be a platform from which I could spend more time pretending to be intellectual and write about some of the challenges and successes coming out of Malawian development discourse….

This week we had an interesting day in the office… I have often wondered about the culture and attitude to charity here in Malawi. In India, very few NGOs exist that aren’t religious (i.e. people don’t generally feel convicted to help their fellow citizens), sweeping generalisation as that may be, I have never really understood where Africa fits on the ‘giving’ map. It’s been 40 years of Wazungu’s trying to dominate the philanthropy and aid game in Sub Saharan Africa, and given the offensively low wages that local staff are paid, I (naively) never thought about people in Malawi (and elsewhere) giving to charity.

For Malawi, I guess it makes sense that people are naturally generous and want to share what they have. Certainly in my experience I have been inspired and amazed by the hospitality extended to me, time and time again, by people that have far less than I do but are always willing to make their meal extend to one more plate.

So in one day we had the dichotomy of ‘giving’ experiences. A chap walks into the office and I did a double take really; he reminded me very much of a chap I used to buy the big issue from back in Vauxhall, London. He was carrying an A4 folder and he came round the office visiting each persons desk. Turns out he was deaf, trying to raise money for a registered NGO here in Malawi working to help people who are deaf and/or suffer from hearing loss. He had all the registration information for the NGO and was asking people to record their names and contact information if they wanted to make a donation.

Observation number 1: BRILLIANT! Great to go with the ‘if i’m well organised and don’t harass people, they will recognise that this is a good cause and be more open to donate’ principle.

Observation number 2: everybody in the office donated generously; we have only 4 permanent expat staff in the office out of 25/30 Malawian staff.

Everyone gave generously, and the guy got a good reception. This doesn’t particularly surprise me, but it is great watching people who don’t paid a great deal, give a sizeable proportion of that to charity. People gave selflessly and without complaint, another attribute I love, and something which is quite rare to find amongst donors in the West… Then the very same day, a chap came through singing the song of ‘I am an orphan, I have HIV/AIDS, I don’t have a job, please give me money’ something we might be a bit more open to listening to if it weren’t for the fact he already borrowed £200 from the company before vanishing off the face of the earth for 2 years…. What a contrast.

In other news, the fuel crisis continues. It goes through phases; when petrol is available, diesel is not and when diesel is available petrol is not. The queues are out of this world, although I am well accustomed to them by now. People will queue through the night/several days just to get to the pump and be told they’re only allowed to receive 30 litres or whatever it is…. Until recently, what would happen is that people would crawl out of the woodwork with jerry cans once a tanker had refuelled a station. They would march straight to the pumps and get filled up and then likely sell it on the black market or give it to their employer who was probably number 135 in the queue…. then Bingu wa Numpty Mutharika decided to ban jerry cans, So you can now only fill up with your car at the pump. Half makes sense…. Anyway thankfully there has been a brief respite and diesel is back for a few days.

The crisis has been going on, on and off since February. The main reason  for the fuel crisis this year, I have been told, is because of heavily reduced donor funding to the Malawi government – money that the gov. had assigned to purchasing fuel… so obviously, no money = no fuel coming into the country. I will miss a lot of things when I move back to the UK in september for a few months, but I definitely will NOT miss having to think and plan my life around fuel shortages.

Life as an Expat Aid Worker

Just to kick things off, i’ve selected a few posts from my old blogsite (graduateinafrica.blogspot.com) to recycle here, because I particularly enjoyed writing them. Suffice to say some of them are a bit old, and my views may well have changed a bit since first writing but here’s one I wrote in March 2011, from Malawi.

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It’s a tough life, picture this: ice cold gin and tonic, white sandy beaches, hot sun and a warm lake to swim in. The peace and serenity of Lake Malawi brings us all a lot of happiness from an often frustrating and utterly bizarre life living in one of Africa’s big cities. Personally, i’m not cut out for the expat vibe that buzzes around this place; it’s a melting pot for diplomats, NGO and government workers with way too much money and an arrogance that goes beyond belief! There’s your die hard old Tobacco biddies, earning upwards of 250K a year just to work the 6 month tobacco season in Malawi, and then there’s the general do-gooders (like myself) who are all still naive enough to believe they can make a difference in an otherwise poor and underdeveloped region.

I went to a party with a dutch physio friend of mine recently. She’s the kind of person who works long days, and parties long into the night – she knows everyone and is generally a great person to be around. So there was a house party that she had heard of and we tagged along. Turned out to be the house party of a top ranking US embassy worker, who lived in the most palatial mansion I have ever seen. There was a huge satellite dish (approx 20 feet tall and 8 feet wide) just in the corner of the garden… veuve clicquot bottles were used as candlesticks and there were trays and trays of catering. not the kind of party we had expected, and full of some rather unsavoury characters I must say… Met some interesting people though, and did the whole networking thing. It did just make me laugh though; the whole thing was a bit surreal. Here’s a country where my strongest and fondest memories are of sitting in the dust in my chitenge talking with rural women in remote villages far away from the NGO tarmac track (despite having fleets of brand new twin cab pickup Hilux’s, many NGOs are unwilling to stray too far from the tarmac which somewhat limits the scope of their work in a country that is predominantly rural and remote). So the comfortable life in Lilongwe, with money and champagne bottles etc was all new for me… nothing particularly wrong with that I suppose, I just know that I would rather spend my time here honestly (there’s the dogooder in me), without flashing money around and then be able to go home and enjoy something a little nicer than VC with my family in England!

so it’s an interesting time to be here, and working for a company rather than a charity per se provides a completely different insight into the work ethic found here, and the attitudes of people who are living here for business rather than to change the world… I’m almost certain we could drink NGOs under the table!

In other news, I have settled in well and I am living with a great family. The house is in a great part of town which is quiet and feels relatively secure. Ive spent time in Mangochi with old friends as well as a trip up north to Mzuzu to visit one of our farms – KTW – and to spend time monitoring and evaluating the feeding programme that has been left to run itself for almost a year… Tomorrow I am supposed to be doing another farm visit in Mangochi, reviewing the adult literacy staff and circles on another of the farm’s followed by a weekend with close friends up near the Mozambique border. However, I am not so sure of these plans! Wherever I go, vehicles always seem to trouble me… when I was here in 2009 I made do with a very old Toyota corolla and managed to negotiate roads that are really only meant for higher clearence, four wheel drive vehicles. It was not without its challenges, particularly being a young female driving alone. It’s less than ideal to break down or have problems when you’re young and alone. I was overly optimistic about this new job, given that part of the agreement was a suitable vehicle to use. I’ve been here a few weeks already, and still no vehicle. I made do with hitching lifts for a wee while, but ive now been given a VERY old corrola to do a 5 hour journey tomorrow then another 5 hours on sunday….

….last night it broke down in the drive….

The last thing I want to be, is one of these fussy Europeans demanding brand new big cars! Indeed, me and my old toyota corrola have had some fun times together and I would consider myself something of a pro at handling a low clearance car on mud tracks and farms! But there is a balance to be had, and to be physically unable to do work because of a lack of appropriate vehicle is annoying (when it doesn’t need to be like that!) I certainly did not sign my life away to an office job here; I did that in London, with 4 times the salary. **note that about 3 months later, we managed to push the sale through of a beautiful twincab hilux that was about 10 years old; I grew emotionally attached to it – is that normal?? We had some great times together and I could easily write for hours on the joys of a slightly old and faded hilux in rural Africa…

Mzungus have a tough reputation in Africa, and it’s a difficult task to balance the realities of working in this environment, and sticking to good old common sense and reality. All this time I have spent in Africa and I still havn’t worked it out!

My chichewa is improving slowly, and I have even managed to remember one or two phrases of Chiyao. It’s a difficult language to understand but once you grasp a few phrases you’re well on your way! So until next time…

…Asigale chenene… (stay well)

A Graduate in Africa

What’s in a name?

I started my first blog a few years ago when I moved to Malawi, as a recent graduate, to undertake a voluntary role with a farming company and NGO. As often is the case, I had a mishmash of roles and was everything from a research assistant to charity liason and development officer. I thought it was fitting to name the blog Graduate in Africa (because it seemed fairly self explanatory) and I wanted to use it as a way to chart my experiences, the highs and lows etc on what was to be a very challenging but rewarding period.

Sure enough this helped get me to Malawi a couple of years later, as a fully fledged member of the International Development community and led to my studying at SOAS for an MSc in Development Studies… Though I spent time living and travelling in Africa as a young’un, I am indebted to my experiences as a graduate in Africa. 

Everyone likes talking about certain places in Africa, but for the many of us who are privileged and blessed to have lived, worked and breathed life on African soil it really gets under your skin and into your soul. I may not be the most intelligent, high-ranking kid on the block but I have a genuine love and passion for the culture, lifestyle, people and attitudes found throughout the continent. I hope to blog on issues broadly relating to International Development, but I am more strongly committed to talking about positive stories of African development…. in an attempt to counter the force of all the negative, whingey and depressed development professionals out there. I will often get things wrong, and I may not always understand the issues but my ethos of smiling and having an open mind has served me pretty well so far and hopefully won’t let me down now….