Troubleshooting

I walk back to my office after a meeting.

“Tibeb has been trying to call you,” Teme tells me. She’s one of my Monitoring and Evaluation officers and is running a mission about two days south of the capital, checking on an emergency food program. “She is wanting to stay in the field to complete her work until the 31^st. But the driver has only been authorized to be out until the 29^th.”

Teme explains that when the request was put to fleet management, a mistake was made on the driver request form and the earlier date entered. So I guess there’s some issue with fleet management wanting the vehicle and driver back. It wouldn’t be the first time that there are hiccups between what my field staff want, and getting the resources from the shared services guys.

I go down the two flights of stairs to have a chat to Girma, the fleet manager. I’ve never seen anyone so consistently smiley as Girma, and he greets me warmly. Although we’ve had issues in mobilizing vehicles at times, I know he’s dedicated to finding fixes and he has always been reasonable when I’ve discussed with him.

“The problem,” he tells me, “Is that on the form, she only asked for the driver until the 29^th. So now she wants the driver until the 31^st. But the driver only took out per diem until the 29^th, not the 31^st, so he won’t stay longer.”

I frown. “So have him stay out, and he can be reimbursed for the two extra days.”

The per diem rate clocks in at a little under ten bucks a day for that location. I’m confident that between them, the team are going to ensure that the driver doesn’t starve.

“I know. I said that to finance. But they say it’s against policy. It creates all kinds of problems. They say if he comes back and tries to claim per diem after the fact that he can’t be reimbursed.”

I raise an eyebrow. Creates all kinds of problems? We’re an organization that measures its in-country budget in multiples of ten million dollars annually. I don’t see how $17 constitutes all kinds of problems.

“He’s out doing work,” I say. “Of course we’re going to reimburse him. There’s no question about that. If finance are going to push the matter I’ll pay the per diem out of my own pocket.”

Girma grins his habitual smile. “I know. But finance.”

Girma and I walk down the hallway to finance. He shows me to the desk of the particular finance officer responsible for this edict. He starts to re-hash the conversation the to of them had earlier. I don’t let him get all the way through.

“We will reimburse him,” I say to the finance officer, directly, in a voice that indicates I’m not asking for his permission.

He doesn’t put up any real resistance. “Well, you’ll need to sign his acquittal form.”

“Yes.”

“Will you be around next week to sign it?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.”

And that’s quite literally all it took.

It’s troubleshooting little things like this (as well as much bigger things) that fills time out here. It’s not difficult. But in an organizational culture where the drive for compliance and the tyranny of petty systems takes precednence over ensuring our project work goes ahead, it’s a constant tussle. Without my intervention (and in a society like this where rank trumps protocol, all I really need to do is show up and give my verbal instruction), a systems-compliant finance officer would have cut short the work being done by my field-team actually engaging at the community level and trying to improve the quality of the work we do. By simply standing at his desk and saying that I’d approve an exception to policy- what ridiculous policy I’m excepting I’m not entirely clear- the problem is solved.

This little story- which took place this morning- is a microcosm for many of the challenges we face trying to ensure our field operations keep rolling. Without constant- constant- attention, the procedural requirements, paperwork and red-tape rapidly grind activities to a halt. In many ways, I have no particular skillset that isn’t greatly outweighed by the experience and ability of my field teams, in terms of actually providing assistance to the communities we work with. I see my main role here as making sure that the systems work to support my staff, not get in their way. And then I get out of their way as well.

This compliance culture is nobody’s fault, per se. It’s a culture common to many INGOs and, I don’t doubt, a plethora of other organizations as well. In fact, I understand that government offices generally have it much worse. And to be honest, I’m lucky enough to be working in an organization where I have a Country Director who backs me up, so I can be confident of stepping into a situation like this one (or, more importantly, one where we’re trying to push through high-level organizational change to improve the efficiency, cost-effectiveness and impact of our field operations on a much larger scale), and when I tell staff to move the red tape out of the way, I know it’ll happen.

Sometimes after some negotiation…

It is, of course, a fine balance. On the one hand, administrative systems were designed to increase transparency and limit corruption. Driven first by donors, it is now increasingly pushed by the risk-averse inertia of organizations themselves, who are terrified of being publically caught out with inadequate systemic controls, fearful of the loss of donor funding that would presumably follow. Large government donors, with increasing layers of demands, don’t make this any easier either. Sadly, what we end up with is a wag-the-dog scenario where we end up putting so much emphasis on the controls that it becomes unwieldy to operate.

Aid organizations have a responsibility to seek a balance- ensuring appropriate accountability while maximising the speed and quality of field work. Donors, too, need to recognize that the more demands they place on implementing agencies- heavy reporting and fiscal requirements and micromanagement of tasks and activities- the more this can be detrimental to the communities we all exist to serve.

My heart is in operations. Helping stuff happen. Which is why I love this job. I get to push things out of the way, try to ensure a reasonable measure of accountability, but free up my teams to go do what they’re supposed to do and deliver our programs on the ground.

Of course, it’s also why I hate this industry sometimes. Because I watch, first hand, as administrative procedures delay funding and operations, occupy time and effort, and ultimately bog down our work until it becomes less efficient. And communities don’t get the services they’re owed.

Today, though, I’m just pleased I won’t be seeing Tibeb back until after the weekend.

Filming Fun with Cam and Mike

While trolling through my blog archives I found a bunch of posts which I wrote months (in some cases, like this one, years) ago, and never got around to publishing. So I might drop a few of them onto the site from time to time. This one was originally written in September 2010, when I was deployed managing an emergency response program in Niger, and had spent a few days with a TV news team filming a couple of pieces. I thought it would be good to share. Seeing as I wrote it and all.

-MA

If I were to want to tell you about my week filming with a foreign media team and wanted to use pseudonyms, I might flippantly call my reporter ‘Mike’ and my cameraman ‘Cam’.

In a twist of truth being at least as amusing as fiction (and frequently far weirder)’ these are actually their real names. ‘Mike’ is correspondent Mike McRoberts, and ‘Cam’ is news cameraman Cameron Williams, both of TVNZ in New Zealand. They’ve been here in Niger putting together some pieces about the current emergency, and about aid workers, and I’ve had the privilege of keeping them company for the last four days while we’ve bounced around the central Nigerien countryside.

(Here, of course, ‘bouncing’ is not simply a euphemistic reference to the extent to which we travelled across the far reaches of rural Maradi, but has a visceral tangibility best experienced in the back seat of our Land Cruiser troop carrier…)

Over the years I’ve found that the professions of aid work and international journalism (particularly war journalism) tend to attract similar personalities (albeit with certain key differences as well). The contexts and activities to which we’re drawn are similar, the situations we put ourselves into providing a similar kick to the system. They’re high-stress jobs on which driven people with an experientialist bent tend to thrive. They’re drawn by the opportunity to make unique contributions in unique locations, and the added risk factor is often an appeal.

Mike and Cam both fit that bill, and the rugged and frequently confronting context of Niger, the world’s poorest country and in the depths of a tragic nutrition crisis, seemed to excite rather than daunt them. I felt quickly comfortable with them. They were personalities I could identify with. The war-stories they shared were like those I’ve shared with dozens of relief colleagues in bars the world over. And to top it all off, they were consummate professionals.

I’ve dealt with the media a fair bit over the years now. Most of it has been more remote- phone interviews from garbage-strewn streets in central Niger and hotel rooms in Colombo jump to mind. Around the time of the Haiti earthquake I also did a few TV interviews with the Australian press, including a particularly daunting live appearance on a daytime chat show, which I have no desire to repeat. So the chance to watch a couple of experienced hands put together some foreign correspondent pieces was a chance to observe the process from both sides of the camera lens- something which as a photographer I found fascinating.

Mike and Cam were making a couple of news slots, as well as a longer in-depth piece about aid workers, and were in-country for about 5 days. I, with a couple of our media staff, accompanied them to the field, and took the opportunity to combine the story-gathering work with an assessment of how our emergency programs are functioning in the bush.

Reporting on these situations is always a challenge. Article 10 of the Red Cross Code of Conduct insists that in their communications material they present beneficiaries as survivors with dignity, not helpless victims. Media has its own internal guidelines- driven mostly by the integrity of the individual reporters and producers (and I’m happy to say that Mike defines himself as a Humanitarian first, a journalist second). Just like NGOs are wanting to have an emotional impact to encourage people to donate, the media wants to have an emotional impact to encourage people to watch the show or buy the edition. This can lend itself to a tendency to focus on the shocking, at the expense of balance and dignity.

It wasn’t hard to find shocking stories, of course. We were all particularly struck by the plight of a 9-month old boy who weighed roughly what Mike’s own son had weighed at birth, with skeletal limbs and a bulbous head. We spent time returning some women to their village who had walked more than 30km that morning to be at the distribution site. But so too they focused on the positive- the children whose weight can be seen improving over several weeks of treatment, the agricultural work helping farmers diversify their income and food intake, the schools offering children who have fallen through the cracks of the educational system a second chance at building a future for themselves.

I enjoyed watching Cam at work. Like me, he’s a student of light and form, and he’s at the top of his game (shortlisted as he’s been for a cameraman of the year award in New Zealand). He took great care not just composing his frames, but also ensuring that the light worked for the image he wanted to capture. I speak from personal experience when I say this is no mean feat in the Sahel. Sunlight during the middle of the day is harsh and washes out features, burns out backgrounds, and casts unsightly shadows. During the magic hours of dawn and dusk, when the light is soft and warm and beautiful, the angles change rapidly as the sun moves quicker in the tropics, presenting unique challenges for a documentary attempting to capture some stability in the light.

Like photography, putting together a piece for camera is a blend of science and art. We spent time finding locations and sometimes having to reshoot when circumstances undermined the quality of the work we were doing (one such instance involved a generator ten feet from where I sat giving an interview which, 20 minutes into the piece, decided to roar to life after the main power-grid failed; it took us an hour to find another location, and we had to restart the whole thing from scratch).

The visit captured yet another aspect of why aid work is a fascinating profession to be involved in. I doubt I could have had the experience of being so intimately involved with the creation of current affairs news in many other professions, but aid allows you to cross a lot of different paths. It was an enjoyable learning and fun to be a part of. But most of all, like so often happens in overseas postings, it was just a great opportunity to meet a couple of really good guys, share some fun, unique experiences, and more than one hearty belly-laugh with guys that get it.

Mike, Cam, thanks for good times on the road.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Maradi, Niger

Why Aid Agencies Fail to Stop Famine

I’m starting to get a little ratty with all the media right now talking about the Horn of Africa.

Articles are starting to look like a fill-the-blanks template that the reporters are all sharing around: Quote some stats about the famine; talk about the complicating factor of al Shabbab making life difficult in Somalia; drop in some pithy quotations about the fact that short-term aid is repetitive and doesn’t solve the underlying problems (always with a nod to the fact that, well, of course it saves lives now); then end on the dark yet hopeful twist that while aid agencies clearly don’t have it right, clearly what’s needed is ‘long-term solutions’.

Yeah, cool, thanks.

Interestingly, the reporting, which feels cookie-cuttered from every other cyclical emergency that pops up around the African continent (alternate Somalia with Niger, Sudan, Kenya…) is exactly the sort of thing that the reports slam aid agencies for doing in their emergency appeals: Template emergency request, paste photo of child in malnutrition centre top-right, insert country emergency name here.

But what I’m really ratty about is not that what the media are saying is wrong per se. My problem is, they’re making noise but missing the point.

Two of them, actually.

By rabbiting on about long-term solutions (I’m sorry, what solutions did you suggest, exactly?), they make it sound like nobody’s ever come up with that idea before.

[Cue professional aid workers the world over beneath newly-illuminated lightbulbs slapping foreheads, exclaiming “Long-term solutions! Of course! Why didn’t we think of that?]

The point is, aid agencies know about this. They speak this language. They can ream ideas out ad nauseum, et cetera, et cetera.

This is not new.

It’s just that, they suck at implementing them.

That’s point one.

Point two is, these solutions aren’t simple in the real-world. But we’ll come back to point two later.

***

Aid agencies have a presence in pretty much all these places that suffer cyclical emergencies. Long-term presence. And presence that isn’t just based on emergencies, either. Long-term community development, empowerment programs, child sponsorship, infrastructure development, food security projects, governance, microenterprise development… In short, kitchen sink included.

So, shouldn’t the presence of aid agencies stop famines from happening?

In principle, yes.

In practice, a woeful no.

Why not?

Well, it would be unfair, but only partly inaccurate, to say because ‘aid agencies aren’t doing their job’.

There are other factors, of course, the most significant being that macro-level factors (global economy, environmental trends) do in fact overwhelm the relatively small investment that NGOs make by comparison. But, it’s not only that.

Most aid programs, however much they might claim the opposite, are not geared to manage pending emergencies. Their activities are not built to context. Their funding sources are restrictive, their monitoring and analysis is not geared around mitigating risk, and their management systems are too rigid to adapt.

Each in turn.

Needs Context

Most aid agencies have their way of doing things. Although they will all claim that their interventions are based on need, most of the time their interventions are based on an assumption of need. Their assessments are often facipulative or partipulative. Their approach is dictated by their organizational ethos, the way they’ve done things in other places. Very rare indeed is the [large- and read, able to make a significant and multisectoral difference over an area sufficient to mitigate against the effects of famine] aid agency for whom each project is truly designed from scratch. Most have to fit a donor funding model, match up with existing organizational skills and experience, fit into standard monitoring and evaluation frameworks, and are lifted from projects and programs that have been run elsewhere.

Most agencies don’t realise that they are a solution looking for a problem. And their ‘solution’ may not be what’s needed.

What is needed?

Context analysis.

Let me say it again: Context analysis.

And I don’t just mean context awareness. All the gathered knowledge in the world won’t save us if it’s not applied. I mean a critical appreciation of the various factors that influence trends, patterns, norms and change, taken and re-applied in an intelligent way to what action is planned.

Agencies have to learn to go in there and fit their interventions to the reality on the ground. Not the reality they assume is there because it looks similar to some other place, or because sweeping the eye over the landscape makes it clear that they lack a particular resource which the agency knows it can provide.

Macro-level. Micro-level. Understand relationships. Understand the need, and the reasons for that need, and the reasons why those reasons exist. Make the communities you’re targeting a part of your analysis process so that you can learn their perspective and, if they’re interested, they can learn yours. Then figure out not what services you can deliver, but what changes need to happen to the situation to change the need that has been identified.

And that is already way too oversimplified.

Easy? Of course not. It involves time, flexibility, intent, relationships.

The frustrating part? Aid agencies have already had time. Twenty, twenty-five, thirty years of it. And if you go into some of these places and talk with the field staff, or the community members, when you drill down into it, they do in fact know a lot of this stuff. But the projects aren’t built around that context. They’re still matched to organizational norms, easily summed up in a donor report and an implementation table.

This has to change.

Funding Patterns

Agencies have their sources for funding long-term programs. Sometimes they’re long-standing cooperation agreements with institutional donors, where five years’ worth of funding is guaranteed for a particular community and sector. Sometimes it’s child sponsorship, where donors provide funds to the agency on the basis of a link with a child in the community in which the agency provides support. Sometimes it’s from general donations sourced from a faithful donor base.

Too often, these funding sources are restricted- either by the donor, or by the agency. If an agency has promised a donor a particular type of activity- providing clean water, or providing education- the agency may not be able to use those funds in other sectors. In some agencies, donors and not the agency have the strongest say in what sectors, approaches or activities are used (guaranteeing that we miss the context). In other cases, the funds may be more malleable, but still tend to be geared towards a suite of perceived acceptable activities.

Of course, these funds are often the agency’s bread and butter, providing the bulk of what keeps the agency in business, so making changes to how those funds are spent is a risky proposition.

When dealing with a context, like the Horn of Africa, which routinely slips into a crisis, we see a pattern. Existing funds continue to be pumped into the agreed sectors because there’s no donor flexibility to jump to other, more needy sectors. Activities continue to be geared towards the long-term development context without taking the emergency context into account, because this is what the organization has promised to deliver with the funding.

It sounds basic, but this is essentially what happens.

And if we’re also seeing a situation where the project has been cookie-cuttered into place, rather than built to context, then this is only going to be compounded.

What’s needed? Well, der, flexibility. On behalf of both donors and the agency. The agreement that, when a crisis emerges in a long-term program area, the agency can switch its donor funding into what ever activities it needs to to meet the needs. Not an unreasonable request, you’d think, for a donor who wants to help communities. So long as the donor trusts the agency.

And, of course, the organizational will and apparatus to do-so.

Thus avoiding the need to launch a fresh appeal every time a new emergency cycle appears in a place we always knew it was going to.

Monitoring and Accountability

And that’s the thing. We know. We often know. We knew about the Horn of Africa drought months ago. Many agencies began responding, in their own small way, long before this was a media circus. Mostly by tagging a few auxiliary activities onto their existing programs with a bit of extra funding. This was in part, to be fair, restricted by the lack of donor interest in the burgeoning crisis. It wasn’t until the media started making a fuss about it a few weeks ago that the public and governments sat up and started taking notice- making them equally complicit in this debacle.

Subject of another discussion.

Where aid agencies struggle though, and this is closely linked to the funding issue, is their indicators for success. When a block of money is granted to a project, there are almost always guidelines around how that money can be used. Hit the agreed targets and indicators, and the project is deemed a success (even if impact is negligible, uncertain or not measured).

And these targets- generally based around what can be produced by the project activities themselves- are most commonly concrete deliverables. (Some, granted, are vaguer, but these are both harder to measure and harder to get funding for.)

What long-term development projects are almost never measured against is their success at reducing the likelihood or impact of known crises in the area.

A malnutrition project may measure the number of children treated (in this case, a crisis that produces lots of malnourished kids actually makes the project look good!). A food security project, the increase in yield produced or the increase to household income- if the agency is really doing its job. Very rare is a project held to account for averting- or failing to avert- a crisis like a famine.

Despite the lip-service that agencies pay to having a positive long-term impact on a community’s context, very few of them can demonstrate this empirically, and even fewer actually hold themselves accountable to this principle in tangible terms.

They need to.

In fact, this should be the very raison d’etre of any long-term development project in an area known to be vulnerable to a particular disaster. Before we start launching into a wide array of obscure assistance packages that are au fait with our donor audience, let’s first make sure that our communities have food, water, shelter, and that we’re greatly improving their chances of hanging on to these things when the known and quantifiable threats this community faces materialise.

And, let’s actually hold them accountable with our measures of success and failure.

It’s called Disaster Risk Reduction. But like so many other technical terms that get touted in the industry, this one lost its currency almost before it had any. It’s another tick-the-box theme that pops up on proposal templates. “Explain how this project will reduce the impact of known disaster risks.” A paragraph of blurb, donor nods and signs the cheque.

Why does such a basic, logical and common-sense principle get sidelined? Partly staff knowledge, partly organizational will.

Internal Systems

Many agencies have a firm divide between what is ‘development’ and what is ‘aid’. Long-term presence in communities is generally to acheive development outcomes. Emergency situations require short-term aid interventions, after which the aid cowboys can bugger off and leave the development professionals to their job of transforming communities.

Staff are not trained to live in both camps. Either they are aid workers, or they are development workers. It is not uncommon to find development workers resentful of having to change their activities because an emergency operation has been mobilized and their manpower is required. And by the same token, assessing long-term development projects for their suitability to the risk context bores a lot of aid junkies.

So staff lack the training, and often the knowledge. But they also lack the motivation. Because they’re held accountable to different outcomes. While aid workers might be expected to meet indicators around services provided in an emergency, long-term development workers will be expected to deliver on achieving their project targets. Getting the organizational systems- including operations management and staffing- to shift from one mode to another without completely shifting the operational and staffing structure- is very hard.

What am I saying? I’m saying that we need to train our long-term development workers to be short-term emergency workers as well. A staff member working on a water infrastructure development project needs to, at the drop of a flag, be ready to become a staff member working on an emergency water project. Staff managing a program to reduce chronic malnutrition must, when the indicators are reached, start managing acute malnutrition instead.

They need to be supported by flexible systems and management, and an organization that is ready to react when thresholds are reached.

***

In summary, a major reason why aid agency presence has not translated into reduced vulnerability to, for example, famine, is due to aid agencies not being geared to do just that:

• Aid agencies do not build their programs around context, but are influenced by donor interest, assumptions, internal capacity and their own models of approach.
• Aid agencies don’t have resources that can be quickly tasked from one mode of operation (development) to another (emergency response).
• Aid agencies’ internal measuring systems do not hold them accountable to how well they reduce the risk of a disaster happening, only on how well they acheive project deliverables.
• And aid agencies own internal systems and staffing do not allow a seamless transition from a long-term development presence to an emergency response.

As such, aid agencies condemn themselves, much like the context they are in, to an endless cycle of superimposing an externally-funded, externally-managed and externally-staffed emergency response program, when in fact they have plenty of funding, management and staff capacity in-place. It’s just not being directed properly.

***

All that said, for correspondents to sit in their air-conditioned offices and take pot-shots at aid agencies for their inability to come up with ‘long-term solutions’ without offering any themselves; to criticise media circuses in refugee camps without ever acknowledging that this is exactly where their story comes from; to slam hyped-up emergency funding appeals while their own publications feed off the drama created by images of dying Africans; and to condemn aid agencies’ slow response to the emergency when the attention which agencies require to raise resources is so largely crippled by the media’s short attention-span with chronic disasters; makes these journalists run the risk of being obtuse, hypocritical, or simply missing the point entirely.

Want to be part of the solution? Get to grips with the complexity of long-term crises and find ways to engage your audience so that donor funding is more forthcoming, understanding more sympathetic, targeting both more flexible and more intelligent. And where aid agencies aren’t doing their job right, don’t just regurgitate pithy soundbites. Take time to find where the holes are, then hold these agencies to uncomfortable account in the public light and show them where change is actually needed.

This isn’t rocket science. It’s about logic and common sense. Let’s be honest about these gaps and encourage change among agencies, donors and the public alike.

It’s not that aid agencies don’t think about long-term solutions. They have the language coming out of their ears. It’s that those solutions don’t match the context and aren’t backed by an operational reality that supports that sort of change. And until they’re forced to change because their survival depends on it, they may not.

***

Complexity coming up in a subsequent post.

Je m’excuse for the plethora of Francophone cliches. I was ranting.

Somalia: Famine, Access and al Shabbab

Somalia is understood to consist of three states of varying autonomy. ‘Somalia’, with its seat in Mogadishu, is frequently refered to as ‘South Central Somalia’, and while it alone has international recognition as a nation-state, the political forces that control the state by name in fact cling to a handful of Mogadishu suburbs, and not much else. Puntland, occupying the corner, or horn, of Somalia, is aligned with the Mogadishu government but has its own para-state structures and functions largely independantly. Somaliland, which makes up most of northern Somalia, is a semi-autonomous state that has recently celebrated its 20th anniversary since breaking away from Mogadishu, and continues to strive for international recognition.

For the last five years, al Shabbab has been growing into the most powerful insurgency group in south-central Somalia. A militant group which aligns itself with al Qaeda, al Shabbab is in effect in ‘control’ of the majority of territory in South-Central. There’s no simple way to explain the power dynamics within this portion (or any other) of Somalia. Its base is a nexus of clan affiliations and alliances of varying reliability and strength, and a combination of ideology, brutality, and ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’. Its main opponent is the Transitional Federal Government (TFG)- ostensibly backed by western governments who are increasingly wary of the TFG’s corruption and incompetence, and supported by an Africa Union peacekeeping mission (AMISOM) staffed largely by longsuffering Ugandans. However there are plenty of groups opposing al Shabbab from within Somalia as well, including various clan-based rivalries.

Since 2006, when al Shabbab began to rise to the fore with the splintering of the Islamic Courts Union, it has waged war not just against the TFG, but also against targets it deems representative of western influence- much in line with other militant groups such as the Taliban, and various branches of the al Qaeda network (yes, I see the redundancy there). This has included aid agencies. Between 2008 and 2009 as many as 42 aid workers were killed by al Shabbab, and by late 2010, virtually no western aid agencies (including UN agencies) had any significant presence in south-central.

While al Shabbab does exert a level of civil control with para-state structures and local governance institutions, its reach is fragile and its support services largely ineffective, with its focus on warfighting and territorial control. The impact for the Somali citizenry in al Shabbab-control territories has been a dearth of basic services- education, health, infrastructure development- and it is not coincidental that the areas which the UN last week declared a “famine” (a technical term relating to surpassing a specific threshold of mortality and malnutrition in a given population)- Bakool and Lower Shabelle- are under al Shabbab control.

In a radio interview on the 5th of July, an al Shabbab spokesperson indicated that al Shabbab was commencing drought response activities, and that it would allow support from anybody, muslim or non-muslim, who only had a humanitarian agenda.

This implied a shift in position for al Shabbab, which had banned aid agencies from its territory since 2009. The implication of the message was that western aid agencies were welcome to begin operating in its territory again, and would presumably be safe to do so. The UN has already commenced drought response operations, and many other agencies are now considering their options.

But why aren’t aid agencies pouring into Somalia as we speak? If al Shabbab have said that it’s okay, what’s the delay? Surely the need of the Somali people on the ground is so urgent that it’s now time to rush in with all our resources and do whatever we can?

Well, in some ways, yes, it is. In others, not so simple. Here are some of the issues to consider that I understand many international organizations are currently wrestling with.

Security

An invitation from al Shabbab central command may sound like a good enough reason to think aid workers would be safe re-entering south-central, but in fact it isn’t. Like many insurgency groups, al Shabbab is as much a network of affiliated warlords as it is a hierarchical paramilitary organization. Fighters on the ground- the ones with guns, grenades and IEDs- will align themselves first with their local commander, and only after that with al Shabbab central. Then there’s the assumption that the message is even getting down to those field grunts and their captains. Or the notion that some 16-year-old with an AKM, who’s never been to school but has spent the last ten years being told that westerners are pillaging his country and deserve to die, will pay any attention to some recent order from someone he’s never heard, when he sees an NGO Land Cruiser drive past.

South-central is heavily mined, and with shifting fronts and ongoing combat operations, new explosive devices are still being laid. Al Shabbab and AMISOM fight almost daily battles in and around Mogadishu and other locations, while rival clans with varying allegiances also struggle with al Shabbab fighters on multiple fronts around the region. Lawlessness and the gargantuan proliferation of small arms would make south-central an insecure prospect even without an ongoing civil war. Last I checked, the pirates who operate along Somalia’s coastline weren’t taking instructions from al Shabbab Central (admittedly they are mostly gathered further north now, in Puntland, but seriously, can anybody say “Open Season”?). Aid agencies who have had to pull out of existing programs (at al Shabbab’s instruction) may have left behind resentful community members or former staff in a culture where disagreements are often settled with firearms.

Finally, the statement- which was vague at best- comes at a time when al Shabbab continue to face uncertainty. Their territorial hold is weakening and they are increasingly being targeted by western intelligence, including drone strikes. The recent killing of Fazul Abdullah Mohammed at a security checkpoint in Mogadishu robbed them of a senior commander, in an organization that is rife with internal power-struggles. The authority behind the statement may be in question, and if, in the midst of a power struggle, different voices take control of the leadership, what will this mean for aid agencies who have returned to the field?

In short- the statement from al Shabbab does not guarantee that aid workers are going to be safe from indocrinated and hard-core al Shabbab fighters and commanders at the field level, never mind the host of other security risks that are on offer.

Logistics

Logistics is a bit of a no-brainer. Somalia’s a remote, hostile environment where 20 years of civil war has been systematically destroying any real effort at building a local infrastructure. A network of airfields and roads (mostly unsurfaced) exists, but there are challenges which need to be overcome. Sourcing goods and supplies is hard when everything has to be flown in from outside (and recall that piracy makes shipping difficult), and agencies will have to staff their operations, many from scratch. This slows down any response, even if agencies are willing to step in.

For more discussion in a different context on some of the factors relating to why aid gets bogged down (some of which apply here), see this post on aid arriving in Haiti from last year.

Politics

Al Shabbab isn’t very popular. The TFG doesn’t like it. AMISOM is fighting a war with it. The CIA keeps bombing it. Most thinking people with a moderate worldview villify it. And now, with a famine in their back yard, most local Somalis are pretty unhappy with the way they run things too.

Tens of thousands are on the move. Thousands of kids are dying. Al Shabbab is losing support. And the outflux of population robs it of a source of new fighters for its cause. Not to mention a resource base on which its fighters draw to survive themselves.

Letting aid workers in solves many problems for al Shabbab. It demonstrates to its own people that it’s taking steps to solve the problem. It helps slow the outflux of refugees. It brings in resources that bolster the population- which may be appropriated by fighters at times, or the effects may be indirect, such as more money in the economy that supports fighters’ families which in turn supports them. And, if aid agencies don’t do the right thing by al Shabbab, it gives them fresh ammunition in the polarizing of its people against the west.

Finally, al Shabbab is being targeted by US drones. The presence of aid workers acts as a human shield. Suddenly, pickups and four-by-fours with aerials racing through al Shabbab territory may not certify a senior commander in his wagon, but perhaps a bunch of USAID consultants on their way to a project site. Ooops.

Resources

An aid operation requires resources- money, vehicles, property, supplies. These come from donors. Unfortunately, most western aid donors have very strong restrictions around dealing with terror-aligned organizations (of which al Shabbab is widely recognized as one). However operating in al Shabbab territory, it is impossible not to engage with al Shabbab, almost impossible to guarantee you haven’t inadvertantly hired an al Shabbab operative, and difficult to ascertain that some of your support doesn’t trickle down into al Shabbab’s hands. With no exemptions from western governments for aid agencies operating in these highly complex circumstances, agencies put themselves at risk of losing donor support, or at worst, criminal prosecution at the hands of donor governments, by operating in these areas.

Many aid agencies operated in south-central Somalia and were ejected by al Shabbab. Some of these did so quickly, at a metaphorical (and sometimes not-so-metaphorical) gunpoint, and in doing so, left behind not just staff and community trust, but also physical assets- cars, computers, generators, compounds. This resulted in a large financial loss to the organizations- resources that had been hard to come by in the first place, given low donor interest in Somalia. Should aid agencies begin operating again in al Shabbab territory without expecting some form of recompense for the loss of their assets? Or do they just ignore the loss of those assets, and let al Shabbab have their way, in the name of helping people? While in principle it may be easy to say that helping people is more important than getting your pound of flesh back, the reality is that agencies have been ill-able to afford the loss in the past, and now investing further in new assets and compounds to replace those lost in evacuation is coming at a cost of resources that might have gone into communities instead.

And what’s to stop al Shabbab doing it all again six months from now and seizing all those shiny new Land Cruisers? And what will donor governments say when they see their logos on the side of technicals being used to ambush AMISOM troops?

The Humanitarian Imperative

All this is very well, but of course, people- and particularly, children- are dying. And these are people who may not support al Shabbab, and certainly didn’t vote for them. Is it fair to let our organizational retisence, our principles of non-politicization, or even some fear that one or two staff members might run over a stray landmine, stop us from rushing in to Somalia to help those who need our help most?

I’m not going to give an answer. The concerns are real. The potential harm from entering this context exists- albeit, at the moment, in some analytical future. The potential harm from not entering the context also exists- and it’s real, and in our faces. But for many years now, the aid community has had to contend not just with growing security risks, but also a growing appreciation for the complexity of their operating environment and the very real need to Do No Harm. Agencies taking a bit of time to assess as best they can the potential risks should be leant some grace, just as those who rush in to begin operations without thought for potential ramifications need to ensure they’ve done their due diligence.

I hope- I sincerely hope- that as many agencies as possible and as much assistance as possible will pour into south-central Somalia. As long as the factors remain as they are, though, this will be an exceptionally challenging operation, with high risk of negative ramifications for even the most thoughtful or well-meaning response agency.

Systems, Complexity, and Staff Realities

In a post last year (time flies) I discussed the application of a framework known as Cynefin to Humanitarian Response. The below post, which I plan to be the first of several, goes into more depth around some of the conclusions drawn from the earlier article, particularly as relates to how organizations manage their staff and operations in complex and chaotic contexts. I hope later articles will look at other aspects of complexity and aid work, and exploring more adaptive approaches to emergency management, and I look forward to discussions with various readers who, I know, are far more conversant in this stuff than I am.

I won’t go over the original framework in detail. Please see the article for more detail or if you’re not familiar with Cynefin. The framework was initially developed by Dave Snowden (@snowded) whose work and that of his associates can be followed on their blog “Cognitive Edge“

In brief, Cynefin assumes that contexts and systems fit into one of five realms- Simple, Complicated, Complex, Chaotic and Disordered.

In Simple systems, cause and effect are known and linked through direct, predictable causality. In Complicated systems, cause and effect again have a direct relationship, but this may be through several stages in a process which may require a level of investigation to understand. In Complex systems, cause and effect are related, but the influence of feedback mechanisms an external forcings mean that they are hard to perceive or predict. In Chaotic systems, cause and effect may not be perceptibly linked and the context is changing rapidly, with factors contributing to change often unknown and a high level of uncertainty. In Disorder, cause and effect are not linked at all.

As Humanitarian organizations, we can apply systems to contexts within these realms. However, systems must be applied to contexts in the same realm. If we apply Simple systems to a Chaotic context, or Complicated systems to a Complex context, we will end up with disfunction.

Most of the systems that we as NGOs utilize to do our work are either Simple (Finance systems, procurement processes, audit requirements) or Complicated (project designs, logical framework analysis, problem tree analysis). However the places that we work are either Complex (the majority of communities we work in in rural and urban areas) or Chaotic (rapid-onset disaster responses).

Take, for example, a Response Manager who has deployed into Port-au-Prince five days after the earthquake of January 2010. It is her job to ensure that assistance reaches affected communities as quickly as possible. To do this she requires supplies and equipment (which costs money) and people. To source supplies and equipment she must follow procurement procedures which state that 3 bids must be submitted in a transparent manner and then selected via a senior committee meeting, all of which must be documented and backed up with tender calls, invoices, receipts, bank statements and goods-received notes. To get people she must follow HR procedures which require posts to be open for a certain amount of time, a certain number of interviews, a selection panel and review process and careful documentation.

These are all Simple systems.

Her context is Chaotic. She can’t find 3 suppliers because many would-be suppliers have either been killed or injured in the earthquake, had their stores destroyed, or are looking after injured relatives. Communication networks have been destroyed so the only way to find suppliers is to travel around looking for them, but roads are blocked and there is insecurity. Her team is scattered all over the city doing assessments so there is not enough people for a committee meeting- nor is there time. The printer is not working properly because the generator keeps switching off, and they can’t buy paper yet. And there is no time to follow lengthy HR procedures because work can’t begin until they have local hires.

Our Response Manager has two options. The first is to do as the organization and its systems tell her, and comply. However if she does this, the response will choke to a halt for days, even weeks, while systems are fulfilled. There is a good chance she will not meet indicators for program success related to goods delivered and numbers of people helped, and her work will be judged a failure.

Her other option is to work around the systems. Go ahead and purchase from whichever supplier she can find. Let documentation lapse below expected standards. Hire staff who are recommended by other local staff or organizations without following full HR protocols. However if she takes this route, she will be deemed to be in breach of company policy. At best, she will have to spend time at a later date documenting her decisions and/or justifying to an audit panel why processes were flaunted, creating more work for herself and others, and in the eyes of some parts of the organization, failing in her workplace integrity. At worst she may face disciplinary action from the organization.

While this may appear to be an overly simplistic narrative (and indeed many organizations have a different set of expectations around some basic protocols such as finance and logistics, to ensure operations in emergencies can continue), the point is valid across most aid agencies. Staff are deployed into highly Complex or Chaotic situations, and are expected  largely to adhere to Simple or Complicated systems which do not match that context.

In this way we end up with a duality in how we operate and how we measure success. We talk about being ‘Humanitarian’ organizations and existing for the wellbeing of the communities we’re trying to support. But we actually measure our success through how well we comply to the systems we use to run operations- Have finance processes been followed? Have audit requirements been fulfilled? Have human resources protocols been engaged?

In the same vein: Have SMART indicators been reached? Have activities and outputs been acheived? Do gender audits measure up?

Systems that make sense in a Simple or Complicated paradigm, but which do not work in a Complex or Chaotic one.

What to do then?

Our Response Manager, as mentioned, has two choices. Which one you would pick probably depends on whether you are a field-based program manager operating largely in a Complex paradigm or an office-based grant accountant operating largely in a Simple paradigm; whether you see success as operational output, or system compliance; whether you (or your boss) understand your primary client to be the target community, an internal auditor, a donor, or a senior manager. Please note, in this comparison, there is no denegration implied in the use of the word ‘Simple’- it is an organizational context and nothing more or less in this discussion.

Most field practicioners have tales of when they or colleagues with them have ignored head-office regulations and bent or broken the rules to make something happen in the field. Generally they get away with it.

I remember working during the rainy season in a famine response as a junior field worker (but token expat) in the car with a local field manager. I took a call from our logistics officer. He could get 10,000 mosquito nets for the program today- an outlay of a very substantial amount of money- but if we didn’t make the purchase straight away, it would be four months before the stocks returned and we wouldn’t get any more before next year. What should he do?

Normal process required layers of approval for an item of this cost. The field manager and I held a brief conversation, agreed that the nets were crucial to helping slow the spread of malaria during the rainy season and which was killing children, and we then told the logistics officer to make the purchase.

It was a breach of organizational protocols. Way, way, way outside my level of authority. Or the field manager’s, for that matter. But it was also the right thing to do for the communities we were serving. Malaria wouldn’t care that we’d followed procedure.

That certainly isn’t the last time I’ve broken company policy- and I don’t expect it to be, as long as policy restricts my ability to do the work I need to.

Talking to other aid worker colleagues, I hear stories like this all the time. ‘The rules say this, but I ingored them and got the job done instead.’

Most aid workers out there reading this probably have your own stories- times you’ve broken the rules, or watched others do it. Please do share those stories in the comments section below.

I want to draw out three points from this:

1. Principle versus Protocol

An underlying tension here is that aid work is a principled industry. When I say that, I recognize the contradiction that implies. An industry is soulless- literally. It is a set of rules, regulations and institutions geared to a particular set of outcomes. It is amoral by nature.

The people who populate an industry, by contrast, are not. They are people with beliefs, experience, motivations and interests.

The people who make up the aid industry tend, on a whole, to be a principled bunch. Many work for organizations whose values they align with. Many work for less pay than they could earn elsewhere because they believe in the task they are working towards.

By operating in the manner we do, overlaying Simple-realm systems over a Complex- or Chaotic-realm situation, aid workers often have to choose between following protocol (what is the right thing to do according to Simple rules) or following principle (what is the right thing to do according to the Complex context). And, where you deal with principled people, you end up with people working around the protocols to fulfil those principles.

I’m serious. Ask any field aid worker and see how many stories they have about doing just that.

But in acknowledging this, we also have to acknowledge two truths:

a) We are making more work for our staff in the field- i.e. they have to circumnavigate the barriers we put in their way

b) Our systems are, apparently, not appropriate to context in Complex and Chaotic situations

2. Decision-Makers versus Compliers

If we put staff who are good at complying into a complex or chaotic context and give them simple or complicated systems to comply to, we will end up with a situation where the boxes are ticked, but the context is not responded to appropriately.

To avoid this, we need decision-makers who can work around compliance hurdles and still acheive organizational objectives.

And for this to happen, we need the right sort of decision-makers.

We don’t want to throw compliance issues out of the window here. These systems are there for a reason. To measure program effectiveness, or to prevent corruption, or to create accountability to donors and communities. All good things. Just done in an appropriate way.

We don’t want people who ignore the good intent behind inappropriate systems. We want people who can internalise these intentions, then base their decisions accordingly. Then we have people who don’t allow systems to prevent them from reaching the aims they’re trying to acheive, but who also ensure that the principles behind those systems are maintained. Such as transparency, integrity, accountability…

What we’re talking about is value-based decision-making. We need staff who can be trusted to make decisions based on principles (whether organizational or humanitarian- probably both).

What’s important is not the process which the decision-making follows, but the outcome. Does the decision reflect organizational and humanitarian values? Does it move the team towards acheiving goals that will benefit the communities we’re serving? If the answer to both questions is ‘yes’, does it matter whether or not the decision can be fitted into an organizational checkbox?

Of course, this is a risky proposition for an organization. I acknowledge that. And that’s why it’s so hard for organizations to move in this direction. Particularly risk-averse organizations such as NGOs, which are so dependent themselves on the trust of voluntary donors.

3. People versus Systems

What we need, as organizations, is to develop systems that are appropriate to the realms of operation. If we are operating in a Complex context, then we need to have a way of operating that is complex in nature. If we are operating in a Chaotic context, then we need to have an approach that is appropriate to chaos.

This requires a loss of direct control by removed decision-makers and those who hold political risk. It requires shifting from a mindset that risk can be controlled, to a mindset that risk can be managed, and from holding staff accountable to process, to holding them accountable to achievement. Box-tick systems assume that if the box is ticked, risk is eliminated. Chaotic realities acknowledge that risk is always present, and can never be completely discounted.

Instead of investing in systems that govern staff behaviour, we need to be investing in staff behaviour in such a way that the values that drive the systems are internalized. We’re talking about prioritizing behaviour over process. Values over procedures. People over systems.

The Red Cross Code of Conduct outlines 10 key values that agencies operating in humanitarian emergencies should exhibit. It’s very difficult to put measurements around these. You can try. But how do you truly put a numerical value around something like ‘impartiality’? And if you try, how do you avoid forcing frontline aid workers from having to jump through a series of organizational hoops to demonstrate on paper that they are running operations impartially, rather than just trusting them to be impartial? And if you do create such a system, how do you avoid the reality that some people will still flaunt it for their own ends and twist the system to only appear impartial? And how do you avoid adding the organizational cost and burden of subsequently measuring, auditing and reporting on that impartiality? And when you’ve successfully assured impartiality across all your programs, is it now time to do it with neutrality, accountability, dignity, respect, and a host of other values that we should all be abiding to?

Or should we be identifying staff who, by their actions, we already acknowledge as having strong impartiality in how they operate? Should we be trusting that, if we put person X into a relief response, she will by very nature strive for impartiality in her program? What does that cost an organization by comparison? Some risk? Sure. But it results in a lighter, freer response and a happier staff member who isn’t wasting time on internal protocols, who can instead focus on the complexity or chaos at hand and try and make a difference.

I close with the words of a friend on this topic, who summarizes far more succinctly than I can:

“It’s inappropriate to put a staff  member into a context, tell her to manage or lead, then prescribe how she must do-so. That assumes a consistency in the context which is not evident in Complex & Chaotic contexts. This results in wasted effort focused on system design which could and should be invested in staff development instead.”

We talked earlier about organizations which have exceptions for some of their systems for emergency contexts. This can shift systems from being simple to complicated, and even complex at times. Managing this shift can itself be challenging in organizations where staff are used to more rigid ways of operating. If staff are used to the perceived ‘safety’ in complying to a set of simple systems (assumption: risk can be controlled), then getting them to adopt a more complex or chaotic form of operating (principled action, decisions based on gut reaction, trust) can be very difficult.

This is where organizations need to do three things:

1. Ensure they have the right people in the right places. People who have appropriate experience, and appropriate training. Ensuring staff are trained in issues such as ethical decision-making and principled action (not just ‘these are the decisions that we make’ but also ‘this is the reason for those decisions’) is central to this. And here we’re not just talking about ‘training’ as a way of telling people what to do, but ‘developing’ staff, enabling them to get the experience they need so that they understand inherently how to apply their knowledge in a given context: that is, wisdom.

2. Invest in trust- trust by removed political risk-holders in their frontline operations staff, and trust by junior staff in on-the-ground leaders who may appear to flaunt ‘normal’ business practices to fit an evolving context.

3. Reconsider their notions of success in an operating environment. While Simple and Complicated realms assume success looks like ticked boxes and process-compliant action, Complex and Chaotic realms base success on change achieved- a results-based measure increasingly regardless of the process used to achieve that change (within the confines of the principles and ethos that guide the organization’s actions providing boundary conditions).

This conversation’s only just beginning. I’ve lots more to say on the matter- as do lots of others- and will hopefully have the space to do so over the coming weeks. Stay tuned. And I’d love to hear your feedback. As with any article of this nature, I can only present a narrow slice of what there is to say, and friends who have seen this article have already identified some room for development and some holes to plug, so input is most welcome.

Aid workers, share your stories: Please tell us about times you’ve had to work around rules to get the job done when you’ve been operating in the field.

Becoming an Aid Worker, Part 5: Count the Cost

This is the last in a series of five posts aimed at helping people who are considering becoming aid workers to understand some of the issues. The first is Know What You’re Getting Into. The second is Aid Work is a Profession. The third is Experience, Education and Personality. The forth is Where Do You Fit?

Following this post is a non-exhaustive list of web-based resources you may find helpful.

If it seems like I’m being a bit heavy on this profession so far, that’s because I’ve seen my fair share of damaged souls wandering along this particular career path. I’ve come close to the edge myself on more than one occasion, and would like to see fewer, rather than more, dysfunctional individuals working on field postings.

And with that said, hold on to your hats…

Aid work is an intoxicating, exciting and richly rewarding career. When it works. Often it doesn’t. Often things like politics, corruption, violence, interpersonal relationships, or sheer incompetence means that things fall apart. Things, like projects designed to save peoples lives. This can shake the strongest of people. When people are driven by values and a belief in the greater good of humankind, watching this sort of failure can leave them deeply wounded. I’ve known of it costing people their faith in humanity and in God. I’ve seen my fair share of cynics, and periodically count myself among them (though I still find myself drawn back, like a moth to a candle, to the hope that we can actually do something about this broken world). People become isolated. Some drop into depression.

They say three types of people are drawn to aid work. Missionaries, mercenaries, and misfits. Humour aside, it’s a fair description. You find a disproportionate number of people driven by values, by their thirst for experience or money, or people who just don’t know how to function in any other environment.

This can make the aid environment quite a dysfunctional one. Exotic, addictive, wonderfully unique, and utterly unhealthy. People jump from one emergency program to the next like it’s going out of fashion (Port-au-Prince? Ugh, that’s so 2010. It’s all Horn of Africa now darling.) They do the same with friendships, with relationships, with lovers. Work hard, play hard is the motto most employ when in the field. This might be the house-party scene, with drink or pills optional but frequently endorsed extras. It might be adrenaline sports. It might be risky travel options. Regardless, this line of work attracts the sort of person who thrives on an element of risk in most things they do. Not always the best approach to life.

I make all these statements with a healthy level of self-awareness.

Aid workers expose themselves to all manner of stresses. Some of us wander into life-threatening situations, which may sound great recanted in cavalier fashion over a couple of local brews, but in fact are anything but when you’re actually in them. Even those that don’t bear direct witness to terrible events are usually indirectly exposed to them on a routine basis. Reports suggest that above all of this, the single biggest cause of stress to aid workers is organizational dysfunction, where the pressures of a poorly managed response in a highly value-driven culture can be devastating, psychologically speaking.

These pressures lead to a whole range of stress reactions on the brain. I won’t go into too much detail, but this regular exposure to steady stress, which may or may not be coupled with repeated exposure to critical incident stress, results in physical changes to the makeup of the brain which cause long-term and in some cases irrepairable damage.

A lot of aid workers see psychologists (I am one). A lot more who don’t should.

The mobile and uncertain life of an aid worker takes a huge toll on the personal life. While the constant changing from one emergency-focused community to the next can be a lot of fun, it also means that forming deep, meaningful and stable relationships over time is very difficult. You meet a lot of single aid workers. You meet a lot of divorced aid workers. You meet a lot of aid workers who have significant marital problems, or who are disconnected from their children. And if you hang around long enough, you hear plenty of stories of married aid workers sleeping around on assignment too.

Even if that’s not the way you roll, finding and maintaining a relationship to a life partner is a challenge in this line of work. For all the negative stories I hear above, I also know plenty of men and women who make it work. But I’ll wager that they work at it a lot harder and more deliberately than their peers who don’t jet around the world at the drop of a seismograph.

It’s not just spouse and children you suffer disconnection from. Whether married or single, connecting to a stable group of friends in your home community becomes difficult as well. With you constantly on the move, you’ll find that most relationships start to slip, and you have to work hard to stay in touch with those you care about. It’s not uncommon to find that people simply stop inviting you to events because they never know when you’re around, or they’re tired of hearing you say that you’ll be overseas that weekend. I’ve found this has been one of my biggest struggles over the years, and I’ve spent long periods of time back at my home base feeling restless and lonely, struggling to maintain social networks, and wishing for my next overseas ‘fix’ instead- which ends up being just as lonely, in the long run.

If you’ve just read through the post this far and gone, “Heh heh, that sounds way cool,”, then you can sod off. Seriously. Stay at home. There are enough burned-out, dysfunctional and anti-social relief junkies out there. Some of them do a decent job at running a relief program, but most are a liability to themselves, and therefore to others as well. We have all of those we need. Don’t become another one.

If you’ve gotten this far and admitted, “You know what, that’s way more than I’m ready to cope with right now,” then no worries. Aid work isn’t for everyone. There are a zillion ways to help people in need in your local community, and there’s a lot of very wise argument that would say your efforts are best placed helping there anyway. It’s great that you care about the world enough to look into aid work, and make sure to keep connected to what’s happening in the world around us. Figure out the way you feel you’re best geared to give, then go do it.

If on the other hand you thought to yourself, “Man, I need to figure out a way to maintain my values in the face of contradicting experiences; I need to develop some good solid coping strategies that are going to hold me together when the pressure’s on; I need to really work on maintaining my relationships with the people in my life I care about if I’m going to do this work,” then congratulations. You may be ready to think about that career change after all.

I reiterate: I’m not saying aid work sucks. I’m not saying you’re destined to become a burned-out loner lurking in third-world bars preying on local prostitutes (though observational evidence suggests that if you’re going to become an aid worker, that’s still well within the realms of statistical probability…). Aid work is rewarding. If you take the effort to get yourself set up properly, work with a reputable agency, and work dilligently to minimize harm and improve the quality of assistance given to people in need, you can accomplish great things.

But if you walk into this line of work without the right mindset, you’re in trouble. You need to know what you’re getting yourself into. You need to understand that the aid industry is a profession, not just a hobby. You need to invest in getting the right set of skills, sufficient experience, and ensuring that your personality is going to gel with this line of work. You need to think through what it is you’re wanting to contribute to this line of work. And if you’re really serious about it, you need to have a plan to mitigate the highly destructive side-effects of the aid worker lifestyle.

***

This isn’t a comprehensive solution to becoming an aid worker. It is a handful of insights that I, as a professional aid worker, want to share with the significant number among you who are interested in this line of work and want to understand what it involves.

I know there are plenty of other aid workers out there who have other things they could add to this series, and possibly some varying opinions on some of what I’ve said. I’d welcome any comments, additions or disagreements you might have. Many of you may have specific resources that might help people interested in becoming aid workers find a starting point or move themselves ahead a little.

And to those of you out there who are seriously thinking about it, feel free to ask any more specific questions you might have that aren’t addressed here, and I’ll see if I can answer them. There are plenty of other very qualified, experienced and articulate aid workers who make themselves accessible via social media and the blogosphere, so do check out the people I’m interacting with on Twitter, follow them, and see what they have to say too.

Salaam, Shalom, Peace.

-MA

Resources:

Aid Workers

Tales From The Hood has a ream of material that catalogues, among other things, the perils of being an aid worker and some of the internal battles that this entails, in a highly entertaining, readable and often poignant style. His audience frequently includes students and would-be aid workers, and his blog should be required reading for anybody interested in the profession. He posted a couple of pieces specifically for students looking to become aid workers, which you can find here and here as a starting point.

Alanna Shaikh, another top-notch aid blogger, has a section of her home page dedicated to Jobs resources for wannabe aid workers (check the right hand column a few sections down)- I’ve linked a couple of them below. For two dollars a month you can subscribe to her newsletter ‘International Development Careers List‘ and get regular information and feedback on how to work in the aid industry.

Saundra, who runs Good Intentions Are Not Enough, has a page similarly dedicated to job resources, including a list of websites worth checking out and monitoring for job vacancies.

Web

A detailed pamphlet on how to find your first job as an aid worker can be found on Eldis, “Better Ways to find Humanitarian Employment“. Thanks to Alanna Shaikh for providing this link, and the next, on Change.org entitled “Finding a Job Overseas“.

Jobs4Development is another good gateway site to start browsing what’s out there.

Aid Agencies

Most agencies have clear links on their websites to where job availabilities can be browsed, although note that most of these are unlikely to be entry-level. Many NGOs have graduate or internship programs which enable young would-be aid professionals to get sector and field experience, but they are generally highly competitive and open to just a handful of applicants a year. The list below is not by any means exhaustive. There are hundreds of reputable agencies you could choose out there.

ADRA

CARE

MSF

Oxfam

Save the Children

UN Careers Portal

UN Volunteers

World Vision

Becoming an Aid Worker, Part 4. Where Do You Fit?

This is the fourth in a series of five posts aimed at helping people who are considering becoming aid workers to understand some of the issues. The first is Know What You’re Getting Into. The second is Aid Work is a Profession. The third is Experience, Education and Personality.

International NGOs are largely varied organizations, many of which are themselves large with extensively varied staff profiles.

The types of people who work in them often have vastly different skill sets and very different reasons for wanting to be there. Some are motivated by faith, others by guilt, others by experientialism, others (misguided fools) by money.

Think about how your vision, motivation and skillset would match with a particular organization.

First off, you have different types of organizations in the humantarian sector. You have development NGOs whose focus is on more stable context and looks at how to help alleviate structural poverty at a community level over many years. Their mandate differs from frontline aid agencies who work in unstable and often dangerous frontline conflict and disaster environments offering lifesaving assistance.

Some NGOs offer practical assistance- the delivery of goods and services directly to communities affected. Others offer less tangible support- focusing on human rights issues or policy change and development.

Some agencies have a very broad mandate, covering multiple sectors and who try and be everything to everyone. Others are highly specialised, and offer only one or two types of activitiy to their beneficiaries- water sources, perhaps, or emergency medical care. Still others are support agencies, which might offer services to other NGOs, such as logistics support, training or surge capacity. Some are local, or grassroots, agencies, with a very limited local mandate and extremely rooted in the communities which they serve. Some organizations don’t implement directly, but identify and work through partner agencies on the ground with whom they have relationships.

Some organizations are motivated by faith and carry out overt prosletysation as a part of their mission. Others are extremely secular and don’t appreciate any expression of religious identity.

There are not-for-profits, private development consultancies , fundraising and donor bodies, for-profit development contractors, corporations with corporate social responsibility programs. There are NGOs, government aid programs, UN organizations, and the Red Cross/Red Crescent movement.

There are- quite literally- thousands of aid agencies out there of varying kinds. I can’t even begin to compile a list here- that’s where your own research has to begin, guided by your own interest and vision in this department- and what you feel you have to offer.

Think about where you fit and what you’re wanting to give. If you’re motivated by your faith, you may be inclined to source a faith-based organization or even a missionary organization. If you’ve got fifteen years professional experience as a trauma surgeon, then a frontline medical NGO could be up your street. If you’re trained as an agronomist and have a vision to see crop yields increase in marginal farming areas, you’re probably after a development organization with a mandate for food security.

Aid agencies, like any other organization out there, employ accountants, administrative staff, auditors, lawyers, HR personnel, media officers, marketers, communicators, IT gurus, managers and all manner of other support functions as well. Most of these posts are at headquarters level. Many exist at the field level as well, although they may well be filled by local staff (as they should be in most circumstances). So don’t let the fact that you don’t have training or experience in third world development stop you from commencing a career in aid work if that’s a shift you want to take. And don’t let the fact that you’re terrified of large spiders, get plane sick, and break out in a heat rash every time you look at a postcard with palm trees stop you from fulfilling your dream of contributing to the alleviation of poverty. Many of these roles never require you to leave your own suburb, and are little different in their accessibility than other similar roles in the for-profit corporate world.

Where you fit is going to be some combination of your personal vision, your experience and skillset, and your personality, the latter three discussed in my last post in this series. You alone are going to be best suited to decide on the starting-point for that journey, and from there see where you get to.

***

Two things to think about here with respect to selecting an organization. First, if your motivation is grounded in the genuine desire to help the less fortunate (and I hope that, by and large, it is), then please make sure you offer your time and services to an organization that takes these things seriously. As I’ve talked about earlier, there is a long list of professional standards and codes that aid organizations should embed their work in. Ensure that your organization takes these things seriously. A good starting point is ensuring that it has adopted the Red Cross Code of Conduct. Another, for your own sake, is that it adheres to the principles of People in Aid. The principle here is, do no harm. If this is an NGO that doesn’t take these things seriously and behaves unprofessionally, not only does this cast other NGOs into disrepute, but stands a very real risk of causing harm to the people it’s trying to help.

Professional standards alone aren’t the be-all and end-all of aid work, nor are they enough to guarantee good outcomes or avoid failures. But agencies which flaunt them have a much higher likelihood of creating harm, not good.

In the same vein, think very carefully before investing yourself in a startup NGO (or, indeed, in starting your own NGO). This is something that happens particularly around large disasters, such as the Haiti earthquake. People, often motivated by a genuine desire to help, look at the situation and figure, ‘Hey, I can do something to help there’. Then they grab a suitcase full of money, get on a plane, and start running around the streets of whatever afflicted country has taken their fancy spreading their do-goodness.

Every NGO has its starting point, and I’m not going to say that these (hopefully) well-meaning projects are universally awful. But generally, when you take somebody who has limited or no knowledge or experience of working in a disaster zone, they’re probably going to make mistakes. The sort of mistakes that more established organizations have made in the past and have measures in place to avoid. It’s a case of not knowing what they don’t know. They make coordination very difficult, they have little or no knowledge of international standards, and when they do a poor job, they cause headaches for other organizations.

I’m sure you’ll be able to find me examples of Mom & Pop NGOs which have accomplished great things in Port-au-Prince. That’s great. There were around 10,000 NGOs that registered to work in Haiti following the earthquake. You show me those examples, and I’ll ask you about the other 9,820 startups that descended en-masse into the chaos in January 2010.

As a professional aid worker (and knowing I speak for hundreds of other professional aid workers) I ask you to consider very carefully before getting involved with that particular aspect of the humanitarian industry. This has been discussed ad nauseum in other portions of the aid blogosphere, so I won’t go into further detail here. It’s not always a popular line to criticise peoples’ good intentions, but sometimes these things have to be said.

If I haven’t offended, disillusioned or generally knocked the stuffing out of you yet, check out Part 5 of this series, Counting the Cost.

Becoming an Aid Worker, Part 3. Experience, Education and Personality

This is the third in a series of five posts aimed at helping people who are considering becoming aid workers to understand some of the issues. The first is Know What You’re Getting Into. The second is Aid Work is a Profession.

There are a lot of people wanting to be aid workers. Far and away the most popular roles are those that are based out of western countries but with a healthy dose of travel. For example, in my own office, when we have a role such as mine come up, we generally have between one and two hundred applicants per position. This number tapers off a lot when we start hiring for full-time field positions, but that’s because the hiring criteria are a lot tougher.

In brief, aid agencies are looking for a mix of appropriate skills, relevant experience, and the right personality. It’s a bit of a nebulous mix and there’s no magic formula. However, if you’re lacking one of these three, you’re really going to struggle to get employed by an NGO.

a) Skills and Education

Once upon a time, people from a range of backgrounds could get sent to the field with charity groups. Today, NGOs are much more specific about the sorts of educational backgrounds. The room for vocational skills is relatively small now, as most skilled jobsets can be sourced locally (see above).

NGOs will generally be looking for a graduate degree of some sort that demonstrates that an applicant has a general overview of developing country contexts. This covers a pretty wide range of options and could be a degree in development studies, in economic development, in sociology or in demographics, as a handful of examples. NGOs want to know that you understand the implications of working in developing countries- fundamental principles such as participation, dependency, risk management, and a generalist’s knowledge of less developed countries.

For more technical skillsets and people interested in technical field work, there’s also a broad range of options. For those interested in long-term development work, things like agronomy, agriculture, economics and public health are all relevant degrees. Medical doctors and nurses, logisticians, civil engineers and nutrition specialists can all find technical roles in an emergency response team.

This sort of degree will not get you in the door. Most applicants will have this sort of educational background, and you not only won’t stand out, but will probably be surpassed by the very high number of people with two or more degrees- often a Bachelors and a Masters, and often one generalist degree with a second more specialised qualification.

An additional note for westerners looking for overseas roles: you’re also competing with expatriates from non-western countries. As global education levels rise, more and more people from countries that were once net receivers of expatriate aid workers are now net givers. East Africa and India both produce a huge portion of many NGOs’ expatriates. And not are they often willing to work for lower salaries than western expatriates, but they are often older, with more developed skillsets, more field experience, and a better knowledge of working in non-western cultural contexts, all making them very attractive as employees. So if you’re wanting to work for an international NGO as an expatriate, you really have to think very carefully about what it is that you have to offer over a graduate from the University of Nairobi with fifteen years of relevant experience.

b) Experience

Education alone is probably not going to get you in the door, but needs to be balanced with experience. There is a bit of a trade-off that happens here. People with the right field experience can often get in on that merit, even if they lack some educational qualifications (although most will find it more of a struggle to climb the career ladder in this instance, and I know a lot of people with 10 or more years of aid experience who are now doing part-time or distance learning to get a masters degree and make them more promotable). Likewise, younger hopefuls with limited field experience but the right attitude and a couple of solid degrees can get over the threshold and be given a shot at an NGO posting.

Experience is the one that gets most young would-be aid workers most frustrated. “How do I get the necessary experience to work with an NGO if no NGO will hire me until I have experience?”

I sympathise. I was in the same boat for a while too.

The flip-side, of course, is that from the perspective of an aid agency, the very last thing they want to do is send some untested junior staffer into a highly complex and possibly dangerous emergency response where mistakes cost lives, just to see whether they’re made of the right stuff. They want to have some assurance that this individual is going to be able to work in the team. Hence wanting to see experience.

For some NGOs, ‘experience’ doesn’t have to mean working in developing countries. If you have ten years of professional experience, this is going to count for something if you have a skill-set relevant to the sector. Medical NGOs, for example, may well send doctors and nurses to the front lines if they have a number of years demonstrated work in an emergency room. Likewise logisticians have valuable skillsets that are quite easily transfered. Men and women with military service can find that they slot quite easily into certain NGO roles- although not always with such ease into NGO culture.

Many smaller NGOs will be less choosy about the level of experience they expect from applicants. If they lack the budgets that larger agencies offer, they will be receiving fewer top-level candidates, and the competition for roles will be less fierce. However, remember that there are still a LOT of people chasing a small number of roles. It’s also worth ensuring that the organization offers the support you as a newbie need. Being chucked off the deep end into an unfamiliar context without the appropriate experience and support can be a great learning opportunity. Or it can wreck your career, and possibly your mental health in the process.

Local or grass-roots NGOs in-country are often the best way in. Of all the NGO types out there, not only will they likely be the least choosy in terms of qualifications (often only able to pay local wages, if that) but as a westerner, you will probably actually have something significant to offer that is different to the rest of their staff- for example, your language skills, your knowledge of donor cultures, your ability to network with other expatriates at coordination meetings, and an external perspective. Significant work with local NGOs will definitely start clocking up points on the experience meter, and will also provide some great learning opportunities and demonstrate cross-cultural skills. And if you’re sitting in-country with a local NGO, you have the opportunity to network with other larger agencies if you so wish. You’re much more likely to build the necessary relationships to get in to an NGO if you’re based out of Nairobi or Lusaka than you will in Toronto or Phoenix.

A respectful little note here. Some of what might pass for ‘experience’ of third world countries around the college bar won’t actually slice the Dijon where aid agencies are concerned. The three-week missions trip you took to Tijuana when you were 17, that voluntourism project at the Cambodian orphanage, or the gap-year you spent backpacking around South America where you worked for 2 months at a hostel in Cusco may all be great experiences which changed your life and from which you draw a lot of personal satisfaction, and that’s great. However if they’re the only thing on your resume, don’t expect to stand out from the pack, and don’t expect the HR staff to get too excited.

c) Personality

In addition to education and experience, you also need to have the right personality. Aid work is a highly stressful profession, and it brings out the very best and the very worst in peoples’ tempraments. Team leaders want to know that the staff they’re deploying are going to be able to work in that environment, and not just make more work for the rest of the team who have to tiptoe around their dysfunction.

This aspect is a little harder to quantify, and can be quite subjective. The je ne sais quoi of the aid world.

As a rule, though, when it comes to this side of things, I can ask myself, who would I want next to me when the proverbial is hitting the spinny thing? When I look at the context I described above (chaotic, rapidly changing, potentially dangerous, highly stressful, professionally rigorous), what characteristics are going to help somebody perform as part of a team?

In fact, one of the first things most aid workers (myself included) would put on that list would be ‘a good sense of humour’. Beyond that: adaptable, flexible, quick to learn new things, strong critical analysis skills, independant but also a good team player, good communicator, able to take and manage risks, demonstrated ability to work in a cross-cultural team, ability to manage stress over a prolonged period of time…

And more.

These aren’t the characteristics you find in every expat aid worker. They are ones you find in most of the good aid workers however. And they’re the ones I’d be looking for in any aid worker I’d want to take with me into an emergency response.

If you reckon you do a good job hitting a good balance of education, experience and personality, then think about how you can demonstrate these things to an NGO on your CV and in an interview. If you reckon there are some gaps, are they gaps that can be filled (e.g. by a graduate degree, a couple of years spent working with a grass-roots NGO in South Asia, the surgical implantation of a sense of humour…)?

There’s no hard and fast rule. You can tick all these boxes and still not get in the door with the NGO of your choice, because it’s a highly competitive sector and many others also have these criteria met. You can also miss out on some of them and still get yourself a position- being the right person at the right time to the right organization. But the above list should give you a starting point for what you should be presenting to an HR officer if you’re looking for a job with an NGO.

To be the right person at the right time for the right organization, consider what you actually want to do and read on with Part 4 of this series.

NB: For those wondering about my own track into the humanitarian world (and note this is now nearly 10 years ago, when the industry was at a much earlier stage of professionalisation):

I grew up overseas in the UN system, with a parent working for a UN humanitarian organization and me attending an international school. By the time I interviewed for my first NGO role, I had lived in 6 different countries and visited about 25. I was bilingual (French/English) with a decent grasp of Spanish, and had a lifetime of demonstrated cross-cultural communication and adaptability. I had a Bachelor’s degree in social science (with units focusing on issues in developing countries, on disasters, and on risk management) and a Masters degree in development and the environment, both from a respected University. I had spent time working with projects in a couple of different countries, one as a volunteer and one as part of my Masters thesis.

In all, I was definitely light-on in the experience side of things, but I was also one of the lucky ones who happened to show up on the doormat at just the right time. I also had a cultural/experiential background (through no skill of my own) that recommended me to this line of work. I got myself a desk-job which was largely project paperwork, and from there took several other office jobs over the next year and a half. Since then, I’ve had a bunch of different jobs, between which have taken me to a further 25-or-so countries and dozens of humanitarian projects. I consider myself a humanitarian professional and expect this line of work to be a part of my career for many years to come. It is also something that, despite it’s regular and often deep frustrations, is something I love doing and find richly satisfying (sometimes perversely-so).

Becoming an Aid Worker, Part 2. Aid Work is a Profession

This is the second in a series of five posts aimed at helping people who are considering becoming aid workers to understand some of the issues. Read the first, Know What You’re Getting Into.

Twenty years ago, you could have a pulse and some good intentions, and you could get youself shipped off to almost any war-zone in the world as an aid worker.

Those days are gone. Long gone.

While aid work is a relatively new profession (when compared to such golden oldies as politics or prostitution), it has been around for more than fifty years, and is caged in a growing body of professional standards and expectations which are continuing to develop.

As well as the core values which the aid community is expected to adhere to, there are the professional standards by which the work we do is judged. Some of these are sector specific (Sphere) while others are generic, cross-cutting or industry-wide, such as protection standards, or accountability to communities.

Aid work is a highly complex job. It involves being able to work to these professional standards, applying them in accordance with humanitarian principles, in a rapidly-changing and potentially chaotic or dangerous environment, with poor information about events or impact, in a time-critical manner, and often with limited resources available.

As such, the sorts of people that aid agencies are looking for are the sorts of people who can function well in these environments. Aid agencies aren’t looking for casual volunteers, or for well-meaning individuals whose skill-sets don’t add anything to the organization’s work, or for people who want to take a year out from their career or studies while they look for meaning in their life. They’re looking for dedicated professionals who have taken the time to learn the skills and soak in the body of knowledge that accompanies the sector.

Please think of aid work as you would any other professional sector. You would not want to go to the dentist with a cavity only to find that he had taken out time from her career as a lawyer three months ago and decided she’d try her hand at pulling teeth instead, which had always been a hobby of hers. You would not expect to walk into a bank without qualifications or experience and be offended when the manager turned you away despite your passion for balancing accounts. And you would be horrified to learn that your local emergency room was staffed by enthusiastic community volunteers.

In the aid industry (and yes, it is an industry) we deal with meeting the critical needs of hundreds of thousands of people at a time. If we get it right, we can prevent thousands of deaths. If we get it wrong, thousands can die. Please don’t think that because you watch world events on the news and have a strong feeling about what’s happening, that that qualifies you for aid work. The aid industry is profession, because it’s highly complex, and when people make bad decisions, even with the best of intentions, the ramifications can be terrible.

One thing that really upsets aid workers and HR staff is people who pop up when a huge emergency breaks, wanting to be an aid worker and sent to whichever location happens to be making dramatic and heart-wrenching headlines this week. You may think this is an excellent time to get sent to the field. The rest of us think this is a terrible time.

Firstly, very few reputable aid agencies will send volunteers to the field. Even to a stable context you won’t find that many opportunities to go outside the handful of volunteer-oriented organizations such as Peace Corps, Australian Volunteers or VSO, and of course UN Volunteers. Don’t offer, and if you don’t get a reply from us please don’t be offended, we simply don’t have time to turn down all the offers of well-meaning people wanting to get sent overseas in the midst of a crisis which has other priorities to manage.

Secondly, the onset of an emergency is not the right time to decide you want a career change. If you’ve been thinking about changing careers to be an aid worker (and I assume at some stage that’s the case if you’re reading this blog) that’s great! Make some structural decisions in your life, get some degrees and experience, then come back when you have what we need. If you show up at our door three days after a huge disaster saying you want to be an aid worker, we will assume that this is a flash-in-the-pan emotional response and not take you seriously. If you go out there and get yourself the right qualifications and experience, then come back to us, there are always places we can use you. They may not be in the headlines right now, but I assure you, there’s no shortage of humanitarian need worldwide, nor will there be any time soon.

Without wanting to sound harsh, I want to make something really clear. If you’re showing up full of good intentions but not a whole lot of professional backing, we don’t actually need you. When there’s a shortage of aid workers on the ground, it’s not a shortage of warm bodies that we’re talking about. We need the right person for whatever role it is we’re trying to fill. It might be a logistician. It might be an experienced operations manager with fifteen years of disaster relief experience. But it certainly isn’t somebody who means really well and who once took a vacation to Nicaragua.

I won’t belabour the point. This has been talked about plenty of places elsewhere. To understand more on why your desire to do good doesn’t necessarily equate to improving the plight of the poor and needy, please spend some time looking at the blog “Good Intentions are Not Enough” (start here, here and here).

I also recommend three books to anybody wanting to start off in the aid world as essential background reading to understanding some of the ways in which aid workers have, despite good intentions, ended up solving nothing and in some cases making bad situations worse.

War Hospital, by Sheri Fink- a staggering, chilling narrative of international intervention failing to prevent the massacre of Srebrenica.

Emma’s War, by Deborah Scroggins- the story of an idealistic but misguided young aid worker in Southern Sudan in the 80s and 90s.

We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, by Philip Gourevitch- a series of accounts written of the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, highlighting some of the breathtaking failures of the international community

To understand more about what we are looking for and the sort of professionalism the aid industry embraces, please read Part 3 of this series, coming up.

5 Part Series: Becoming an Aid Worker

As an aid worker, there’s one question I get more than any other, both from people I know and people I don’t. It’s some variant on “So, what should I do if I want to become an aid worker?”

I don’t actually mind being asked this question. It’s great that people are interested in this line of work. Clearly there’s a perception that working in the aid profession is either meaningful, or interesting, or some combination of both. The answer isn’t straight-forward though, and takes a while to answer, so I thought I’d put down the main principles of what it takes to be an aid worker on my blog, which I could direct people to when they ask.

Please note that this five-part series is written largely for the audience who primarily asks this question, namely people (usually but not exclusively younger) living in Western nations who want to help overseas. For my readers from non-Western nations, getting employment with an international NGO is quite a different prospect. If you have specific questions about this, please feel free to add a comment after any of these posts. Likewise this does not target those who wish to volunteer locally with an NGO in their area of residence. This is usually a much easier process so contact the local branch of the charity you’re interested in for more information.

Please also note that this is not a guide to getting a job within the aid industry. You need to talk to a careers advisor for that, or make some time to talk to an HR officer within an aid agency. That said, at the end of this 5-part series I will post a series of links to some resources that may be helpful. There will be other links scattered throughout the series that provide additional information or debate on some of the points raised which I would recommend you browse if you’re serious about taking this forward.

To others within the aid community, if you have other thoughts or resources you want to share on this theme, I’d welcome your input in the comments sections below each post, as I hold no monopoly on information in this sector. Thanks for your time.

PS- Sorry, but no, I can’t get you a job with an aid agency. It’s not that I don’t like you, it’s just not what I do…

Becoming an Aid Worker, Part 1. Know What You’re Getting Yourself Into

So you want to be an aid worker?

First, read this (particularly the second half): A Day in the Life Of…

Still with me? Okay, let’s go.

The idea of aid work has a lot of romance attached to it, particularly in the Western world. In the Gen-X/Gen-Y worldview, its identity sits neatly in the nexus of a value-driven, unique vocation which allows travel all over the world and lots of amazing experiences. Kind of like a perennial gap-year which you get paid for.

This isn’t an accurate reflection. While aid work has the humanitarian imperative (the need to help others) at its core, working in an international NGO can be as much about working out how to compromise values as how to uphold them. It can be unique, but at times it can be like any other desk-job, replete with emails, deadlines, reports and administrative systems. For every amazing experience, there can be months and even years of office-based tedium. Your chances of soaking in the warm glow of being thanked by a horde of grateful villagers for saving their collective lives is extremely low. And if they do, they’ll almost certainly hit you up with a shopping list of all the things they want done in their village right afterwards.

I don’t want to make it sound like being an aid worker sucks. I love it. I’ve had incredibly enriching experiences. But I’ve also had some bitterly painful, frustrating and dissapointing ones, ones that have shattered my ideals and come close to breaking me. It’s important to approach this career with this in mind.

Realists, welcome. Idealists, beware.

If you are an educated westerner seeking employment with an international aid agency, you will almost certainly have one of three broad roles. An office-based support role. An office-based manager. Or a technical expert.

Almost anything else- from skilled tradesmen to field workers to project implementers- will be drawn from local staff. Local staff work for local wages (we don’t need to employ your two graduate degrees to be handing out grain sacks, nor do we need to export your carpentry skills into a chaotic emergency when there are hundreds of skilled carpenters available locally all scrambling to rebuild their livelihoods). Hiring local staff builds local skills and contributes to local economies. And local staff have the social and cultural access that makes them better able to do the work. If hiring you is going to deprive somebody local of an income, who can do the job just as well and for less money, you won’t be getting the role.

Being an aid worker, like many other professions, has giddy heights, deep lows, and long periods of intense boredom in the meantime. Be prepared for this.

If you have romantic memories of the time you did a voluntourism trip to Costa Rica and helped build a school, shelf them. If you’re expecting to be handing out sacks of food to happy smiling brown people, get your facts straight. And if you’re looking for a perennial paid gap-year experience, please stay at home. Aid work is a profession.

Read more about what this means in Part 2 of this series, coming next…