Giving to Charities- Comment & Response

I’ve been toying with putting a brief post up (yes, a brief one) about the issues of giving ‘stuff’ to aid agencies, versus giving cash. Brief, because I only really wanted to highlight the debate as an issue and direct you to posts by other aid and development gurus who are altogether more articulate, brief and knowledgeable than I am on the subject. Indeed a raft of really fantastic posts have been written on the subject, which got a lot of re-coverage around the 1 Million T-Shirts debate.

I’ve been pre-empted by reader Sue, who sent me the following comment:

Hi MoreAltitude, love your blog and have learned an amazing amount about international crisis and aid. I will always try to help wherever I can..short of giving cash. I have given food, blankets, time and more. But (and this is largely due to the media hype we see here in the US) I usually don’t trust that cash will be used where it is most needed. Do you have any thoughts on that? Also, Is there a place you trust where small amounts of $$ can be given on a regular basis? Thanks…

It’s a great comment and question, and it’s always good to hear that people are genuinely interested not just in giving to emergencies, but in giving well- which is crucially different. My response to Sue follows. Please note the post by Saundra excellent blog on her excellent website Good Intentions are Not Enough which has additional links to much of this debate and which, if you’re interested in learning more, I highly recommend as a starting point.

Actually I have *plenty* of thoughts on the issue of giving ‘stuff’ rather than ‘cash’. First off, before launching into it though, I want to commend your attitude and your heart to give. People like you who want to give and learn are what allows support to get into places that are hurting.

I’ve not really posted much about the issues of giving ‘stuff’ on this website (other than the 1 Million T-Shirts debate), partly because there is SO MUCH AWESOME STUFF written by some of my contemporaries on the blogosphere. The basic premise, as a rule, is that by donating goods internationally, there is a high risk that a) they won’t be what’s most appropriate to the context, b) they’ll cost huge amounts of money to ship and c) they stand a good chance of undermining the local economy. Among other evils. It’s a hard truth to hear, especially by people who are concerned that their funds won’t be well used. However can I suggest you look at this page by Saundra (Good Intentions are Not Enough) which has links to a whole series of extremely articulate, intelligent and spot-on posts as to why giving ‘stuff’ is actually not the best way forwards, and why in fact cash is the best way to go.

You’re right of course- cash can be misused or poorly used, and so you need to do your research into what NGO or charity you want to give to. The decision around this should be based on a few different things. Firstly, from a personal perspective, it’s worth checking the ethos of the organization. Does it have a particular set of values or a mission (e.g. is it faith-based and is this important to you?); is it committed to the long-term welfare of the communities it’s partnering with (sustainability)? Does it run its programs in direct conjunction with the communities it’s purporting to help (participation, empowerment, accountability)? Does it publish its annual reports and financial data in an accessible location (transparency; this enables you to see exactly where your money is going)? Is it involved in cutting-edge best practice, or is it still carrying out outdated development and relief activities (e.g. is it just doing truck-and-chuck handouts that continue the cycle of dependency)? In its literature, does it refer to the people it’s trying to help as partners and people with dignity, or does it make you pity them as poor, shirtless, desperate people in need of any old thing you can chuck at them?

There’s three major perspectives that need to be understood by people wanting to give to a situation. Firstly, that by giving the wrong thing, you can actually make the situation worse. Secondly, that the people you’re giving to are not just hapless victims, but are real people with aspirations, abilities, capacities, creativity and energy, all of which can and must be harnessed to respond to any crises they are facing- ideally on their own terms. Thirdly, that the services that good-quality NGOs provide in this process are often not related to the delivery of things (food, water, hospitals, medical supplies- although in some circumstances these do have their place- unlike, for the most part, t-shirts and shoes) but actually are related to the delivery of services, of expertise, of facilitation, and of processes. These things are, to the donor, more intangible, harder to account for, often appear to be related to ‘salaries’ and other unattractive costs, and are therefore unsexy and frequently result in people prefering to give ‘things’. However if the organization is doing things right, then these services should be enabling and multiplying, and have far greater impact than giving, say, a box of used clothes, or a food parcel.

I hope that gives you some things to think about. Please do follow the links to my colleagues’ sites- they are extremely eloquent, concise and intelligent, and will hopefully help elucidate any questions that remain.

Further to the comment, additional thinking as to which agencies to donate to, it’s best to look for agencies that have an established reputation (beware charities that pop up as a result of an emergency- they probably don’t have the expertise to know what they are doing or to understand what they don’t yet know about emergencies) and ideally ones that have experience and a long-term plan in the country in question. Big NGOs have the downside of apparently having high overheads (sometimes there are economies of scale in there, and sometimes inefficiencies of scale)- but they have the upside of having huge resources to mobilize at the drop of a hat and can actually have a massive impact (hopefully for the better). Smaller agencies sometimes have the reverse. Be careful asking the question ‘how much of my donation actually gets to the field’. It’s a question I’ll address in another blog post, so all I’ll say at this time is that it’s not an accurate reflection of the impact your donation will have. It’s actually much more about making the donor feel good about themselves, rather than benefiting the people they’re trying to help.

I’ve got a list of good, reputable organizations down on the right-hand column of my blog. All of these agencies have strengths, and all of them have weaknesses. When somebody designs the perfect relief and development agency, I’ll be submitting my CV there at the drop of a hat. For now, they are a place to start for organizations that have presence, vision and the capacity to achieve things.

For more specific input (for example, for ideas of particular projects and new ideas that are emerging and are worth supporting) I am not an exhaustive reference, and can I suggest following some of the Aid and Development blogs I’ve got listed on the right, and perhaps following their authors on Twitter and getting involved by asking questions and following threads. The threads of practicioners such as @alanna_shaikh, @TalesFromthHood, @saundra_s, @meowtree, @owenbarder, @Michael_Keizer, @texasinafrica and @aidwatch are informative, entertaining and dynamic. They routinely provide great analysis and insight into contemporary (and real-time) aid-related issues, as well as providing on-target commentary and relevant links and resources.

Happy networking!

Triage: News Media and the Disasters that Languish

If I ask you to recall which humanitarian emergencies stand out in your mind, I can pretty well predict the top contenders that will appear.  At the top of the list, the recent Haiti earthquake, most likely followed by the December 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami.  This year’s earthquakes in Chile and Tibet may also be on the list, as they’re fairly recent.  Most of you will probably recall that there’s been a refugee crisis in the Darfur region of Sudan, but you may be a little hazy around the dates and details of what was actually happening out there.  Those of you with a broader understanding of the context may include the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and even Pakistan over the last 9 years in your analysis, while the older among you will recall events such as the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in 1991, the Kobe earthquake of 1995, the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989 in California, or maybe the Mexico City earthquake of 1985.

I remember most of those events (except maybe the Mexico City earthquake, as I was a little young to be watching the news at the time, although I studied it at school later).  The more recent ones I have a little more intimate knowledge and memories associated with, given my choice of profession (and a long list of other lower-profile emergencies to boot).  The older ones I have particular images in my mind that relate: A stratospheric plume of grey ash over the Philippines; toppled segments of raised highway in Kobe; cars flattened beneath the Oakland Bridge in San Fransisco.

Disasters such as these stick in our minds for precisely that reason.  The images that get broadcast into our homes via news and media outlets.  The more relatable the image, the more likely it is to have an impact on us.  The Boxing Day Tsunami was a shocking, rapid and overwhelming disaster which both stunned people by its scale, and also struck areas with which western donors were familiar (the beaches of southern Thailand, where many have taken vacations).

This is why natural disasters tend to have a greater pull on the public imagination than war-zones.  They are more easily summed up by a photograph or a thirty-second video clip.  They can be easily communicated.

Because of this, they also continue to captivate for longer.  The shock value lingers.  The fascination with destruction on that scale claws at the insides of our souls, searching for answers.  Why?  How?  Could that happen to me?  Why or why not?

Ultimately, of course, these images reach us because news media outlets choose to broadcast them.  The longer that media outlets continue to broadcast, the more the events are likely to reach us, and have an impact on us (within parameters).

And the more we’re affected, the more likely we are to give to an emergency.

By contrast, there are emegencies that we never hear about, or which don’t have as much impact.  For example, the displacement of Pakistanis following the (western-backed) military offensive into tribal areas in early 2009 was one of the largest and most rapid population displacements in the last century.  However the humanitarian implications of the event, while overwhelming the capacity of NGOs and the UN to manage, got very little screen time compared to the warfighting itself.

The Darfur crisis did get some coverage, but comparitive to the needs, moderately little.  In Darfur in excess of 200,000 people are thought to have died, and over the seven years since the conflict erupted, 3-4 million displaced, and 5-6 million affected.  These numbers, standing alone, are relatable to the scale of the tsunami.  When you examine them qualitatively, in fact, the extent of need and human suffering in Darfur is far greater than that suffered by the survivors of the tsunami.  However Darfur has received just a fraction of the media attention- and just a fraction of the material support.

Similar emergencies that get little attention are things like the war and displacement in eastern DRC (ostensibly the highest death-toll of any conflict since World War II); routine food crises across the Sahel; the ongoing war and humanitarian emergency in Somalia; and a long, long list of other sorry situations where the UN and aid agencies struggle to operate on underfunded program budgets while people wrestle with a range of natural and human-made impediments to a full and healthy life.

The reason you hear little or nothing about these other emergencies is generally the fact that they don’t get much media air-time.  There are in turn reasons for this, which I’ll discuss below.

However, the question which I wrestle with, and which I’ve asked myself many times in the past is, how much is our media accountable for which humanitarian emergencies get funded, and which get forgotten?

And I’d like to suggest, very.

Working part of my career in an NGO office based in a western country which works to raise funds for overseas emergencies, I am acutely aware of the interplay between media coverage and money-through-the-door.  If a story gets headline time, we get cash, phone-calls, offers of assistance.  If it stays in the headlines (Haiti, Tsunami) then we raise millions of dollars.  By contrast, if a story doesn’t make the news much- or at all- we get next to nothing.  The recent earthquakes in Chile and Tibet are good examples.  Both had less than 3 days in the news media here, and we raised very little for either.

DRC, which remains one of the worst crises on the planet, gets almost no media airtime, except on obscure late-night news analysis or foreign correspondant shows.  We get almost no money for it.

The correlation is solid.  Even our own fundraising efforts are limited without the appeal of mass media.  We can run advertisements or send letters asking for funding, but if the request is about something that the public knows nothing about, then we don’t get much back for our investment.  As a rule, it is not financially worthwhile for us to do so, and a poor use of our resources.  We simply don’t have the reach to be able to educate the public about what’s going on out there in the same way that the major news networks do.

In short, if it ain’t in the headlines, it ain’t getting paid.

News agencies, certainly in western countries, are free to run what stories they see fit.  Or at least, what stories Rupert Murdoch sees fit.  So how much should we hold them accountable?  In principle, if news organizations choose to run a humanitarian crisis as a lead story for two weeks (as opposed to, say, a story about Paris Hilton, or the British Prime Minister insulting one of his constituents by accident), they could arguable transform the level of resources raised for that emergency.

By contrast, if they choose to not run a story on a particular crisis, they effectively damn it to obscurity, and can guarantee that it will be nearly impossible for agencies to raise funds from the general public.

And not even the general public.  NGOs and the UN receive large amounts of funding from state governments.  As well as recieving information through their own channels, these governments are influenced themselves by what gets reported in the news media, and also by what their constituents are clamouring about.  If the public gets riled about a crisis, chances are the government will want to be seen to be doing something.  The reverse is equally true.  Will the Australian public be pleased to hear that their government has just contributed twenty million dollars of tax-payer’s money to some obscure war-zone they’ve never heard of?  That’s not the sort of stunt that gets you re-elected.

The influence of news media on raising support for emergencies is hard to knock.

Of course, it’s only partly fair to blame media organizations for this process.  They are responding to public demand.  If stories are run that are not interesting to the public (long, complicated, lacking dynamic images, or uncomfortably confronting), then channels are changed, papers are not sold.  Ratings go down.  Profits go down.

So there’s an extent to which the public themselves, in their appetite for soft, easily-consumable newsertainment is equally guilty.

I’d argue that media itself has helped create this dynamic, in its quest to become ever more about entertaining the lowest common denominator, with fast-changing topics and brief soundbites that communicate a punchy message but little depth to an audience that wants to be stimulated but not challenged.  Pitching to the lowest demoninator, attention-deficit consumerist junkie.

With different expectations about what media should be about, perhaps demand itself would be different?

Realistically, in my mind there’s two levels of responsibility.  There’s what the news media portrays (both in terms of content and in terms of expectation).  And there’s what the public demands.  As a rule, people aren’t interested in educating themselves about world affairs.  That’s not to say there aren’t exceptions.  But let’s face it, if you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’re well aware that there are all sorts of information resources out there about what’s going on in the humanitarian field, some of it listed down the right-hand column of this blog.  Anybody who wants to know what’s going on out there can do so.  They just have to spend a few minutes of their day learning.

But I submit that if the news media were routinely highlighting, in a balanced, intelligent and informative fashion, what was actually happening in humanitarian situations around the world (as opposed to cliched fifteen-second summaries to a dramatic soundtrack), they’d change the way the donor public looks at world affairs, and ideally change both the giving and the living practices of that public to be more geared around global realities and understandings (and not reflexive reactions and cereal-box interpretations).

Yes, there are economic realities.  Yes, there’s donor fatigue.  But I’d like to believe that, on the whole, people do care about the plight of others.  And the more that those ‘others’ in humanitarian crises overseas can be brought perceptively closer to those with the power to give and act, the more we’ll see people and societies making changes and sacrifices for a greater good.

I believe international media has a lot to answer for to the people caught in forgotten emergencies around the world.

Haiti Earthquake Issues- A Reader

My posting on Haiti last week (and the resulting spot on WordPress’s homepage, editorial in The Age, etc. etc.) provided a couple of fun side-effects. As well as the upswing in traffic on this site (thanks for the 12,000 of you who sauntered round for a gander last week), it also linked me in a little more to some of the other blogs and websites out there discussing the ins, outs, ups, downs and general architecture of humanitarian assistance. Some highlights for those interested in getting some more in-depth analysis around some of the issues that make aid work complex, fascinating, engaging, and periodically dysfunctional are linked below.

On why we should think twice about how best to engage with military actors in protecting aid delivery, check out this article on J.’s [fantastic, insightful and frequently humorous] blog Tales From the Hood.

On what to do to help the people of Haiti, what not to do, and why, check out these punchy points from J., and also some thoughtful analysis from Saundra Schimmelpfennig in her string of posts about choosing a charity to give to, why admin costs should not be the deciding factor in which agency you donate to, and why Haiti doesn’t need well-meaning volunteers. Aid worker and blogger Alannah Shaikh has also been getting some great coverage on her article explaining what Haiti does not need right now.

Some added insight into the ins and outs of logistics and complexity as related to the Haiti quake, aid logistician Michael Keizer gives a great overview here. He also gives a good response to my earlier post on the economics of Search and Rescue teams.

Michael and Alannah have both written good responses to an article in the Lancet criticising the aid industry, which you can read here and here, while AidWatch, a site dedicated to holding humanitarians accountable to best aid practice, has their own response here.

And finally J. adds his two or three cents on what needs to follow the initial frenzy of digging people out of the rubble.

On a completely different (non-Haiti-related) tack, I stumbled across an article written about a year ago entitled The Archipelago of Fear, a personal and insightful account of the dichotomies of life in Kabul as an expatriate. Long, but full of vivid emotion and tight, evocative prose. Highly recommended.

Edit 25.01.10: For a great overview of some of the more relevant alternatives for how to help Haiti become a better place after reconstruction, check out Paul Currion’s commentary on Reinventing Haiti. NGOs need to start taking some of these more non-traditional approaches to reconstruction and rehabilitation more seriously.