This is Not an April Fool’s Post

“10: In our information, publicity and advertising activities, we shall recognise disaster victims as dignified humans, not hopeless objects.

Respect for the disaster victim as an equal partner in action should never be lost. In our public information we shall portray an objective image of the disaster situation where the capacities and aspirations of disaster victims are highlighted, and not just their vulnerabilities and fears. While we will cooperate with the media in order to enhance public response, we will not allow external or internal demands for publicity to take precedence over the principle of maximising overall relief assistance. We will avoid competing with other disaster response agencies for media coverage in situations where such coverage may be to the detriment of the service provided to the beneficiaries or to the security of our staff or the beneficiaries.”

-The Code of Conduct for the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) in Disaster Relief (taken from the Sphere Handbook, 2011 Edition, p.370; Emphasis mine)

It takes a lot to floor me. I’ve seen a lot of dumb stuff in the humanitarian industry. I’m moderately immune to dumbassery these days, and tend to keep my righteous indignation in pretty good check too.

However, a document came to me via a colleague in a partner NGO recently. Said colleague works in a specific emergency context involving refugees and refugee camps, and a fundraising office of said NGO had approached them with a request to bring in a TV crew and do some filming of the refugees and their crisis situation.

Not an unusual request, and under the circumstances of trying to raise both awareness and funds, generally a good idea.

As long as your fundraising office has at least half a clue about international standards of humanitarian fundraising guidelines, as outlined in the Red Cross Code of Conduct excerpt quoted above.

I won’t say much more. Instead, I’m going to lift excerpts directly from the media brief that the fundraising office provided, which instructed the country program exactly what stories they wanted to source for the commercial TV crew they were going to send.

Call me mean-spirited, but I have left the grammatical errors in the original request in place, because I think it adds to the flavour.

Detailed Story Request:

Children under 12 are suggested for the story case main character. If the child is too old, we lose the effectiveness.

Case Examples:

1. Disease/Injury

– AIDS infected, parasite, virus infection and so on. Because of these infections, the child is severely suffering. Please look for disease case that can be seen visually [in the original document, this word is in bold and in red text- MA] such as Elephantiasis, sand flea, one’s arm or leg amputated to protect from further virus infection, severe skin disease and so on. Disease that is so heart-breaking just by looking. Diarrhea and fever are dangerous for children under five but in filming, it is difficult to catch the seriousness of the symptoms because we cannot see from outside. [in the original, underlined and also in red- MA]

With me so far? They talk a little more about emergency medical cases and ‘serious injuries or burns’, and then:

2. Early Marriage

– Because of early marriage… she is not at school getting education but in household to live as young wife.

– She is originally from very poor family and that is why she has to accept early marriage. However she is suffering from disease and her babies are malnutrition and have other diseases.

Are you sure that you want to bother sending a TV crew all the way over here, or shall we just send you some shots of a sad looking kid and you can put your own voice-over onto it, because it seems like you already have the story figured out…

Onwards, and under the section on “Child Headed Family”

– A very young child who is in an age to receive full love and care from parents, but unfortunately the child has no parents (or parents who are very sick) and has to live as the head of the family…

– This child really wants to go to school as her friends in the village but could not go even near to the school. She really desire to get education and better life for the future.

– The child is very young but very loving and attractive child.

Obviously poor kids need to be visually appealing. Cuz, fundraising.

The list goes on. Then towards the end, the fundraising office explains that they want to ensure that “our potential donors can feel the same pain and sadness as if they witness the situation.”

I can think of some ways that could be arranged.

However, to avoid any potential misunderstanding (because it may not have been clear in the run-up), they conclude with a summary of exactly what they’re looking for:

-Children or households in serious poverty

-Children and family suffered by disease, water contamination, inflammation, aids, malaria, malnutrition, etc.

– Situation which was born by extreme poverty

– Sad, abysmal, inhumane scenes and stories that happened by local issues such as conflict, disaster, early marriage, etc.

Final emphasis mine.

So that you don’t damage anything, I am told that the TV crew visit did not go ahead. And I sincerely hope that somebody’s head of fundraising got a firm shoeing.

As the language in the brief suggests, there is a cultural element in play here. Different nations and cultures do have different expectations and standards around what is and is not acceptable in the public domain. Anybody who’s seen an Al Jazeera (Arabic) news report following an Israeli incursion into the West Bank knows that the Middle East has different thresholds for violence on the evening news than you’d expect to find on the BBC.

None the less, the issue of human dignity should be a universal one. The Red Cross Code of Conduct- and other guidelines more specific to humanitarian media and fundraising- are signed by international organizations- I stress that word international– recognizing that we are a global community, and it is simply not appropriate to exploit human suffering simply because our cultural norms say it is okay to do so. Not if we want to remain a part of that same international community, and be treated with any respect whatsoever.

I really wish this was an April Fools Day post. Unfortunately, this level of ignorance still thrives, even within the international aid community.

Images of Africa

In a study reported by the BBC today, aid agency Oxfam has said that people’s negative impression of Africa was making it hard to raise assistance for the continent. Instead, Oxfam says it wants to improve the way people think about ‘Africa’, and present a more hopeful image. Says Oxfam’s CEO Dame Stocking:

We need to shrug off the old stereotypes and celebrate the continent’s diversity and complexity, which is what we’re attempting with this campaign. The relentless focus on ongoing problems at the expense of a more nuanced portrait of the continent, is obscuring the progress that is being made towards a more secure and prosperous future. If we want people to help fight hunger we have to give them grounds for hope by showing the potential of countries across Africa…

This cry is by no means a new one. Binyavanga Wainaina’s popular, passionate and now-mainstream “How To Write About Africa” is a scathing satire of mainstream western representations of the continent, and it wasn’t a particularly new issue when that was published in 2005. Concerns about donor fatigue- the idea that people constantly presented with images and stories of human suffering will stop giving, unless presented with ever greater and more shocking narratives- has been around for many years as well.

Part of the problem, the BBC says in its explanation of the report, is media representation of Africa as a place of suffering, famine and human misery. Columnist and correspondent Ian Birrell responded with a sharp:

And he has a point. NGO media campaigns, in their efforts to galvanize sympathy, do focus on stories of misery and suffering, often competing with one another for the most tragic stories to draw donors towards their campaigns, and reinforcing these negative stereotypes. The 1984-5 Band-Aid and Live-Aid campaigns, turning points in the history of NGO fundraising, began a trend of guilting the Western public into giving with a cycle of ever more shocking images and heart-breaking stories.

Of course, it’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg thing. The public certainly appear to ‘demand’ shocking images before they respond with financial support- but why? Is it that charities have produced more and more heart-rending pictures and tales into the mainstream media which have raised the public’s expectations and the media’s need to reciprocate? Or has a mainstream media desensitized the public through its efforts to sell air-time through ever more horrifying footage of calamity around the world, and in order to compete with the headlines, NGOs have felt forced into raising the stakes on their side as well?

It makes you question the underlying assumptions. We’ve been working within a paradigm for a good fifty years where it is assumed knowledge that in order to motivate charity, you must first demonstrate need. Must you? It’s worked over the years- to a point- but at what cost? The desensitization of a viewing public (at least in part contributable to NGO fundraising campaigns, and a certainly-complicit mainstream media)? The objectification of an entire genre of humans- the voiceless, hopeless poor? And, a much darker implication, that the negative view of Africa- as a hopeless, disaster-ridden, corrupt and diseased place so overwhelmed with loss and negativity- means that people feel dissuaded from giving or- worse- investing.

This impression that many people in the Western world have has, I suspect, got far deeper and more complex roots than simplified and cliched media and NGO messaging. Our own assumptions about chronic poverty in our own experiences come in to play- like the assumptions we might make about the homeless drunk who sits with his cardboard sign outside the supermarket; we quietly assume he is going to buy alcohol with whatever money he receives, and in subtle ways we transcribe that expectation onto the chronic poverty we see on TV screens. Cliched tales of African despots purchasing private jets with aid dollars linger, decades later- not, as Oxfam points out, that there aren’t portions of the African continent that have problems, such as chronic malnutrition, war and corruption. (Interestingly, though, even this representation is highly politicized in the public messaging we receive. A despot like Robert Mugabe is easy pickings as the prime example of the African strongman, and broadly criticized. Far less noise is made about leaders like Uganda’s Museveni, or Rwanda’s Kagame, both of whom probably have far more of their peoples’ blood on their hands, in retrospect. However because they have brought stability- or a perception of it- to their respective nations, their detractors have less voice.)

I think a lot of this stems, ultimately, to our fear of the unknown, of the other. The narratives presented, equally by fundraising NGOs or by media looking for a quick hook, gain traction with us because they connect with that disquiet deep inside us that sees something different, alien, something that falls well outside the story of our daily lives, and makes us uncomfortable. I think this is a human trait, and not specifically the domain of wealthy white people in suburban homes with cable TV. I also think that it is entirely possible to choose to overcome it, to perceive it, to change its influence on our mindsets, if we make the effort to recognize it, and if we make the effort to educate ourselves so that the other, that which is different, becomes less unfamiliar, more understandable.

I like the idea that Oxfam- not uniquely- puts forward, about understanding the complexity and diversity of the African context. I like the idea of challenging stereotypes. I think ways of thinking should and must be confronted and assumed narratives deconstructed, among the general public, among the mainstream (and non-mainstream) media, and among charities’ fundraising arms. I particularly like the idea of telling the story of people and places, of painting them as faithfully and honestly as possible, as balanced and lovingly as possible, of capturing their humanity, identifying with their commonality, and celebrating their differences- wherever they are from. I like the idea of stories being told by many different people- sure, Africans telling stories about Africans, but equally Caucasians like me telling stories about Africans, and Africans telling stories about Caucasians- and so forth, because each voice, each perspective, is a facet in our view of this complex jewel we call humanity. I’m reading a book, They Poured Fire on us From the Sky, written by three Dinka boys who were forced to flee their homes during the Sudanese Civil War, and one of the most interesting parts of the narrative, for me, is to read about the way they perceived western aid workers, people like me, coming into their relief camps.

Ultimately, I really like the idea that maybe, just maybe, the best way to get people to care for and contribute to the needs of the less fortunate is to humanize them, to show their potential, to showcase the good, and not the bad. Maybe.

So I agree with Oxfam, that people in need have to have their story told differently, and that representations of them in the media undermine their ability to grow, to be supported, and to be treated with dignity. And I agree with Ian, that blame rests equally on the shoulders of the NGO community as with the media’s. And I think it goes far deeper than either one, and that responsibility for this mindset ultimately belongs to the individual, who must choose to recognize the assumed narratives they frame the world with, or choose ignorance.

The Red Cross and NGO Code of Conduct, Article 10, states:

In our information, publicity and advertising, we shall recognize disaster victims as dignified human beings, not hopeless objects: Respect for the disaster victim as an equal partner in action should never be lost. In our public information we shall portray an objective image of the disaster situation where the capacities and aspirations of disaster victims are highlighted, and not just their  vulnerabilities and fears. While we will cooperate with the media in order to enhance public response, we will not allow external or internal demands for publicity to take precedence over the principle of maximizing overall relief assistance. We will avoid competing with other disaster response agencies for media coverage in situations where such coverage may be to the detriment of the service provided to the beneficiaries or to the security of our staff or the beneficiaries.

They’re good words. Good words to aim for. I’m confident that aid agencies consistently fail to live up to them- despite, I believe, many aid workers and their organizations truly believing these are good things to aspire towards. I also think it’s a perspective we could all embrace when we visualize those places less fortunate than ourselves- whether in some broad notion of ‘Africa’, or the homeless man outside the supermarket. And I think we can go a step further. Dignified human beings. With potential. With creativity. With dreams and visions. Among whom so many are working so hard to improve the world around them, and succeeding in ways small and large. Not to patronize. Not to simplify.There are shades of grey in everything. But to embrace the traits that make all of us human, regardless of where we’re from, and to recognize that in the ‘other’. I think if we could only perceive just how like one another we all are, we’d find we behaved very differently.

I’m not blameless in this myself in my own representations of the less fortunate I meet, although I do consciously work towards a balance. I enjoy analysing the complexity of things– specifically in relation to the aid industry. I try to look at times where the aid industry gets it right, and where it gets it wrong. Sometimes I do talk about the needs of people in Africa or elsewhere- though I hope I do so in a fair and dignified way. I’m no fan of the media- or well-meaning individuals– presenting a pathetic impression of Africa, or the poor. And yes, sometimes I write about the landscapes– after all, I’m also a photographer. But I also like to think I capture some of the people and places, and some of the hope too. Everything is nuanced. Nothing black and white. But feel free to hold me to account in the work I do.

Vloggers, Accountability, Donor Education and The Uncultured Project

I’ve mentioned on Twitter (though haven’t here) that the international aid agency World Vision has been running an interesting social media experiment. Being run by @RichendaG, they’ve taken a bunch of high-profile vloggers (video bloggers Frezned, Nerimon and Nanalew, for those who tube) across to Zambia to check out some of the charity’s field work on the ground. These vloggers have put up regular video posts on their YouTube channels and elsewhere to engage their followers on understanding some of the basic tenets of development work in a very personal way. I’ve talked about the applicability of social media to aid work in the past, and this is something I’ll be watching with some interest as it unfolds.

Another vlogger, Shawn of The Uncultured Project, has been following the story as well. According to his video posts, he was involved in the planning stage of the vlogger trip to Zambia, and he has a few things to say about it.

Uncultured

Shawn is an interesting guy. As well as having a vast network of online followers, Shawn has dedicated a large chunk of his time to trying to raise the profile of poverty-related issues, and carry out assistance work himself, taking his viewers along for the ride.

Following Cyclone Sidr in Bangladesh in 2007, Shawn travelled to the country himself and, through his YouTube network, raised money to fund a series of rehabilitation projects over two years, including repairing a school damaged by the storm. Check out his YouTube channel for an uplifting video summary of the process.

Shawn has used his strengths in social media and mobilization to support a good cause. This is similar to the sort of stuff a lot of aid bloggers were talking about around the time of the Million T-Shirts escapades. It was a good confluence of using an individual’s passion and resources, coupling that with an organization which had local networks and know-how (in this case, the international NGO Save the Children), and using the interactivity of social media to engage both donors (fundraising and mobilization) and the local community.

In a more recent video post, Shawn reflects on World Vision’s current project and, while supportive, challenges it in further ways. He argues that while using vloggers to raise the profile of countries, issues and events in a general sense is one thing, what the online community really craves is the high level of interactivity with specific projects and people which new media tantalizingly promises. He holds up his time in Bangladesh as an example- where he could mention specific donations, and then show video of that individual’s gift being delivered to a family in need. He also references other specific charities which offer that kind of interactivity particulary Charity: Water.

There’s a bit of a negative vibe among the aid blogger community about the appropriateness of voluntourism, and high-profile well-intentioned (and occasionally self-promoting) do-gooders jetting off for a few weeks to some developed country, seeing all the flaws in the aid industry, and sharing their epiphany on how they can do such a better job than the aid professionals currently working in the field. On the surface, Shawn appears that he could be an easy target for this sort of criticism. I’d actually like to suggest he isn’t. Shawn’s approach has on many levels been substantially different. He’s remained engaged with a community not just for a few weeks, but over a three-year period. He’s done his time reading up on the subjects he’s interested in so that he has some theoretical knowledge behind him. He’s not gone off half-cocked with his own project, but he’s joined forces with a well-established aid agency (Save). And to boot, he’s gone to a country to which he has some cultural links, speaks the local language, and can engage directly with people in what appears to be a meaningful way. And he’s used his strengths- his social network- to add value to the process.

I do, however, want to discuss some of the points that Shawn raises in his latest post. He raises some very valid challenges, but I feel a couple of his observations probably don’t sit well with the realities of aid work on a global scale.

The model that Shawn proposes holds two main tenets as central. First is the notion that, unlike large NGOs, individuals like Shawn and small NGOs like Charity: Water can keep their overheads low and operate more cheaply for local beneficiaries. Second, that interactivity between donors (the YouTube community, for example) and the community creates both fundraising and accountability in an effective way because of the relationship that is built.

Overheads

The first is a common myth among individual start-up style aid interventions and MONGOs. I, Joe DoGood, can rock up in community X with my suitcase of money, and give all that money straight to the project- unlike those big greedy NGOs who slice off huge percentages in overhead margins. It’s not true, but it sounds great.

Joe DoGood, of course, still costs money. His flight to the field costs money. His accomodation costs money. Ditto food. Then there’s his salary or income on top of that. He’s probably still paying taxes back home, maintaining a home, possibly a family. He’ll be paying travel insurance, contributing to a pension fund, and so forth. He might be drawing benefits, or on sabattical, maybe drawing down on a savings account- but whatever the reality, there will be a host of other costs associated with keeping Joe DoGood alive and healthy.

These costs are invisible. They may not be coming directly out of the pot of money being raised for the project in question. But the fact remains these costs are still there, being paid, but unlike with an NGO that hires paid staff, these costs are never factored into the equation when considering the cost of the project itself- thus the claim that there are no overhead costs. It makes the donor feel better, but it is actually a zero-sum game.

I’m not saying that there’s anything insidious or malicious about this. It’s fine. But it’s a fallacy to suggest that Joe DoGood doesn’t have any costs associated with his time on the project, and this needs to be clearly understood when weighing the benefits of small, individually-funded responses against those run by ‘overhead-heavy’ NGOs. It’s just the source that’s different. This is an issue when it comes to transparency in advertising (essentially, a gimmick). And this is very relevant when it comes to the issue of sustainability. Because Joe DoGood may be perfectly happy to spend 3 months of his time running a project without a salary, or even six months, or even two years. But unless Joe DoGood has already made a mint as an industrial capitalist and is now seeing out his twilight years living off the interest from his investments in rolling stock, sooner or later he’s going to need to go back home and start earning some money again.

Shawn references the agency Charity: Water a couple of times. It’s a smaller US-based NGO focusing on water projects. They have a donor promise that 100% of their funds raised goes to the field because “a group of private donors, foundations and sponsors help pay for the everyday costs” associated with aid work. Well, really this is just an example of robbing Peter to pay Paul, where instead of all donors sharing a percentage of the overhead costs, a handful of specific (and presumably quite forward-thinking) donors have chosen to carry that cost for everybody else. In fact, if you look at their figures (from the 2008 annual report) Charity: Water spend USD 1,113,591 on the dreaded operations/overheads costs, out of an overall budget of USD 5,421,990. That’s 20.6% overhead, or a percentage of 79.4% of funds going to the field. Which puts them in a dead heat with most of the major aid agencies out there, who operate at a rate somewhere between 75-85% of funds going to the field. If major NGOs could get their funds covered in the same way, they would. The fact is, few single donors have the funding available to pull off a stunt like that, and those that do- namely, international governments- choose not to. While an agency the size of Charity: Water (annual budget USD 5 million) can find organizations able to foot 20% of that to relieve them of the need to charge overheads to their donors, an agency the size of World Vision, for example, with an annual budget of well over a billion dollars, simply cannot.

(I’ll take a moment to bitch about government donors here for a second. You’ll find that unlike the giving public, who are very generous and tend to accept overhead rates of around 20%, government donors are far less acquiescing, and will cap their field overhead rates at a figure that is usually well below cost- 10-15% maximum, which means that it often falls to NGOs to cover their actual running costs from other donations)

In fact, the notion of unrestricted funds is a fair one. If 100% of NGO funding was unrestricted, that would mean that all overhead costs could be shared equitably across all donations at a set rate. As it is, some donations have to get a higher portion taken out for overheads, because governments (among others) place such restrictions on their contributions (or, as in the Charity: Water case, some donors get lumped with 100% of their donations going to running costs!).

More to the point, unrestricted funding is the way forward in terms of good donorship. Agencies have been pushing for decades for the removal of ‘tied aid’- both at an intergovernmental level, and at the level of charity giving. Placing restrictions on where, when and how funds must be used often locks agencies into fulfilling promises made to donors at a point in time, after which the field reality changes. In some cases, this means NGOs have to implement promised project activities which no longer meet the best interests of communities due to these changing circumstances, because if they don’t, they’ll get punished by the donors (either in terms of legal ramifications in the case of government donors, or loss of trust by the public). By contrast, unrestricted funds allow agencies to be reactive to changing needs on the ground in real-time. As discussed in my article on Cynefin and humanitarian assistance, the currency that needs investing in here to allow this level of reactive implementation is trust. What Shawn is suggesting- moving donors back away from the notion of unrestricted funds- actually flies in the face of a lot of what NGOs are currently advocating for in terms of good donorship.

Finally, one example Shawn gives is how individuals can get a better deal from local suppliers than aid agencies can. I don’t want to query the information Shawn was given in the specific example he cites. But I can tell you about how major charities do business in these places. First off, charities know that expatriates will get charged through the nose if they take control of purchasing items. You need spend no more than five minutes in any market in the developing world to witness this. NGOs, for all their flaws, aren’t actually stupid. So it would be an extremely rare and unlikely circumstance that would see an expatriate taking charge for purchasing and procurement. On top of that, staff makeup charities’ country program offices are usually 90-95% local staff, so odds are, it’ll always be locals doing the purchasing. Next up, agencies have very strict systems around making purchases. Usually they involve things like a competitive and transparent tender process to a minimum of three suppliers, to get the best possible prices. Then a bid analysis takes place to ensure that the deal is a good one. This will be compared with staff local knowledge about appropriate prices, and market analyses are also regularly done. Finally, because large agencies are usually running fairly large operations, they can usually benefit from economies of scale and discounts on large purchases, further making prices competitive. Whatever the details of the specific incident Shawn refers to, the likelihood of an individual being able to get a better deal from local suppliers than a major purchaser like an NGO is quite low. If we then bring in the outsider model, it’s nearly impossible. Shawn has roots in Bangladesh, but if any other Canadian rocked up in that store and tried to make a purchase, I guarantee they’d be paying much higher rates.

(Note: This is not to say that big NGOs always get it right, that they never get ripped off, or that there’s never any corruption in their ranks; only that they have systems that will, on balance, mean that they’ll usually get a pretty good price on local purchases).

Accountability

The other issue worth addressing is that of micro-level accountability. Back in the middle of last century, a number of the now-large NGOs hit on the ‘child sponsorship’ model- namely, you give your donor a picture of a child with their name on it, and the donor gives their money to the aid agency to give to that child. There’s been a range of variations on the model which range from direct benefits to the child (my $10 goes straight to the child, with a little admin cost taken off the top) to indirect community benefits (you donation goes into a pool with all the other donors, which the agency invests in improving that child’s community). The charm in the model is the sense of personal connection created between the donor and the child.

Shawn’s model is a bit like the sponsorship model for the New Media generation. It creates a bond between donor and recipient- but one which is even more tangible and interactive. There’s a lot of great things that can be said for this idea as a concept. It’s an exciting new way to mobilize donorship. It gives the opportunity to educate donors in a really tangible fashion. And it allows near-real-time accountability: I get to see my donation being handed out to the recipient the next day on my 3G iPad screen sitting in the tram on the way to work.

The thing is, this model works great on a micro-scale, like The Uncultured Project, where we’re talking about a single community, a few dozen beneficiaries, a few tens of thousands of dollars. Ditto for an organization like Charity: Water with a field budget of some four million and change. But what happens when you hit a crisis like Darfur? I think of distributions I’ve been a part of where 200,000 people will receive a monthly food ration over a two-day period in a single location- food in one distribution worth more than Charity: Water programs in a year. Two million people across the region every month, consistently for the last six years. And that’s just one sector, in one emergency. How do you video that? How do you link that to tens of thousands of individual donors? How many hours of footage do you need to shoot and sort through?

It’s a lovely idea- but one which, on a large scale, is utterly impractical. Impossible- no. But the cost in terms of staff time, data storage and processing, communication, and administration would be immense- talk about a bite into your overheads! That’s not the sort of thing a roving vlogger could cover on a voluntary basis. That’s not to say that the idea couldn’t be adapted to match the reality of larger scale events- I like Shawn’s challenge and think agencies should look to investigate how they can do a better job of engaging new media generally and YouTube specifically in this sort of context. But to hold up the work Shawn did in Bangladesh as an example of what YouTubers should expect to see if they engage with aid projects is, I’m afraid, not realistic when faced with the scale of global need.

On top of that, there’s also the issue of market saturation. Right now, The Uncultured Project, and like it, World Vision’s Vlogger project, are a bit new, and a bit unique, and somewhat ground-breaking. But imagine if we did try and cover every distribution in that way? The market would quickly become saturated. The concept would lose its appeal (how long before people are tired of Old Spice rip-off style viral marketing campaigns?). Worse- donors would come to expect that level of intense coverage, jacking up administration and reporting costs. Think how outdated child sponsorship is now considered in many aid circles.

Finally, I want to just remind folks of the risks of observer bias- that being that when you rock up to Village X with a notepad, or a camera, your very presence affects the answers that will be given. Community members may lack resources, and even education, but they’re not stupid. When a donor representative like myself or Shawn asks them a question, they will always give the answer that makes it most likely that they will receive more funds. If they turn around and complain about the quality of aid, they know there’s a risk that the donors in question may write off the village as a failed project and move on. Big smiles and thank-yous are far more likely to make a donor feel good and give more- and they know this. When agencies carry out accountability and evaluation processes, observer bias has to be built into the analysis of the results. The same holds true for any new media interactions such as the sort of accountability that Shawn is suggesting. That’s not to say it shouldn’t happen, but it does mean that everything that gets reported back can’t be taken at face value.

Summary

I want to drive home several key points.

1. Overheads are necessary. Donating but wanting no overheads is like buying a meal then complaining because the restaurant charges a service fee on top of food costs, or buying a car and expecting to pay for the value of the metal and plastic in the components, but not the labour or design costs. It takes people to deliver aid, and good people to deliver aid well. It is not a matter of chucking sacks off the back of a truck. Aid is a complex, difficult and dangerous profession that requires years of training and experience to implement. It’s also important to recognize that a very significant portion of overhead costs come from needing to meet the demands of donors themselves around demonstrating accountability- systems, report-back mechanisms, and so forth. This all costs money. The notion of zero overheads may sound nice, but either it means the overheads are just hidden somewhere else (Charity: Water), or there’s a good chance that from the service and accountability side, your donation may not actually be being put to good use.

2. NGOs have to prove they are worth their overhead rates (and this includes Charity: Water). Agencies do need to demonstrate to donors that they are in fact adding value to an operation through their experience and expertise, and doing so in accordance with international standards. In fact, this is where big NGOs- as opposed to well-meaning individuals- have a distinct edge. Meeting international standards such as Sphere, the Red Cross Code of Conduct, aspects of International Humanitarian Law, accountability codes, host-government requirements, the UN humanitarian system, interagency collaboration, and so forth, takes tremendous work and hours of labour. Large NGOs can engage at a professional level (and the sector is increasingly professionalizing) with these aspects of aid work. Bypassing these systems is ignorant, runs the risk of doing harm to local communities, and undermines decades’ worth of hard-earned experience and learnings that established aid agencies have developed together (and we saw this happen hundreds of times over in Haiti with ill-informed, ill-prepared but well-meaning startup NGOs). Overheads alone (high or low) are no measure of program quality. As donors, you have the responsibility to check into the agencies you’re giving to. Are they accountable to the communities? To their donors? Operating to the very highest standard of emergency response or aid delivery? Challenge them- and yourself.

3. Unrestricted funds are good donor practice. There is a huge volume of material that talks about the need for donors to reduce their demands on donor funding, not increase it. Calls for restricting donor funds fly in the face of good donorship advocacy and risk creating more poorly-designed and poorly-implemented projects that might satisfy a donor’s feel-good needs, but will compromise communities’ wellbeing. While it’s essential to engage with donors and educate them, it’s important to stress that their needs are secondary to those of community members, whose lives and wellbeing are at stake, and as aid agencies it’s our job to represent them to the giving public.

4. Well-meaning people can often cause damage, not good. While somebody like Shawn, who’s taken time to educate himself and has chosen to invest a lot of time in a particular community, working alongside a well experienced NGO actor, has chosen a thoughtful path into aid work, he is the exception, not the rule, when it comes to small-scale and personal-driven aid initiatives. In fact, the thought of hundreds of well-meaning vloggers from Canada, the US, Australia and/or Britain running around aid projects globally, reporting back on what they’ve been seeing to the world, is in many ways horrifying. The potential for ignorant opinions, misunderstandings and knee-jerk reactions from inexperienced people who have been shelfed off into culture shock and have no idea what they are witnessing, has the potential to do tremendous damage both to aid projects, and to communities themselves. That’s not to say that individuals (even those with no knowledge/experience of the aid sector) can’t be used in exciting ways in social media engagement with development work (people such as Frezned, Nerimon, Nanalew, and at one time, Shawn himself)- but it is to say that not everybody with a video camera and a hankering for a third-world adventure should be visiting NGO project sites to vlog.

5. Accountability is a really important thing in aid projects- first to the recipients of aid, and second to the donors. Vloggers can create a specific and niche application of accountability and I would wholeheartedly support investing in creative ways to engage this community in contributing to accountability mechanisms. However I’d also remind folks that accountability is not new. The Humanitarian Accountability Project (HAP) is a sophisticated and extensive internationally-designed and -accepted framework to which most major agencies hold their aid projects to some degree or another- and it has been in circulation in various developing iterations for years. In fact, if the agency you donate to does NOT engage with HAP, I would strongly recommend you rethink whether you should be giving to that organization.

6. It’s good to challenge NGOs to do better. I- and many of my online aid-blogger type comrades- are big fans of holding agencies, big and small, to account over their aid practices (as well as donors and other commentators). I will always welcome and encourage the public, at any level, to challenge and question what aid workers do (so long as they do so from a platform of openness and intelligence, not ignorance as is sometimes the case). In this vein, I think it’s great that Shawn is having these dialogues, that he’s working with NGOs to try new ideas, that he’s bringing his enthusiasm, passion and network to bear here, and that he has some really good things to say. I look forward to The Uncultured Project continuing to challenge agencies and suggest new ways we can do things better.

***

I’ve written before about the potential for social media and technology to contribute to aid work and communications, and it continues to excite me. Shawn has some good ideas, and there’s plenty of room for aid agencies to grow in this field. Shawn says that he hopes that this vlogger project will be the first step, and not the last, down the road to greater social media and vlogger engagement. Talking with a number of different NGO ICT4D and social media types, I’m very confident that this really is only the beginning and I look forward to lots more feedback from a range of sources into this process as well.

I’d like to suggest one final thing in regards to some of Shawn’s challenges to the vlogger project, which is that to some extent, I think Shawn is speaking a slightly different language to the 3 vloggers World Vision took out. Shawn’s passion is in accountability, program quality and stretching the envelope in terms of social media engagement- in many ways quite sophisticated for somebody who is not an aid professional. By contrast, the three vloggers in question were new to the notion of development work, were learning themselves, and their goal on this trip (and presumably World Vision’s goal as well) was not so much to start conversations around aid quality and effectiveness, but to raise profile, and to explore how successful such approaches might be in engaging donor audiences. Both are relevant issues to NGOs, and NGOs need to invest time in both- both internally, and in public domains such as YouTube.

Shawn should keep challenging NGOs to try new ideas, and call them out when they go wrong- as anybody who has taken the time to learn about and engage with the industry should. I would ask that he takes a hold of some of the key messages about good donorship and good aid agency practice in the field, and help us educate the public by sharing these messages with his network. And I’d recommend that Shawn- and anybody else interested in this line of work- take a look at the large amount of important and very digestable information about aid quality and donorship, starting with the website “Good Intentions are Not Enough” (as well as several of the other blogs on the right-hand side of my home-page).

Note: All photos my own, taken during NGO response to Niger nutrition crisis, 2005

Back in the Headlines: Niger

I spent a year living in Niger from mid-2005, courtesy of a media-labelled ‘famine’ that put about a third of the county’s population at risk of acute food shortages, and during which time tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of children died. From time to time I run into former Nigerien colleagues, and they always tell me, ‘you must come and visit us again’. Of course, they don’t really mean it. Given my role in emergency response, the only time I visit a country is when it’s in a really, really bad way. Nobody wants that.

The title of this post is, unfortunately, a total misnomer. Niger isn’t in the headlines. It’s barely ever been in the headlines. It got a couple of weeks of coverage in mid-2005, courtesy of a BBC camera crew who visited an MSF feeding centre in the east of the country and snapped some shots of a few skeletal children, thus propelling the story of a famine into the headlines. It also made a blip a couple of months ago when a low-level military coup deplaced Mahmoud Tanja as President of the country, all in the name of a more streamlined democratic process. Maybe 2 days’ worth.

Most people outside France confuse the country with Nigeria, can’t prononce its name, and wouldn’t know the proper noun for its inhabitants (Nigerien, versus Nigerian). I remember doing media interviews with Australian press when I was in the field. Standing on some street corner with a Thuriya Satellite telephone against one ear, the conversations always started the same way: “We’re joined now by an aid worker in Niger. Tell us, where exactly is Niger?”

Niger is facing another food crisis. At this point in time, failed rains have precipitated a state whereby 7.8 million people, more than half the population of the country, are facing food shortages. The government and aid agencies in Niger have all sounded the alert, far earlier than in 2005 (when it wasn’t until mid-year, as the country approached the height of the traditional ‘hardship season’ that the media, and by inference the world, finally started to pay the emergency any attention), and the implications are that 2010 will be a worse year for Niger than 2005 was.

Of course, nobody outside NGO circles is talking about Niger at all.

It Just Ain’t Sexy

There are all sorts of reasons why countries like Niger don’t get press coverage, fitting neatly into the category we in the industry refer to as ‘forgotten emergencies’. That Niger is a geographically obscure former French colony doesn’t help. But beyond that, there’s the dynamic of the emergency itself. Complex.

The media labelled the 2005 crisis as a ‘famine’. The word ‘famine’ makes for a great headline. It has an emotional hit with it. We get images in our head like Ken Carter’s infamous pullitzer-prize winning image of a vulture stalking an emaciated toddler in Sudan. We think of Ethiopia in 1984 and Band Aid; of the Biafra famine and airlift of the late sixties; of the great famines of the Victorian period in India which cost millions and millions of lives.

What happened in Niger, of course, was not a famine. Which was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, no country wants a genuine famine. On the other, it meant that as soon as people started to delve into the root causes of what was happening in Niger, they lost interest. It was too complex to stay on the front pages. Not sexy enough.

It’s the old challenge we’ve faced for years in the aid industry. Natural disasters are fast, shocking and simple to explain. From a media perspective, they are attractive. People eat them up. Disasters like the Haiti earthquake, or the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami, jolt themselves into the public conciousness and hold headlines- and attention- for weeks. Sympathy- and cash- flows.

By contrast, complex emergencies such as famines, wars, refugee crises and political emergencies are slow-moving, complex, and distinctly lacking in hope. They take far too long to explain to an audience used to the sort of oversaturated ADD-pandering stimulation provided by MTV, Jerry Bruckheimer and Fox News (complete with soundtrack). People lose interest. If they bother to learn even the slightest bit about the crisis, they feel their money will be wasted there. If it’s a war, then anything they give will just get blown up. If it’s a political crisis, then it’ll get eaten by a corrupt system. If a famine, then the children whose lives they save this year will just die in the next hunger season.

There’s more than a grain of truth in this prejudice.

A Beginner’s Guide to Famine

Famine is already a complex proposition. Hunger and starvation are pretty straight forward, but in fact famine is invariably a symphony of contributing elements. It’s food shortages, distribution systems, politics, purchasing power, economics, growing practices, feeding practices, health systems, soil mechanics, climate patterns, and many other things all wrapped up together. Famine deaths are rarely (though occasionally, in acute circumstances) due to actual lack of food, but usually a vicious interplay between nutrient deficiency and disease.

This downward spiral is in itself multipronged and complex- if quite easily explainable if you’re willing to take the time.

We eat food because our body needs certain inputs to maintain healthy life. Energy in the form of sugars, carbohydrates and fats. Building-blocks in the form of proteins. Specific functions supported through the intake of vitamins and minerals- micronutrients. Reduce the intake of any of these things, and the body doesn’t work so well. Reduce them enough over the long-term (chronic malnutrition), and the body doesn’t develop properly- it becomes smaller (stunting) and brain function is reduced. Reduce them enough over the short-term (acute malnutrition), and the body starts to consume itself (wasting), ultimately leading to death if not checked.

In both instances (but particularly situations of acute malnutrition), the lack of essential supplies means that the body is more succeptible to disease. The inbuilt defence mechanisms to fight bacteria and viruses are weaker. At the same time, many diseases also inhibit the correct absorbtion of different nutrients- resulting in a downward spiral, where poor nutrient intake results in disease, which in turn slows nutrient intake. The alternative cycle is equally true where certain diseases (such as malaria, or diarrhoeal diseases) are endemic in a population- disease inhibiting nutrient intake, leading to higher succeptibility to disease.

In both cases, high mortality results. Usually among the most vulnerable members of a population- young children.

There are additional complicating factors. The biggest is hygeine, which contributes to the prevelance and spread of diarrhoeal disease. This in turn is driven both by mechanical factors (is there a sufficient supply of clean water for drinking, washing and cooking?) and behavioural factors (do people wash their hands after going to the toilet and before handling food? Do they boil water?).

A nation’s public health system is the next tier. Is there a network of hospitals, clinics, doctors and nurses to support a population and treat illness? Are there campaigns to reduce endemic and epidemic diseases (such as vaccinations, or mosquito net distributions)? Are there public health messages reaching remote communities to reduce risky behaviour?

Yet another driver that contributes to mortality cycles is population displacement- and particularly, relief camps. Cramming large numbers of people together puts huge stress on food and water production and distribution systems, and existing health care systems. People quickly become under-nourished. Hygeine systems and fecal waste management become difficult. The physical proximity of people to one another vastly accelerate disease transmission rates. The chances of an outbreak of diarrhoeal or viral disease increases by orders of magnitude, and the rapidity with which it can take hold can have catastrophic impacts on existing support networks, and ultimately on mortality.  In the aftermath of the 1994 Rwanda genocide, tens of thousands of ethnic Hutus died in a matter of weeks after diarrhoeal disease ravished displacement camps on the Congolese border.

In short, camps kill.

Malnutrition

The term famine, in the international public health context, relates to a state of excess mortality driven by food shortages- both acute and chronic- across an entire population. In other words, if we call it a famine, we should be expecting to see a rise in the number of people dying in multiple age cohorts, attributable directly to these physiological effects of limited food intake.

In Niger, this was not the case. In fact, during the 2005 hunger season, there wasn’t a single case of a recorded adult death directly attributed to food shortage. The mortality and morbidity was almost exclusively confined to the cohort of children and infants under the age of 5. A nutrition crisis, certainly, but not a famine.

Is this just semantics? Famine, nutrition crisis, surely it’s all pretty much the same thing. People need food, right?

Well, no, actually not right.

Famine, as we’ve already discussed, is a highly emotive word with which we immediately attach baggage. Drought, crop failure, rake-thin Africans and starving babies. People need food, and need it fast. We think famine, we think problem. We think solution, and we think food distribution. Trucks and airplanes loaded with sacks of grain, long queues of colourfully-clad black women with plastic bowls beneath a World Food Program logo. Donors expect it. And, sadly, aid agencies often jump to it as well.

But we’ve already talked about what famine is. It’s so much more complex than this. If we use simple, loaded language to describe the problem, we run the risk of failing to pause and fully understand it. We’ll be easily pressured into jumping into a knee-jerk response. We won’t tackle the problem where it needs to be tackled. And people- children- will die.

Complexities of the Context

Over the last couple of decades, Niger has been consistently ranked at the very bottom of the UNDP’s Human Development Index- somewhere among the poorest three countries in the world, as a rule. This is more than simple economics. It relates, yes, to the fact that the nation produces virtually nothing for the export market except a few crumbly chunks of Yellow-Cake Uranium, but also to the low adult literacy rate, the extremely high birth rate, or the catastrophic infant mortality rate.

Niger exists on the border between Sahel and Sahara- the former being that vast semi-arid band of mixed grass and woodland that stretches from east to west across the African continent and marking the gradual transition from the true-desert of the enormous Sahara to the moist tropical jungles that seethe around the Congo River. The Sahel is characterized by short, intermittent and unpredictable rains, high temperatures, and a current trend towards increasing aridity and desertification. A third of Niger- the southern region- is Sahel. The other two thirds are desert. The vast majority of the country’s population of 15 million live in this southern band, and it is here that the nation attempts to provide enough food to feed itself. 82% of the population are involved in agricultural or livestock production, much of it subsistence. Just 15% of the land area is actually arable.

Niger’s staple is millet, supplemented by sorghum, and small quantities of market vegetables. Millet is a hardy crop which grows well in drought conditions, but which is low in nutrients and hard to digest, particularly by children, and by people who are unwell. It is generally ground into powder and turned into a paste or porridge- something which takes a lot of physical work and energy. Children are typically fed millet from an early age- the traditional weaning age is two, disregarding the health status of the child or the potential benefits of remaining on breast-milk.

Adult males in the family are likely to be fed before children, as they are economically productive and need to be kept healthy to continue bringing resources into the family. Superstitious beliefs in many parts mean that children are not fed eggs (there is a fear that they will grow up to be thieves)- the best and most easily accessible form of protein in most villages. Strong conservative and male-centric values mean that men take the largest and tastiest portions of food, and children and women are fed only after men are satisfied. (There were many reports during our feeding programs of men taking the nutrient paste we had provided to infants and eating it themselves because they liked the sweet taste).

A large portion of the country’s agriculture is subsistence, with any surplus production usually sold on local markets for cash income. Families are large- Niger has a fertility rate of 7.1 children per woman, and it’s common for men to have more than one wife. Water in this arid country is in short supply- 3- 600mm per year, or around a quarter of that of continental Europe. Resource production is spread thin.

In rural areas, all kinds of traditions prevail in child-care. Generations of high infant mortality has resulted in a certain detachment by mothers towards newborn children. In places, mothers will not care for children until they are weaned (when it’s clear that they are not going to die as babies) and the task falls to other women. Colostrum- the thick, nutrient-rich substance that womens’ breasts produce during the first few days following childbirth and which provide newborns with a huge kick-start for life- is considered unclean, and infants are fed water until the mother’s milk becomes ‘normal’. This is a double-whammy, as it means that not only are children denied that boost they need to start life off, but they are often given unclean water, which makes them sick straight off the bat. Assuming they survive (almost 80 in every 1,000 children born in Niger die before they reach the age of 1), they start life off sick, and poorly able to absorb what nutrients come their way, paving the way for high vulnerability to malnutrition.

Roll all of this together, and nearly 170 out of every 1,000 children born in Niger die before they reach the age of five. That’s almost 17%, or more than 1 in 6. Given that the average woman gives birth to 7 children, that means that on average, every woman in Niger will lose at least one child.

In perspective, the infant mortality rate in Australia is 5 per 1,000 live births. The under-5 mortality rate is 6 (in other words, just one out of every 1,000 children born in Australia will die between the ages of one and five, compared to 90 in Niger).

I hope you’re getting the picture.

All this context mumbo-jumbo (that most readers have probably stopped perousing by now) really means that Niger’s population- and specifically, it’s children, are in any given year extremely vulnerable to anything that might reduce their food intake. If, in a normal year, these are the background statistics, and this is the difficulty people have in simply not dying, it means that when the resources available go down, large numbers of people are very rapidly pushed into a place where they will be at risk of death. Which is how, this year, 7.8 million Nigeriens now find themselves at risk of ‘starvation’.

The crisis, as we can see, is not so much an immediate, short-term issue, but rather it’s couched in this long-term situation.

Anatomy of a Crisis

Short-term factors still play a part however, layered into all this complexity. In 2005, the causes were manifold. First off, there were the combination of failed rains across the southern part of the country in the 2004/5 growing season, and a locust invasion which finished off the rest of the crops. So, acute food production shortages.

Merchants with significant purchasing power- many from Nigeria- foresaw that there would be a food shortage, and as soon as the harvests came in, they bought as much as they could from farmers. Many farmers even mortgaged off their coming season’s harvest before it was in- pushing themselves into debt and annihilating their own production and purchasing power to cover short-term needs. Many men left the land and moved to urban areas or out of the country to find waged labour.

As the year progressed and demand for food on the market spiked, it was trickled back onto the market by merchants who were hoarding it- but at hugely increased prices- a simple supply/demand effect. The merchants made a killing. Literally.

This layering of natural and man-made factors pushed a chronically food-insecure context into a critical emergency. Food shortages across the country meant that households simply didn’t have enough to eat. Children- already chronically underfed with low physical tolerance or resistance to nutrient deficiency and disease, bore the brunt of this. They started to waste away by the hundreds of thousands. Many died.

The politics of a male-dominated conservative society compounded things. It was commonplace for men to leave food and seeds locked away in their storehouses. They would take the key with them and forbid the women from touching the food supplies. They would be gone for months at a time without being in contact. We heard of many instances where women refused to take their dying child to a nutrition centre or hospital, because to leave the village they needed their husband’s permission, and he was travelling looking for work.

Into this mix came a government fearful of the implications of an emergency on its population. The last time there had been a major food emergency in the country the government had collapsed as an indirect result. Frightened the same might happen, they became aggressively defensive. Journalists who threw about the word ‘famine’ were kicked out of the country, accused of embarrassing the government which supposedly had everything under control. NGOs had to tiptoe around government sensitivities. Authorities were slow to admit anything was wrong, reluctant to ask for international assistance.

NGOs sent in their emergency teams, loaded with the ‘F’ word and all the professional expectations that carries. Fundraising campaigns were run, small amounts of money raised. We ran food distributions and set up feeding centres. Tens of thousands of metric tons of food aid flowed into the country. Tens of thousands of families received food. Tens of thousands of children were admitted to nutrition programs.

We undoubtedly saved lives.

We undoubtedly failed to prevent some deaths.

Lessons Learned?

Aid reached Niger too little, too late. NGOs rushed in expecting to find an acute famine based on food shortages (failed rains and locusts) but failed to understand the broader context for several months- everything from cultural practices to the ecnomics of supply and demand to a fragile and defensive state structure. While bits and pieces of the long-term situation in Niger certainly began filtering through in the early days, the complexity of setting up a time-critical emergency response and all the operational demands that such a program demands meant that precious little time was dedicated to reflection and understanding. Spurned on by the emotional sense of urgency, key clues were missed.

It took months to re-orient the response to focus on the structural issues. Food distributions- particularly the network of nutrition centres for young children- certainly kept many alive while the process was reshaped. Had the government been more proactive and had the international community (including donors and the international media) pulled their act together in a more timely fashion, that band-aid measure could have prevented far more deaths, and allowed that re-orientation to take place earlier in the journey. As it happened, by the time the context had been analysed and fully understood, donor and media interest had moved on, and there was little additional funding to run essential programs.

But dealing with these big-picture changes is not easy. How does an NGO change the child-care or hygeine practices of a nation? How do they influence government expenditure on health-care networks or vaccination programs? How do they transform the agrarian sector of an entire economy?

The fact is, they can’t. They can tackle the practical issues on a local (village) level. They can advocate to regional and national government officials. But the potential for this big-picture, long-term impact is limited. And sadly, small, short-term changes in a locale which is couched in a much bigger and more complex context tend to be easily undermined.

The Now and the Not Yet

Niger is again on the brink of a food emergency. It remains a severely impoverished country with political upheaval, and a long-standing set of cultural practices, beliefs and dynamics that are unlikely to have changed much over the past 5 years. Programs have been running to tackle chronic malnutrition and food insecurity, but I can’t comment on their efficacy. To the best of my knowledge, millions of children have once again been placed at risk of acute malnutrition, and by all accounts, the lead-in to the current crisis is worse than the lead-in we saw in 2004/5.

Once again, there is no media interest. Once again the year ticks on, and NGOs and the UN have all put out their early-warning reports, and nobody seems to care. Once again, other emergencies overshadow the crisis in Niger- such as the earthquakes in Haiti, Chile and China.

Niger’s hunger season traditionally runs from May to September. That is, the period after the seeds have been planted in the ground and last year’s harvest has been mostly consumed, but before the next harvest is brought in. Every year, rural Nigeriens have to struggle to find a way to keep food on the table- either ration their own dwindling supplies, cut back on the number of meals a day, scrounge for bush fodder, or look for waged labour in urban areas. The longer the hunger period, the harder it is to make these coping mechanisms meet the needs of families. It’s April, and we’ve been seeing signs of food stress for months. The hunger season has already been underway for some time.

If the world intervenes now, lives will be spared. If the media can raise public awareness, and governments and individuals give money and resources to respond to those needs, and NGOs can mobilize response programs early enough, fewer children need to die there this year.

If, as generally happens, we wait to see photographs of emaciated children in feeding centres on BBC and CNN, then lives will have already been lost. The time it takes to ramp up response programs will cost even more lives. This is the practical reality of the aid sector.

The government, at least, appears to be picking up on the mistakes of the past, and is already sounding alarm-bells at its level, accepting that there is a problem. NGOs too have been engaged since early 2006 with the structural issues in-country and are far more aware of the context than they were in 2005. Programs would be run differently. Best practice in the management of child malnutrition has come a long way even over the last 5 years. The UN and interagency partnerships are far better established than they were before, and long-term nutritional programs aimed at structural issues have been running. You can read more about how 2010 differs from 2005 in this analysis by IRIN here. But resource needs remain, without which programs can’t be run.

Sitting as I do in an aid and development charity, knowing full well that we can’t create resources out of thin air, I’m frustrated to know what to do. I have no power over what stories the media runs. I can’t swing government policy. I don’t have the ability to tell the Australian public where to give their [generously donated] funding. All I have is the memory of the faces I saw when I was there five years ago. The barren landscape and the fields dotted with sorry-looking stalks of millet. Skinny children with piano-key ribcages and oversized round skulls. Fierce heat. Looking at the statistics sheets on our feeding centres: The number of new children admitted; the number of those recovered; the number of defaulters; the number of dead.

I’m unlikely to be the guy on the ground this time round. My role doesn’t have me travelling quite so much at the moment, and that’s not likely to change into the near future. I have mixed feelings about this. I don’t particularly want to get embroiled in what is a complex, slow-moving and at times seemingly hopeless context like Niger’s. On the other hand, you don’t get involved with a country in a situation like that without leaving a bit of your soul there, and taking a little of its soul with you.

I sincerely and with all my heart hope that people can get their act together and choose to do something to prevent people dying needlessly in Niger this year.

Photos:

1. Niger River at Sunset: The sun sets over the Niger River as viewed from the Grand Hotel in central Niamey.

2. Feeding Centre Mother and Child: A woman and her malnourished child await registration at an NGO-run feeding centre in central Niger.

3. New Admission: A malnourished infant awaits registration at an NGO-run feeding centre in central Niger.

4. Maria: 2-year old Maria exhibits signs of acute malnutrition. NGO staff talking with her mother try and convince her to take her daughter to hospital.

5. Food Queue: Women queue at an NGO-run food distribution in rural Niger.

6. Warehouse: An NGO warehouse stacked with WFP food aid in rural Niger.

7. Millet Stalks: Staple crop of Niger.

8. La Nutrition: An NGO staff member registers an acutely malnourished child into a feeding program.

9. Recovery: A child who has been in an NGO-run feeding program for some time exhibits signs of improvement.

10: Split Peas and Mais: At an NGO-run food distribution, a man demonstrates the food being distributed.

11: Traditional Coping Mechanisms: An elderly woman sells a plate of baked leaves which she has foraged from the bush as a food source.

12: Hilltop Sunset: The sun goes down over the hills beyond the Niger River near Niamey.