Tornado #SWEDOW

The #SWEDOW (Stuff WE DOn’t Want) debate has surfaced a bunch of times on this site, and far moreso across the aid blogosphere over the last few years- with a particular crescendo around the Million T-Shirts conversation a while back. It deals with the issue of people wanting to give things– t-shirts, shoes, underpants, food, footballs- to disaster response agencies rather than cash.

For a whole bunch of reasons, this is generally unhelpful. Stuff costs huge amounts of money to ship, store, sort, distribute and track. It often ends up being mismatched to context- too much, too little, culturally inappropriate, or most often, just stuff that isn’t needed. There’s a misconception that what disaster response agencies do is hand stuff out, whereas in fact a huge part of their work is in delivering services, training and other more intangible benefits. Where stuff is required, it can be more cheaply acquired from local or regional markets than shipped from overseas. And stuff, dumped on local markets, can undermine local economies and actually make the situation worse, rather than better.

As a result, most aid agencies lobby for donors to give cash, not try and send stuff for them to distribute. Cash gives them the flexibility to respond quickly, cheaply and appropriately, and improves their chances of saving or bettering the lives of disaster survivors.

A lot of the SWEDOW debate has revolved around the shipping of stuff to third-world disaster sites, places like Haiti, Pakistan, or the nebulous ‘Africa’. Interestingly, in the wake of last week’s tornado in Moore, OK, in which 24 people died and nearly 400 were injured, SWEDOW has become more of an issue in the developed-world context.

@texasinafrica posted this link to this NPR article yesterday, in which disaster relief agencies responding in Moore are asking people in the US to stop sending stuff to ‘help out’:

<blockquote class=”twitter-tweet”><p>Sigh. Cash, friends. Cash is what you should ALWAYS give in disasters. Not stuff. <a href=”http://t.co/fXymRDEN9q&#8221; title=”http://j.mp/1769hfW”>j.mp/1769hfW</a></p>&mdash; Laura Seay (@texasinafrica) <a href=”https://twitter.com/texasinafrica/status/338304458415017984″>May 25, 2013</a></blockquote>
<script async src=”//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js” charset=”utf-8″></script>

The article is interesting in that it captures the main aspects of the SWEDOW issue, and makes it clear that this is not just a third-world problem. According to the article, relief groups in Moore are now posting on their websites,

“Please, no more clothes.”

Of the inflow of relief donations:

Marty Taylor is a pastor at the evangelical JourneyChurch in Norman, just south of Moore. This megachurch has become a kind of mega-relief center. Hundreds of volunteers sort thorough rooms packed with donations, everything from diapers and teddy bears to crutches and toilet paper.

“And there’s your obligatory giant rack of ramen noodles,” Taylor says.

In fact, this church has accumulated so many items that volunteers are busy building a tent in the parking lot to store some of the stuff so there is room inside to hold church services this weekend…

[D]onations have been so overwhelming that groups around town are posting on their websites, “Please, no more clothes.” The city of Moore suggests that those who want to give should send money to the American Red Cross, the Salvation Army or a local food bank.

In a quick survey of Moore-related disaster appeals, I found only one agency (the Baptist Disaster Relief Agency) explicitly stating that it was no longer accepting clothes. United Way are also a bit more overt about the need for cash-only donations, saying:

City of Oklahoma City, the City of Moore and United Way of Central Oklahoma advise that monetary donations are the best way to assist the recovery efforts.

However, the default for most other response agencies is to direct all web traffic to a cash donations page, with no options given to provide non-cash donations- fairly standard practice.

Some agencies talk about providing material supplies in support, but it is the agencies themselves that purchase the equipment or supplies in question (hygeine kits, for example), while accepting cash, not stuff, from the public.

A handful of other agencies work specifically in delivering donated relief goods, and therefore do accept donations to their distribution network. Many of these list the specific items they wish to have donated, and others work exlusively with corporate donors, not the general public, to ensure the items received are bulk and of standard.

More on some of this in a moment.

The comments provide some of the most interesting reading, as they capture more depth from the readers who have had experience of this sort of thing.

A comment from reader Cyn B:

I know people mean well but it seems they use every tragedy as an excuse to clean out their closets.I worked in a warehouse after a hurricane once and it was ridiculous, the piles & piles of old, musty clothes. Just give $10 to the Red Cross, please…or $5 even…in lieu of closet cleaning.

Melissa H helped respond after the May 3 tornado in Moore:

One of my favorite memories? Getting some food and finding a box of pistachio pudding that had expired in 1978, a full 21 years before the tornado. People use these tragedies to rid themselves of garbage and make themselves feel warm and fuzzy at the same time. It has nothing to do with the people of Moore being ungrateful and everything to do with the fact that clothes do not rebuild homes or feed people. As has been said, mountains of clothes take manpower away from more important tasks.

vcponsardin writes:

I have a neighbor who has made a business out of disaster “relief.” Every time there’s a major disaster somewhere in the world, she organizes a “teddy bear” collection. She usually gets thousands of stuffed animals donated which she then sends off to places like Oklahoma, New Orleans, Haiti, Indonesia, etc. And she does this despite the fact that time after time she’s told by authorities (from the Red Cross to the National Guard) that while the donations are appreciated, what they really need are things like money, blood, water purification, medicine, etc., not stuffed animals But she persists nonetheless and invariably gets herself in the local newspaper as a disaster “hero.” I always wonder, when she does this, if misplaced good intensions might not be worse at times than doing nothing at all.

Jennifer Murphy, who volunteered with the Red Cross in Hurricane Katrina, says:

Although donations of all sorts came in almost daily, the number of those donations that were actually useful to us was about half of what we got. The two “visions of waste” that stick in my mind to this day: The mountains of clothing that we would see piled on the curbsides like snow, not as detritus from the storm, but as well-intentioned yet useless donations. Also (and this one was my favorite), about three pallets of those crustless frozen PBJ sandwiches that are individually wrapped. Mind you, these need to be kept frozen until they are used, and the only freezer we had was your average-sized household refrigerator freezer! To make things worse, they weren’t even noticed by the staff until they had been sitting in the warehouse for over a week! Needless to say, they all went to waste, as well.

Talk to any disaster response worker, and you’ll get story after story of useless stuff gone to waste that has been shipped at high expense to a disaster response.

But why?

The article says it well. Quoting Taylor (referenced above):

“So many people … just feel this urgency like, ‘I gotta do something,'”

Something, unfortunately, often means giving SWEDOW.

“But writing a check or texting a donation isn’t always that satisfying for those who want so desperately to help.”

Trucks and volunteers have been streaming in all week long… Sean Hawkins and seven others traveled from Phoenix with three trucks loaded with cases of water, Gatorade, shampoo, soap, clothing and work gloves.

How did they know what to bring? Hawkins says they didn’t, really: “We just figured…’If we were without, what would we need?’ “

Many good, well-meaning people have a “I want to help” button, that gets pushed whenever a disaster strikes. They feel saddened, or powerless, or some other compulsion to try and fix what went wrong. The act of giving can make a person feel better. And that feeling can be magnified by giving stuff, rather than cash, which isn’t, as the article points out, ‘satisfying’ in the same way. I’m trying to be cynical- while there are people who give for selfish reasons, many who give- both cash and stuff- do so from a good place, and my not be conciously motivated- or motivated at all- by the need to feel good about it. None the less, the strength of this ‘I want to help’ button being pushed, coupled with an ignorance around what the disaster response community actually needs, results in people often tending towards giving stuff instead. Stuff that’s unhelpful.

Relief agencies do push for cash- sometimes stymied by fears among donors that cash can get misused while stuff is a safer option- and there’s been plenty of cash raised for the Moore response over the last week or so. Ironically, while donors worry that maybe some of their money might be mis-spent (i.e. on overheads), for more Gifts in Kind (GIK) gets wasted in a response, not to mention the cash required by agencies to transport, store, sort and distribute- so GIK loses out on every front when it comes to the conversation about cash.

But what about some of the agencies working deliberately with GIK? I’d like to look at a couple of those for a moment.

One of the biggest issues with GIK is the link to corporations and the inextricability of tax breaks for organizations to dump their unwanted stock on charities. It serves both corporates and the agencies themselves in a fairly cynical cycle of useless.

Not to name-and-shame, but one organization’s blurb on their corporate disaster relief partnerships is particularly telling- albeit I’m sure unintentional. Operation Blessing has this to say:

Across America, Operation Blessing’s fleet of tractor-trailer trucks travel an average of 2 million miles a year to service our corporate partners, helping deliver their GIK donations directly to families and communities in need. [italics mine]

I don’t want to be too pedantic, but I think the comment “to service our corporate partners” does capture the relationship that agencies often have with GIK- overt or not, that this is something that isn’t just about the communities in need- this is actually about the corporate donor as well, a total “we scratch your back, you scratch ours” dynamic.

Other agencies are more prescriptive in dealing with GIK issues. The Oklahoma government relief page lists donation centres and the specific types of GIK required at each. Operation USA is one of several agencies that also lists the relief items they are willing to collect and donate. The Moore Recovers site linked to the City of Moore allows would-be donors to list what they have available, and will contact donors back if this matches a requirement among the community- better still.

This is certainly a better way to approach GIK than it just arriving in a maelstrom of small and uncoordinated donations. But there’s another major problem with this, and that’s the evolving nature of disaster response.

The final line of the NPR article says:

“People here say, so far, they’ve gotten everything they need. It’s what they’ll get in the weeks and months ahead that are the big unknowns.”

This really is the crux of the matter, even for well-intentioned and thoughtful GIK. Disaster needs change, and change often and quickly, in the wake of a rapid-onset disaster. In the first few days after a disaster, particularly in a developed country context, people need medical assistance, water, food and temporary shelter.

After that, most people have access to their own bank accounts. Shops are re-opening- if not right on the disaster zone, then close enough by that people aren’t going to starve. Some food distributions can help, especially for people who can’t return home, but on the whole, people need to be able to move to more robust interim shelter arrangements, to regain some semblance of routine in their lives as quickly as possible, to get their kids back to school, and to engage with the clean-up operations.

Eventually, reconstruction begins- and with it, the need, perhaps, for help restarting a business, or long-term debt recovery, and in a few cases, long-term medical assistance- but each of these pieces will be quite household-specific.

The specific items that will support people in this process vary. And they vary rapidly. The period where food, water and medical supplies are needed is really a short window- a week, ten days, really not too much beyond that in terms of actual need. The cleanup period, a little longer after that, where tools and so-forth can be handy, depending on the capacity of other actors.

The reality will vary from response to response as to how long each window lasts, exactly what it looks like, and what is needed when.

However the donation of GIK is a slow process. If it’s being given around the country, it can take days for donated items to reach collection points, days more for it to be compiled, shipped and warehoused. Days more for it to be sorted by overwhelmed volunteers on or close to the ground. By the time donated goods actually reach the target community, there’s every chance that, even if the donation responded to a request by a legitimate response agency, by the time it gets to where it’s needed, there’s a good chance it will no longer be needed.

I’m not saying that no GIK donation provides any worth whatsoever. Some, I’m sure, subsidize operations on some level, and they will be appreciated. What I am saying is that with cash, rather than stuff, agencies can respond quicker, more appropriately, and for less money than it takes to manage somebody’s well-intentioned gift of stuff.

Nuff said. If you want to support survivors of the Moore tornado, please give cash to the Red Cross or another reputable response agency. And please don’t give anyone SWEDOW.

If you want to help, give cash. If there’s stuff in your house you want to meaningfully dispose of, give it to a local charity shop that has a system to effectively monetize it to meet local needs. That should be the only place you donate household items.

References:

1. ‘Please, No More Clothes’: Relief Agencies Ask For Cash, NPR

2. How to help Oklahoma tornado victims, NBC News

 

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

Photo Essay: Nutrition Program Walk-Through

 

I’m managing our emergency response program addressing malnutrition in Niger for a few weeks. For those who work in the aid sector, you probably have a fair idea of what that actually means. For the rest (those of you who are interested), here’s what we’re doing.

First, some background, so we’re all speaking the same language.

Malnutrition, simply put, is the state that results when a person’s body doesn’t take in enough nutrients- the chemicals that allow our body to function correctly, which we do generally by consuming a balanced and sufficient diet. Malnutrition can be due to the overall food/calorific intake being too low, a poor diversity of food-groups, or an illness that inhibits the body’s correct processing of those chemicals. Malnutrition has a large number of indirect causes, and a large number of direct results. Key among the latter are nutrient deficiencies, poor physical development (‘stunting’), rapid weight-loss (‘wasting’), susceptibility to disease and, in extreme circumstances, death (although direct death through malnutrition is relatively rare- it is more likely to be caused by disease which is more virulent in a body weakened by malnutrition).

We deal with two main types of malnutrtion: Long-term, or ‘chronic’ malnutrition, and short-term, or ‘acute’ malnutrition. Chronic malnutrition exists where populations consistently lack access to sufficient or balanced diets, or are exposed to regular and frequent cycles of acute malnutrition. Acute malnutrition exists where there are substantial short-term shortages in food availability.

Niger experiences both chronic and acute malnutrition. It is a landlocked country which is two-thirds desert, so growing food is a challenge. Rainfall is erratic and unreliable, and the desert encroaches into arable land. Roughly 90% of its agricultural harvest is a single crop (millet) which grows well under the circumstances, but means that diets are unbalanced. Traditional childcare norms (non-exclusive breastfeeding, early weaning and poor hygeine and sanitation practices) mean that children are health-disadvantaged from an early age. So the background chronic malnutrition is high, primarily among children. It means childrens’ bodies do not develop as well as they should. They are stunted (small for their age), and their brains may also not develop as well as they would have with a good diet. It has huge implications for Niger’s development as a country.

The harvest is brought in once a year. Depending on how good the harvest is, villages will have enough to eat. However stocks will dwindle through the year, so as the months go by, people will drop back to having two meals a day, one meal a day, and sometimes not even eat every day. This is known as the hardship or hunger season (saison de soudure). The onset of the dry season (February through May) reduces the availability of wild foods, and also puts herds of cattle under pressure. The worse the prior year’s harvest, the earlier this hardship season begins, the more pressure this puts on communities’ abilities to cope, and the deeper the crisis.

The rains traditionally arrive in late June (although as the world’s climate changes, they are becoming increasingly erratic and unreliable) and last until September. This enables the next year’s harvest to grow and flourish- depending on how good the rains are. It also brings with it malaria. The relationship between disease- especially malaria and diarrhoeal disease- and malnutrition is such that children who are malnourished are more likely to get sick because their bodies are not as well equipped to defend themselves; and children who are sick are less able to maintain their nutritional status. It is a vicious cycle.

These factors then give rise to acute malnutrition. In Niger, acute malnutrition traditionally starts to rise from May and June and continue until after the harvest in October, but on a bad year may begin to spike in February, and can last throughout most of the year, with substantial caseloads still recorded in November and December. It affects mostly children, and mostly those children under the age of five. Child deaths also spike during this time. It is inevitable, and the less work that is done to manage acute malnutrition, the more children will die. We focus on children because physically they have the fewest bodily reserves to handle shortages of food and therefore they become malnourished quickest, and also die quickest. It’s worth noting that children who are chronically malnourished already will be the first to drop into acute malnutrition once food runs out.

There are different ways to manage malnutrition. In refugee camps, malnutrition is typically done on-site in feeding centres, where women bring their children to receive a cooked ration directly from the supporting organization. ‘Wet ration’ feeding centres are expensive to run, as they require staff to prepare and distribute the food, often for hundreds of children at a time, but they work well in relief-camp settings where tens or hundreds of thousands of people may be in one physical location which can be easily accessed- so they are efficient. The biggest advantage is that staff can actually watch the malnourished children receiving the ration, so they know it has been received.

In a peace-time context like Niger’s, where rural populations are low and spread over large areas, wet feeding centres are too expensive to put into every village, and distances too great to expect women and children to travel to twice a day. The solution is a model called Community Management of Acute Malnutrition (CMAM), which brings women to distribution points once a week or once a fortnight to receive a ration for their child, which they take home and give their children as instructed. This has the advantage of being far more affordable to reach a population spread over a large area, but requires trust that the women will in fact give their children the ration- not always the case, when they might have two or three other children at home also not eating properly.

The first stage of the program is ‘screening’. Community volunteers are trained to identify children in their village who they suspect could be malnourished. They encourage those children’s mothers to take them to the nearest government health-centre.

There, program staff working alongside government health workers assess the children for malnutrition. This is done using something called a MUAC (mid upper-arm circumference) tape, which goes around the child’s bicep to assess how badly wasted it is (apparently that circumference does not change greatly in young children above the age of six months). It is marked in millimetres to measure the actual circumference, and colour-coded. A green reading indicates the child is healthy, a yellow reading indicates moderate acute malnutrition (MAM) and a red reading indicates severe acute malnutrition (SAM).

If the child is malnourished, it is then weighed on a hanging scale, then placed on a measuring board to take its height (which generally encourages loud wailing from the hapless child). The child’s weight for its height is then assessed against the average weight for a child of that size; obviously, the lighter a child of a particular weight, the thinner it is. These measurements are taken at intervals while the child is in the program to track changes in its weight. Additionally, they are assessed against a chart of ‘z-scores’ which plots the average weight for a child of a particular height. If the child is more than two standard deviations below the average weight for its height, the child is moderately acutely malnourished, and if it is more than three standard deviations, the child is severely acutely malnourished.

It may sound a bit technical, but in fact it takes no more than half a minute per child using MUAC, or ninety seconds to weigh, measure and score children using weight-for-height. The child’s information (name, village, score) is then recorded on a health card which is given to the mother- blue for moderates, and pink for severes. Program staff also assess children for possible medical complications (e.g. malaria, oedema), and if these are present, children are refered to an intensive care facility, managed by another organization.

So to sum up, we have four categories. Healthy, Moderately Acutely Malnourished, Severely Acutely Malnourished, and Severely Acutely Malnourished with Medical Complications. Our program looks after the moderates and the severes. And because the physical needs of moderates and severes differ, we treat them differently.

Moderates receive a bi-weekly ration of a reinforced meal-mix (‘reinforced’ meaning the staple has had things added to it to increase its nutritional value). This is usually a cereal flour (in our case Corn-Soya Blend, or CSB), sugar and oil, mixed together. Mothers take this home and feed their children the ration over two weeks, then return to have the child re-measured for progress and receive another ration (if required).

Severes receive a weekly ration of therapeutic food. We use a product produced locally in Niger called Plump’ynut. Each ration is self-contained in a small foil packet and tastes like sweetened peanut butter. It is specifically designed to address severe acute malnutrition, and generally speaking, the kids (and, sadly, sometimes the adults too) love it.

There are tweaks to the program beyond this, but this is the core. Our biggest challenges include ensuring the malnourished children receive the ration they are supposed to, and that it isn’t shared with other children (or worse, adults). In fact it’s not unusual for mothers to deliberately underfeed their children so that they remain on the program, so that they can continue to access the food ration which can contribute to their whole family’s wellbeing. Sometimes, an additional ration is given to the families of malnourished children to try and prevent this from happening.

The harvest is slowly coming in. Between now and mid-October it will be gathered, and during this time the food situation in the villages here will gradually improve. Malnutrition levels will lag- October is the peak malnutrition month historically. Millet is fine for adults, but kids under two will not get its full nutritional benefits (we push as hard as we can for mothers to keep breastfeeding). During the 2005/6 crisis we were still seeing kids in the program as late as April and May the following year, and I’d certainly expect to see some of the same patterns this time round.

The nice thing about working on a nutrtion program- as opposed to many other programs aid and development workers can often get involved with- is the short-term horizon. It’s normal for us to phase out of a place and never actually see the work that we do bear much fruit, beyond, perhaps, the provision of some basic goods and services. Here, however, it’s pretty easy to tell when a really sick kid shows up at the nutrition centre. Most of the kids in our severe program are ill enough that if they were to get malaria or cholera, they could die in a matter of forty-eight hours. Getting them out of that state and to better health is the aim of the program, and if the mother is feeding the child the ration, stays in the program, and the child doesn’t get ill during this time, then we can turn them around in a matter of four to six weeks. The really sick ones- the ones we refer straight on to the intensive care clinics- may only have lived a day or two past when they come to us.

It really is the business of saving lives out there. The teams on the ground (across several organizations) do amazing work, and there are many children who will live who would otherwise have died without their assistance. It’s a privilege to be able to drop in and be a part of the work they are doing for a few weeks.

Ponderings On The Road

The air-con is broken. This is rarely a good thing at the best of times, but when it’s so hot outside that opening the window doesn’t reduce the perspiration soaking into the back of my t-shirt, it starts to become something of a drag. We’re halfway into the ten-hour journey between Maradi and Niamey, and the day’s still getting hotter. Happily my iPad doesn’t seem to mind the heat. So far…

The trip is much as I remember it. Long, dull and unremarkable. But then I’m seeing it through the eyes of familiarity. Granted, a familiarity several years old. But I’m seeing only a couple of differences. One is the amount of green. This I recall from the very first times I did this journey, the same season in 2005. It was striking, because the fields seemed so lush for a country in the grip of it’s worst famine in a decade. But as colleagues pointed out to me, if the food is still growing in the fields it means it’s not on people’s plates.

Of course, the last time I did this journey it was the height of the dry season. I have vivid memories of stopping for a comfort break (‘checking the tyres’ as an Ivorian colleague euphemistically observed) along some desolate stretch of country far between villages. The air was so hot that inhaling it made the lungs burn. My skin sang under what felt like pressure coming from the sun, and I got little shivers up and down my back. Crickets whined a persecuted song, but otherwise the landscape was silent. In the distance, across brown scrubland near a line of low flat-topped hills, a pair of dust-devils, small brown tornadoes, twisted in a macabre dance. It was the sort of scene to crush a traveller’s weary soul.

Thank God for the rains.

The other difference now is the road. I noted immediately in 2005 how good the highway between Niamey and Maradi was at the time, certainly compared to other Sahelian roads I had driven. I can no longer make the same claim. While much of it is still in good nick, there’s a good two hours of driving where the blacktop has deteriorated into a potholed mess barely better- and in some cases far worse- than a dirt road. I have had a number of colleagues tell me that life here for the population of the world’s poorest country has gotten harder over the last half-decade.

Otherwise the journey is remarkably similar. It is an alternating pastiche of farmland with antenna-high millet, thicket-spotted scrubland running to a low, flat horizon, and run-down villages replete with square mud-brick buildings and ricketty wooden roadside stalls. The few towns are dusty but buzzing with energy. Gigantic overladen trucks jam the streets. Vendors hawk loaves of sugary yellow bread, cheap plastic wares imported from Nigeria, and chocolate wafers that taste like cardboard. Where we stop for lunch at a stall in Dogon-Doutchi we chow down on a plate of rice and sauce, liberally sprinkled with a local spice mix that is both tangy and delicious. It costs a buck fifty a head. Standing out on the street a few minutes later waiting for the car to come back for us, a skinny old man shuffles past us. His trousers are held around the middle of his thighs, he’s covering his genitals with a school exercise book, and nobody pays him any attention as his bony, dusty buttocks recede down the street. It’s a tragic indifference to poverty and neglect in a country where most people live on less than two dollars a day.

But now Ravi, our driver, is tootling along at 120kph, and if you see this post online it means we haven’t ended up as a metallic confetti at the side of the road, which some do as evidenced by twisted vehicular remains littered along the highway. George is dozing in the front seat, Cam has his head in the open window catching the breeze on his face like some satisfied pooch, and Mike is next to me in the short-straw seat in the middle, listening to an mp3 player (I’m trying to talk him into getting an iPad; which I do with most people). And we’re all looking forward to getting to our hotel rooms in Niamey, having a cool shower, and heading out for some Bieres Niger and good local cuisine.

Uncomfortable travel is a part of any aid worker’s job description- and any foreign correspondent’s too. It is, of course, by far the most dangerous part of the job we do- even though it gets far less press than abductions and hijackings. The combination of poorly maintained vehicles, bad drivers, meandering donkeys, long distances and deteriorating roads make traffic accidents among the leading causes of death for adults across the developing world- and that includes foreigners silly enough to take to the roads as well.

I actually quite enjoy road travel as a rule. I prefer it if I’m the one driving, and if I’ve got the time to stop, explore, take photos and let the roads lead me. However even on work trips, it makes for a great way to see the country up-close, to get a feel for landscape and people, and show how things hang together.

In my early twenties I wrote a list of things I wanted to accomplish or expeience. It was (unsurprisingly) quite long, but I recall that one of the things on the list was ‘to have a job where in order to commute I need a four-wheel-drive’. I’ve certainly ticked that one off the list. Just in the last four days I reckon I’ve spent an easy 24 hours in Land Cruisers getting to remote field locations, mostly on sandy tracks through the scrubland and getting nicely knocked around in the process.

The novelty wore off a long time ago, but it still beats the heck out of the Monash freeway at rush hour.

(Actually, root canal work beats the Monash at rush hour, but that’s the subject of another post…)

So our wing-mirror slips down the length of another overflowing truck trundling the other way up the narrow highway, and the verdant landscape glides past in a blur of contrast with rich red soil. Heat haze makes the horizon white and featureless, like a washed-out photograph. The car stinks of dust and diesel fumes, and the clothes I’m wearing now will need to be washed before I put them back on, even though they’re fresh from this morning. The sun slanting through the passenger window washes out my iPad screen, but not enough to halt my typing. It burns my skin and makes my eyes squint. Mumford & Sons are singing ‘Awake My Soul’ in my ears as we pass some dead animal hidden in the bush, and the stench fills the vehicle.

They’re the moments both mundane and exotic that form the patchwork of memories that are often all that we, sojourners, get to carry away with us when we leave these places through which we pass so temporarily and so frequently. On the one hand, they tend to fade, after so many similar journeys, into an obscurity that is hard to distinguish one from another. On the other, they sit at such sharp contrast from the routines of our daily lives that they become in their own way enough of an experience to justify coming here; just to live the difference.

Both a privilege and a pergatory.

Yet another example of the dichotomy that is the aid worker’s existence.

Three more hours till Niamey…

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Niamey-Maradi Road near Dogon-Doutchi

Legacies

It’s day three in the field.  For the last two days, we’ve been spending most of our time looking at the nutrition program.  It’s been a mixed mission.  On the one hand, we’ve still got Mike and Cam, the journalist and cameraman, with us doing their story on the Niger nutrition crisis- and me (oddly enough).  On the other hand, I’ve been using this opportunity to spend time with the field teams, check up on the work we’re doing, and orient myself well for the next three weeks of work here in-country.

Today, though, we’re all about the media stories.  It’s been an interesting experience for me, watching how the news is made.  Mike and Cam are both at the top of their respective fields and they’ve been a pleasure to work with- even if there are moments when I cringe at the thought of what the villagers who watch our antics must be thinking.

We going a little more into the background of Niger- and my background as well.  It’s a nice angle for the story- an aid worker who was here in 2005 during the last crisis, returns in 2010 and comments on his journey, and what he’s seeing.  So I’m doing a few pieces to camera, usually interviewed by Mike, either beside me, or perched to one side of the camera.  When I’m not on camera, and because most of the things we’re seeing today are not part of my program responsibility, I’m a little off-duty, which is nice because I’m free to take photos.  Which of course I do.

The work aid agencies like mine do is built around both long- and short-term realities, and each has to take the other into account.  For example, although my focus is on acute malnutrition and how to make sure that hundreds of children in our areas of operation don’t die between now and November, the team also has to be aware of the long-term context.  There’s issues of chronic malnutrition, health care, disease management, clean water, hygeiene practices, breastfeeding, and a host of other trends, changes within which are measured in years, yet which have a direct and tangible affect on our work.  Likewise, when our colleagues in the development wing of the organization are designing their fifteen-year program cycles, it’s essential that these programs are built around the emergency contexts that are likely to arise during that time (such as acute malnutrition) so that the root causes of these emergencies can be tackled over the long term.

So the first place we stop is outside a small village on the horrendous road to Dakoro.  I say horrendous, because the Senegalese are funding a road project to pave it all the way up.  I remember this road from my time here.  It was laterite- a bright red dusty unsealed track running due north for several hours.  It was one of the more uncomfortable journeys to make, as the road was marred by rock-solid washboard, and you spent the journey trying not to let your teeth grind down with the jarring.

Ah the good old days.

Today, the road is under construction.  The first few miles are now metalled, and the rest is undrivable.  In fact, we spend most of the journey not on the road, but on a set of sandy tracks which drivers have been forced to forge off to one side of the road because it’s gotten so bad.

It’s a relief to branch off straight into the bush when we do.  We’re accompanying a wizened farmer who’s one of the more entrepreneurial types.  Instead of just growing millet, he’s planted acacia trees to stop soil erosion, as well as cassava (an edible root crop), melons, hibiscus, sorghum, and a bunch of other things too.  We walk around his plot and he shows us what he’s doing.  This is all good for the long-term growth of the rural areas, and the health of communities, if what he’s doing can be replicated to others.

I take a portrait of him which I love.  He’s wearing a red-and-white chequered headscarf in the bright overhead sun, and his face is full of lines, evidence of a life lived hard.  He’s looking at the camera, and I’ve stopped the 85mm lens down to f/1.8 so that the background is thrown out of focus and the details on his face are extra sharp.  It’s one of my favourite types of portraiture, and one of the most satisfying when it works.

Our next stop- and photographically my favourite- is further north at a village with a second-chance school.  In Niger, many villages don’t have schools, and those that do are often understaffed.  Children who don’t enroll into primary school at the correct age are not allowed to enroll at a later age, and therefore if they miss registration one year (or in some cases, if they have no birth certificate) they miss out on being able to gain a formal education altogether.

These schools have been set up as a safety net for kids who’ve missed out through the normal channels.  They teach the national curriculum, but teach it over four years instead of six, so that the kids can catch up sufficiently to be able to attend college (secondary school) when they graduate.  The children themselves understand the importance of education (I always enjoy visiting schools in rural communities, because the kids understand what a privilege it is to be at one, unlike so many classrooms in Europe, the Americas or Australasia).

The children in Niger are beautiful.  They’re graceful and have elegant features, and are a joy to shoot.  I mean, kids are great most places, but I’ve always found the Nigerien children particularly endearing.  These ones are no exception.

Mike and Cam set up some interviews with some of the children, and again I’m free to do some shooting.  Which I do.  Some more from this shoot (and some of my favourites from this trip- and for a long time) will show up on a later post.

From here, we visit a cereal bank.  I was involved in setting up our cereal bank program back in 2005 (when I knew very little about them; the advice was coming from our local staff who had worked with them before).  The principle is, you provide some sacks of food to a village committee when food is at its cheapest (right after harvest).  The committee then keeps this food in a central location.  If people in the village need food, they can buy food from the cereal bank at rates cheaper than the market rate- a benefit to the community- but still more expensive than the food was purchased for at the start of the year.  If the bank is managed properly, the committee should have enough money to replenish the store when the next harvest hits the markets and grain prices are surpressed again.  If they’ve done a good job and market prices have worked in their favour, they may even gain some profit which they can then invest in their own community development.

The cereal banks have come under fire at different times.  When they’re not managed well, communities expect NGOs to top them up for them, so it can become a hand-out project if not carefully supervised.  They’re vulnerable to market shocks and food shortages.  However this one we visited had done well for itself.  Over the last five years, only this year had they come to us for help to restock it, and that because the food crisis was so severe.  We gave them a few extra tonnes of food- not a huge amount- and they reckon with that they’ll go back to being able to replenish their store again in the next harvest, in a few weeks’ time.  Meanwhile, over 800 families in the community benefitted in some way from the bank’s work over the last year.

It’s nice (and remarkably rare) to be able to step back into a country many years after leaving it, and to see a project that you’ve contributed to in some small way having made a difference to peoples’ lives.  I can assure you, it doesn’t happen often.

(And obviously, when the chats and the interviews are over, I head off and take a few photos of cute kids. 🙂 )

On the drive back to Maradi, Mike and Cam want to recreate some background shots from the Dafur incident.  Part of their piece on me will involve a brief re-telling of the ambush.  They shoot some stylised footage of the vehicle in the bush, of us taking cover behind the dashboard, and of Idi, our driver, wearing my turban and menacing the vehicle.  It’s all rather hilarious in its own way, four guys with expensive gear playing Cowboys and Indians making light of a very serious situation.  But as we watch the sun start to kiss the tops of the millet stalks, we settle back into the bumpy ride and muse on yet another good day in the field.  We’ve been lucky with the times we’ve had, and we all know it.

Tomorrow we drive back to Niamey.  Ten hours.  It’s going to be fun.

Negotiating Extremes

The life of an aid worker is necessarily made up of contrasts. I deploy from a suburban home in a wealthy western city and find myself, seventy-two hours later, standing in a dusty village where people sleep outside and struggle to survive if the rains don’t bless them. I swap material comforts for long hours in a bumpy four-wheel drive, a temperate climate for one of the hottest on earth, and the companionship of friends and family for those of strangers- or nobody at all.

On the other end of the spectrum, of course, the newness and exoticism of the experiences we expose ourselves to form their own sort of extreme. My commute to work in the morning lasts about the same amount of time, but instead of driving down multi-lane highways, I walk on a sand footpath through a bustling African market lined with silversmith workshops, stalls selling used clothes, and a bird vendor with a giant cage full of pigeons (yum) and several smaller ones housing grey parrots. I immerse myself in the chatter of foreign languages- some of them known to me, most of them not- and equally foreign cuisine. The harsh semi-desert landscape is just another reminder of how different this place is from the one I currently call home- and how far.

***

On Thursday we travel to a second nutrition centre, again a couple of hours along sand tracks. The health centre is based out of a fair-sized bush town, and the place is teeming with women when we get there. We’ve timed our arrival earlier this time, and get there just as activities are starting.

It’s more of the same. Much more. Although the program has been running for a little while, we’re adding dozens of new cases of malnourished children to our roster in this location today, child after child meeting our criteria for malnutrition. The screening point is under a lean-to, a small patch of shade in the middle of the sand, and the women form a tight mob around it despite the best efforts of our staff to keep them in an orderly line.

While Mike and Cam go looking for stories, I watch the proceedings. I check out the screening point where the children are weighed and measured, all bustle and activity. I walk around to where the health workers are handing out the ration of nutritious paste for the severely malnourished kids from a darkened room- oddly quiet after the cacophony of squawking voices and wailing babies. Out under the trees, a second distribution is taking place for moderately malnourished children, where they receive a reinforced meal-mix which is poured out into a piece of cloth which the mothers then tie into a bundle and carry home on their heads.

I’m back to feeling a fraud again. Wandering from post to post, watching, asking a few questions, taking the odd photo and smiling at the mothers, some of whom try to engage me in conversation, which peters out quickly because I speak precisely no Hausa. I don’t feel like I’m doing anything useful. Just a token white guy with a camera. I feel like the mothers see my inadequacy. I’m a voyeur. A disaster tourist. Wretched insecurity.

Standing near one knot of mothers, I’m pulled aside by a couple of women who show their companion to me. She’s a young mother of twins, and herself looks haggard and unwell. She has two tiny infants, one strapped to her front, another to her back. They both look ill. The one on her front can’t hold its head upright, and it flops back unnaturally, eyes half-open and milky. I palm its tiny brown skull in my hand and lift it, and it feels both heavy, and terribly fragile. The difference between life and death is just a frail thread here.

I talk to the nutritionists, but we can’t help this woman. The children are too young- four months old- and the only thing we can do is press on the mother how important it is that she keep breastfeeding them. Her milk is far healthier and nutritious for them than any artificial produce we can give her, and at any rate, her little ones are too small to be able to safely digest the food we give to the kids in our program, who have to be a minimum of six months old.

The nutritionist spends some time talking to the woman, driving home how crucial it is that she keeps breastfeeding. It’s a huge challenge in Niger, where breastfeeding is seen as undesirable, and children are weaned far too early onto foods their bodies are not able to digest. I hope and pray that this mother hears the words and puts them into practice. It’s a terrible feeling to step away from a situation like that and feel utterly unable to help, but to leave these children’s chance of survival in the hands of somebody who may not want to take the action she needs to take.

The others are following up their own story, the case of an eight-month old boy who weighs what Mike’s son did at birth. He is so visibly emaciated that we all wince at the sight of him. He has spindly arms, so skinny that the definition of his bones stand out. His skull is round and bulbous, his lips drawn back over his teeth in a sneer, and there are vertical scars cut into the side of his scalp, a traditional talisman to hurry healing. Days later, we’ll still be talking about him.

We move on from the village in the early afternoon. It’s baking hot out in the open, and we retreat to another compound to have a brief lunch, struggling with an element of guilt as we do so. We’re all feeling a little flat after witnessing the morning’s activities. On the one hand, there’s an element of rejoicing that the team have managed to identify nearly a hundred new malnourished children who will now be able to receive treatment. On the other, it’s hard not to feel a heaviness seeing that volume of sick children. And although there are kids I’ve seen today that have their progress marked on their health-cards in ever-increasing weight-gain, the ones that haunt me are the ones, six weeks on, whose weight has continued to slide downhill.

We load up into two Land Cruisers and head back the way we came from Maradi. There’s a village, Zakara, about forty minutes from here we passed through in the morning. Mike and Cam really liked the look of it as a place to get what they call ‘GV’, or ‘General Vision’. Those are the background shots that help the viewer get a feel for what the place is like while the narrator, out of sight, talks about what is going on. Where the road enters the village, it narrows and passes between two mud-brick walls, a unique and atmospheric feel that the cameraman wants to capture.

We reach the village and, as is always the case in Niger, our arrival creates a little stir. The men are often found resting in lean-tos at the side of the road, keeping out of the roasting afternoon sun. A pack of kids draws up around us as we exit the vehicles and go to greet the men, looking for the chief so we can ask his permission to film. Well before we find him, Cam is an instant hit with the kits. Blond, at six-foot-five, and lugging a gigantic TV camera on one shoulder, he’s like a magnet dropped into a pile of iron filings. Within a minute or two, there have to be over a hundred kids knotted around us generally, and him specifically, all wide curious eyes and big toothy grins.

It feels like the whole village has come out to see us.

This presents a slight problem. Cam was looking for an atmospheric shot of the mud-walled lanes. Quiet, shady, with perhaps a person or two walking in the background but otherwise, a scenery shot. Probably a couple of wide-angle takes from ankle-height. Right now there’s so little room to move, he couldn’t lower the camera from his shoulder without clocking two or three African children in the process.

We strategise. Cam isn’t the only one with pulling-power. I have a camera, and Mike’s famous in New Zealand. Surely that counts for something? I get people lining up for photos, and Cam tries to take a walk.

The crowd see the camera start to drift away and are onto him like a pack of Orcas on a wounded whale. Fail.

We take a walk up the street. By we, I mean the team, and the entire village. The mood is electric. People are laughing and smiling. We all think this is great fun. It’s not what we’d planned, but it’s totally out of our control and we know it. Trying to move this crowd would be like trying to stop a dust-storm.

I do a couple of walking shots with Mike when we get to one end of the street, and once again we try and draw the mob away from the camera to give Cam his shots.

“Let’s see what sort of pulling power we have,” Mike says, and we begin to trot away.

The crowd ignores us, locked adoringly on the fair giant with the funny camera, and we laugh hard at our total lack of appeal. When Cam starts to walk, the crowd surges with him. Their feet churn up dust which fills the air.

We reach the centre where the trucks are parked. I fit my wide-angle lens and climb onto the roof of one of the Cruisers to snap the crowd. This provides some entertainment, and the vehicle is quickly thronged. The colours are magnificent, and so are the grinning faces. Everybody is having a ball with these loony whites and their cameras, climbing all over vehicles.

Cam takes some more shots, ringed with children, then spies a donkey which a couple of kids have driven into the crowd. He kneels down to get some wide-angle shots of its docile face, and the whole village erupts in peals of belly-laughter. This is great sport. Children swarm the poor animal- and Cam as well, until he’s only discernable by the camera on his shoulder.

Finally, some of the men of the village work out that Cam wants some space, and let him into a compound, blocking the kids at the gate from following him. They then turn their attention onto Mike, George and I. We decide to try and create some space for Cam, so we take them for a little walk.

We start off, and the kids pour down the narrow street, running and shouting and having a great old time. They’re going to be talking about us for months to come. I’m feeling like a total cliche right now- a typical white guy in Africa- but actually, while village welcomes aren’t uncommon, I’ve never seen a spontaneous celebration quite like this one before. What’s overwhelming is the sense of innocent joy that’s being expressed in every direction. They’re genuinely thrilled just to have us.

We get to the edge of the village. We look at each other. “Now what?”

The kids are watching us expectantly.

“Okay,” I say, “Who’s going to dance for them.”

George looks at Mike, who’s a Maori and a rugby player.

“Mike,” she says, “Can you do the Haka?”

Mike shoots her a grubby look that says has no intention of doing the Haka in the middle of a dusty village, but it only takes a few moments of urging, and the expectant gaze of a hundred small Nigerien children to break him. He bends his knees, glowers at the crowd, and slaps his hands against his thighs.

“Ka mate! Ka mate! Ka ora! Ka ora!”

The effect is stunning. These kids have never seen a Haka before, but they know straight away what’s going on, and within half a second, the ring closest to him are already mimicking him, slapping their thighs with much delight.

Mike does the Haka, and a hundred Nigerien village children are rapt.

When he finishes the war-dance with his leap, half of them jump with him, arms raised in exuberance, while George and I fall about laughing. Everyone cheers, almost giddy with excitement. The laughter is contagious. The joy is tangible.

We walk back to the cars. Dust billows into the air beneath the slap of two hundred bare and flipflopped feet. A couple of the braver kids reach out and touch the skin of my arm. It’s pale (by their standards, though I like my tan) and hairy. They giggle. I look down, and they are uncertain for a moment as to whether they’ve crossed a taboo. When I grin at them, the spell is broken, and a moment later my arm is seized by a dozen different hands, stroking it, pulling on it, giggles bordering on hysteria as they paw my skin.

We leave the village feeling like celebrities. The whole lot have shown up to see us off, lining the road, waving as we go. A bunch of kids chase the vehicles to the edge of the village. There’s a glow that remains in the car all the way back to Maradi- and for a long time after that as well. Days later, we all reflect on how Zakara was one of the best times any of us had ever had in the field.

***

We’d left the health centre feeling pretty broken by the heartlessness of life in the Nigerien hinterland. An hour later, and we were surrounded by happy cheering children and bouyed up by an unspeakable joy.

Every day in the field is special in its own way. I’ve had a lot, and a lot of them are memorable. Several of them I’ve written about on this blog.

This one was particular. Negotiating the extremes of sadness at the plight of critically-ill children, to the spontaneous celebration of Zakara, covered a spectrum of emotion I’ve rarely experienced in a single day’s work. And it served as a beautiful reminder of why, sometimes, being an aid worker can be an incredible privilege. Some days, I really resent what I do, torn away from friends, loved ones, simplicity and comfort. But not today. Today I know just how lucky I am.

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Maradi, Niger

Back in the Field

I’ve been in Niger for just over sixty hours when we board the flight in Niamey. It feels like my first time back in the field in a long time. I did some trips in Fiji back in June and had a brief trip through parts of Typhoon-devastated Manila this time last year, and before that, a few days in northern Sri Lanka at the climax of the war in early 2009. So it’s not surprising I’m feeling a little starved.

The day starts in typical third-world travel fashion. A dawn departure from the hotel, an arrival at a near-deserted airport where the only passengers were the dozen scraggly expat-types boarding the UN Humanitarian Air Service flight, and the mind-numbing bureaucratic protocols that are one of the great legacies the French left behind in West Africa, together with the French Foreign Legion, and great bakeries.

We squeeze onto the little 15-seater turboprop. The pilot is a ruddy-faced eastern-European. He might be Russian, he might be Bulgarian, but either way I do a nasal sweep for vodka before I’m happy to buckle my safety belt. I’ve heard the stories.

The flight is gorgeous. Ninety minutes at four thousand five hundred feet. The morning air is dead calm and we don’t bump once. In bright sunlight we see the Nigerien heartland laid out beneath us, everything from barren scrubland to fields dotted with vivid green, from round-hutted villages to monsoon-flooded wadis. We get a great view of Maradi town as we sweep low over flat-roofed mud houses arranged in tight grids. I can see garbage strewn down the familiar dirt streets where rain has washed it out.

We travel straight to the field, just time to swing past the Guest House to dump our bags and grab breakfast to go; Mike and Cam are still funneling omelette into their mouths when I usher them into the vehicle and we’re heading bushwards. It’s a ninety-minute trip to our destination.

The mission is two-fold. Mike and Cam are journalists from New Zealand reporting on the nutrition crisis. They’re using our program as a springboard to tell the story. As well as accompanying them as the interim manager of the program, I’m taking the opportunity to familiarize myself with our activites in the villages and see the context for myself.

For me, the trip out of Maradi is a series of flashbacks, a journey I’ve done countless times from my time here in 05 and 06. It hasn’t changed much, though maybe it’s a tad busier, and there are more broken-down trucks than I recall. It only takes us twenty minutes to lose the tarmac, and then we’re jarring northwards on rutted tracks into the bush.

We’re late to the village, and the program activities have waited for us to arrive. We pull up outside the health centre where the nutrition screening is taking place, and it’s all a bit daunting. There must be over a hundred mothers with children gathered beneath the shade of spreading green trees, not to mention the prerequisite hoard of older children who are there for the excitement of seeing the foreigners. They already know something’s up because a team’s gone ahead of us to get things set up for our arrival. Mercifully, we don’t get a song and dance to welcome us, and the screening starts straight away.

While the boys get their camera gear out the back, I wander over to the main screening point. Siradji is there, managing the operation. I haven’t seen him since 2006, when he was doing exactly the same job. His face lights up and we share an enthusiastic hug in front of a hundred bemused mothers still waiting for us to start weighing their kids. Most of them smile at the exuberance.

Mike and Cam work with Ann and George, our media reps, looking for interesting stories, while I check out the different parts of the nutrition program. We screen the children who’ve been referred to us by the health centre as exhibiting likely malnutrition. They’re measured and weighed, and then either dismissed or added to the program, depending on their health status. In the program, they’ll be given a weekly or fortnightly food ration, and their progress documented by health workers. Different activities happen at different stations, and it’s a setup I’m familiar with from five years ago. It’s all eerily familiar- except that there are far more women here than I ever saw in ’05. Plenty of sick kids too. One of the first on the scales is a visibly emaciated youngster eight months old who weighs 3.2 kilos- or what I did when I was born.

It’s a hot day. Which goes without saying. It’s Niger. The village is mostly sand, and that sand is white and burning. I have my camera and inbetween talking with staff and health workers, I take some photos. I haven’t done much of that recently either, and it takes me a little time to work into it, but the kids get a kick out of it every time I point the camera at them, so that makes the job easier, and a lot more fun too.

As always happens on this sort of exercise, after a while I start to feel a little awkward. I manage the program. My training is at a fairly high level. I’m not a technical specialist, and my role there is to get a feel for what’s happening, identify any problems that the operation might be experiencing, and make sure that they get solved. I’ll do much of that in meetings, trainings and from behind a laptop in a scuzzy office in Niamey. But out here in the field, I’m the token white monkey, just an odd foreigner walking around talking to people, taking notes and the occasional photo, and feeling utterly useless.

In fact, I feel like poo.

And then something funny happens. Siradji comes over. There are a lot of women, and some of them are impatient. They’ve been there for a while, and the screening is taking too long. Our two volunteers are totally overstretched and can’t get through them quickly enough. So Siradji grabs a measuring tape, and passes me a pen and a card, and we set up a second screening point under the trees.

I have a stack of cards. Siradji reads out the measurement, and if the child’s arm is below a certain diameter, they’re admitted to the program, in which case I note down their name, village and measurement on a health card and give it to the mother. I speak no Hausa and the women speak no french, so as he measures, Siradji asks the women the child’s name, and often as not he then needs to spell it out for me because it’s been a while since I’ve come across quite so many Abdoulayes, Fatoumatas and Ibrahimas.

I’m a glorified scribe. I’m ridiculously overqualified (and overpaid) for what I’m doing. In fact I’m probably thoroughly inappropriate, given my linguistic shortcomings (although as time goes on I get my ear in and can understand the names and villages straight from the women themselves).

But I feel useful. I’m doing something practical. I’m helping out. And I freaking LOVE it.

It gets intense. The women are all impatient, and as the line deteriorates into a mob, they grow rowdier. Children are being shoved at Siradji. Accusations of queue-jumping and unfairness are thrown about in banter which borders on being less than good-natured. I understand not a word of the chatter, but the tones speak for themselves. I’m not concerned beyond the fact that the disorder isn’t pleasant for the women. But as I sit there, I reflect on my situation. Sitting on a small chair in the sand on a roasting afternoon. Agitated women squalling in sharp tones in my ear. Screaming babies. We’re completely ringed in, hot bodies pressing so closely sometimes I can’t move my elbow to scribble on the little cards. The smell of sweat is a sweet odour that fills the nostrils with foreign scents. I am perspiring heavily myself, and can see the beads of moisture on the women’s scarified faces.

I’m a long way from my desk in Melbourne.

And I’m still loving it.

Perversely, most women want their children to be malnourished so they can get the food ration. It’s an understandable but tragic worldview. Siradji and I pantomime joyful celebration every time a healthy baby passes through our setup. However most are not healthy. The moderately malnourished get their name written on a register to come back next week for a ration, while the severely malnourished get a pink card and are sent round to collect their food. I pass the cards to the mothers with a smile and a thank-you, and their reactions differ. Some nod politely. Others withdraw shyly. My favourites are the ones who collapse into giggles and wriggle away.

After a while we learn things aren’t quite right. Women, seeing the white guy sitting on the chair taking notes, overestimate my station and think their kids will have have a better chance of being admitted to the program if I’m the one doing the assessing- so even those who have already been screened and overlooked are coming back around for another go. It’s time for me to move on, which is just as well because the journos have shot all they need to shoot, and I’ve collected all the data I need.

Mike and Cam have, however, found some women who walked here thirty kilometres this morning. It’s a triumph of perseverance and maternal care (assisted by the tantilizing promise of food), and we all agree that compared to these women, who have walked the better part of a marathon one-way since 3am, with little water and carrying sick children, we’re all lightweights. Mike and Cam, both athletic types, are in genuine awe of these skinny, resilient villagers.

We give them a ride back to their village with their children. The journos go to interview one of them, to get a feel for life in a typical Nigerien village. Typical it is. To western eyes its hard to compute how people live in such a materially-poor environment. Yet there’s an admirable sense of self-reliance out here too. They are a long way from a main road, even longer from towns and services. There are few signs of modernity. Everything they have they make and grow from the ground.

We visit one woman’s dwelling. It is a tiny mud-brick room about three metres by two, with a metal door that can seperate the place from the outside world. It is hot outside, but brutally-so inside, and whites and Africans alike are quickly sweating in the cramped quarters. Sunlight burns in the doorframe, casting the outside world into a curious white overglow.

In the room is a single bed which takes up half the floorspace. There is a mosquito net hanging from the ceiling. This is the woman’s indoor living space. She has five kids, all under the age of twelve, and she can’t age them except to tell us that they came at roughly two-year intervals. She is one of two wives married to the same man, and her co-wife has a mirror dwelling attached to this one, where they share the compound. They seem to get on well. This wife also have five children, and Adriane the project manager, and American who is fluent in Hausa, explains the local proverb that when it comes to children they are like a horse’s ears- always in competition, but never getting ahead of the other. Women in Niger give birth to an average of more than seven children each, so between them there are still four more waiting to be born if the odds play out.

We drive home at the end of the day, through late afternoon sunlight. Curfew for our teams is six pm, when we’re expected to be off the roads and back in Maradi. We muse on the day’s experiences. The Kiwis are struck by the gentleness and hospitality of the villagers we’d visited, as well as the difficult sight of so many seriously ill children. We settle into the dining room of the small hotel we’re staying in and work our way through several beers, and by nine o’clock were all pretty out of it. We’ve got two more days ahead of us in the field.

I’d nearly forgotten how much I enjoy this. I’ve been spending more and more time at desks lately. It’s the drawback of increasing professionalization. As you get older and more experienced, your skills are better put not to micromanaging a single site or overviewing a small project, but to working on ‘bigger’ issues. That’s not to give myself more importance than the guys on the ground. In fact, quite the contrary, I am deeply envious of the work they get to do- at least in the short-term. It’s just that my role has changed.

The enjoyment is a funny thing. It’s more a rejoicing in the intensity of experience, the uniqueness of it and how it differs from my usual grind. Many of the things we witness are hard realities. The program focuses on children on the cusp of death, in many cases, and when errors are made- even seemingly innocuous ones- some will in fact die. We are witnessing people who live in physical circumstances that we are inclined to call ‘suffering’- although, and not to patronize nor to belittle their reality, most have learned to take in their stride and accept with a startling grace. But overall, I come away from a day like today feeling infinitely more satisfaction than any day in the office. I wish I could have many more like it.

At least there’s tomorrow.

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Maradi, Niger

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

The Tyranny of Small Emergencies

About once a fortnight I get a request for emergency funding from one of our field offices. These requests typically relate to events that affect between 50-100,000 people, with minimal deaths (less than 50), and are often either weather related (floods/droughts) or minor earthquakes. In the last week, there have been requests for support to people affected by Cyclone Laila in India, monsoonal flooding north of Colombo in Sri Lanka, and the flooding of a major river system in Somalia. And those are just the ones in my portfolio.

In fact, at any one time there are dozens of emergency responses going on. Right now, for example, we’ve got the follow-on from recent bigger emergencies, such as the earthquakes in Haiti, Chile and China; ongoing protracted responses to conflicts in places like Darfur, southern Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo, northern Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Gaza and the Caucasus region of southern Russia; food responses across the Horn of Africa, Western Africa and Southern Africa; emerging slow-onset emergencies such as the food emergency in Niger and the response to the harsh winter in Mongolia; and the long-term follow-up to disasters like Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar, the Sichuan Earthquake in China and the Padang Earthquake in Indonesia.

Three times a week our office produces a daily digest of current emergency-related issues relevant to our work as pulled from global media. This morning’s listed 17 different items, a pretty standard number. I also received our monthly early-warning brief for the Asia-Pacific region. There were more than 45 seperate issues listed as building concerns or events in the region.

In short, there’s a lot of emergency traffic going on. Never mind the two or three appeals you get through your letterbox each year. We all heard about the Haiti disaster. But there’s stacks more out there to which humanitarian agencies need to be aware of and, in many cases, want to respond to.

The challenge, though, is how best to do-so. We have limited financial, human and organizational capital to draw on. When big high-profile emergencies such as Haiti occur, we can raise lots of funds from governments and the general public, but it’s impossible to do-so on a weekly basis to respond to all the minor emergencies that come along. We face what’s called ‘donor fatigue’. Repeatedly asking people to give to emergencies taxes their goodwill and their limited financial resources, and ultimately runs the risk of turning them off to giving altogether. In the same way that aid workers often become desensitized to violence and tragedy due to overexposure, we risk numbing the hearts of the general public if we hound them every five minutes for yet another crisis.

What to do then? Well, some agencies are able to raise what we term ‘non-designated’ funding, that is, pockets of money that is not tied to a specific location or emergency event, which we can contribute at our own discretion where most needed. But such funds are, sadly, hard to raise. Most people give because of specific triggers- such as a disaster they’ve seen on the news which they are moved to sympathy by. It’s much harder to encourage people to give ‘on principle’ and trust agencies to make the decision about where that money should be directed. That’s not a criticism, just a reflection on the reality of donorship. To some extent, agencies themselves bear the responsibility to educate the giving public to change these behaviours.

The practical reality is, no agency can respond to all the need out there, and disasters have to be ‘triaged’. We can respond to this one over here, but not that one over there. How do we decide who benefits from support and who is ignored? Ultimately, we need to be using the Humanitarian Imperative to guide this- that is, where are the greatest levels of need? Pragmatically, this is difficult (and costly) to measure empirically. It is more often, which implementing office can put forward a more compelling argument, and which offices have the capacity to do a better job with the money we give them? It can be hard to compare like with like across continents and across emergency types.

State capacity also plays a part here. Aid agencies aren’t lining up to help shrimp fishermen in the Gulf states of the US because, although they face a real economic need due to the human-made disaster of the BP oil spill, there are structures like insurance, recourses such as the court system, and a highly functional and wealthy government with a history and precedent of supporting its people when faced with difficulty (and sure, the US government might have its shortcomings, but when you compare it to the governments of Somalia, or Myanmar, they come out looking pretty good). NGOs mustn’t undermine a state’s sovereign responsibility to help its own people when in need. But where states don’t have the ability or the will to intervene, there is a higher onus on agencies to step in.

Finally, agencies employ long-term development programs with a risk reduction element. Communities living in areas where disasters are commonplace and cyclical (drough and flood cycles in sub-Saharan Africa, for example, or monsoonal storms in south Asia) are provided with tools and training to manage their own risk environment- that is, to identify the threats they face, and put in place measures to reduce those risks. Those might include growing more drought-resistant crops, or building raised cyclone shelters, or moving houses away from slopes prone to landslide, or creating village-level micro-insurance systems, or storing next season’s seed on raised platforms where seasonal flooding won’t ruin them. Anything to make communities more resilient to these regular disasters.

Risk reduction activities take time to implement, and longer to bring about behaviour change in at-risk communities. And, like I’ve mentioned above, we can’t be everywhere, nor can local-level activities mitigate against larger disasters. So our dilemma remains. Myriads of emergencies, and only limited resources. It’s a daily tension in my job. Who do we help, and who do we turn away?

Any thoughts on how to manage this situation from an organizational perspective are most welcome.

Photos:

1. Maradi Flooding: A small girl uses stepping-stones to cross a flooded street in the central Nigerien city of Maradi.  Rainy season storms routinely flood streets and houses, and wash out roads and bridges, in Niger and across the Sahel, displacing hundreds of thousands of people a year in many small events.

2. Dust Storm, Niger: The same city, nine months later.  And nearly nine months has passed since the last rains.  Winds whipped up by cyclonic systems cause intense dust-storms that damage homes and crops.  Drought itself brings economic hardship and food insecurity to millions of households in pockets across Sub-Saharan Africa annually, and to many children, death.

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.