“We are band-aids born of affluent guilt and survive almost entirely on the donated profits of unjust privilege and power.”

“WTO, WB and IMF policies and corrupt/ignorant/criminal national elites matters million times more any humanitarian program implemented by NGOs.”  

Some thoughts as I continue reading, sorting and making sense of  aid worker voices on the future of humanitarian aid

[Note:  I am working on a long post (chapter) on this topic, but I wanted to get this out separately.]

So, I have been reading through -in many cases re-reading and re-reading…- the 311 narrative responses to the “future of humanitarian aid work” (Q60) on our aid worker survey and I am struck over and over again with the depth of thought put into some of the responses.  Though there were many who responded from a short term or narrow view, many were clearly of the ‘35,000 foot’ and long term perspective.

One theme that I see very clearly is a healthy neo-Marxist/anti neoliberal assessment of the ‘big picture” relative to not only the aid industry but our entire international community. Many echoed the oft quoted sentiments of former UNHCR chief Sadako Ogata.  “There are no humanitarian solutions to humanitarian problems,” said Ogata, explaining that in the many emergencies she oversaw at UNHCR, humanitarian relief in itself was not enough because the problems were caused by political factors.

Here are a few examples.

“The big picture is that developed world is fucking [the] developing world over so that anyone in Europe and America can buy a T shirt and an iPhone. Without more political and economic engagement of developed countries things will remain fucked up in the developing countries (debt, corruption, zero accountability). I hope with growing awareness citizens in developed countries will pressure their authorities more, but I’m a hopeless optimist.”

And then this one, with just a bit less salt:

“I think humanitarian aid work operates within a system that is built on inequality – we won’t see large scale change happen in the lives of people, in terms of long term development, until we start to challenge the structures and systems that result in this inequity in the first place. And the heart of those institutions is within North America and Europe – until we recognize how dependent we are on the oppression and marginalization of others for our own betterment and benefit (i.e. access to cheap disposable goods, foreign foods and fresh imports, temporary foreign workers to fill low-income job vacancies, etc…), humanitarian aid work is just another cog in this bullshit machinery.”

And then this:

“We are doing nothing to change the power structures that generate the social problems we try to fix. We are band-aids born of affluent guilt and survive almost entirely on the donated profits of unjust privilege and power. Unfortunately, such views are seen as too radical to be productive and those conversations are rarely engaged with.”

What I see in all three above meshes well with what I wrote in my previous post discussing the long term impact of humanitarian actions, namely that aid does not exist in a vacuum but rather is part of an extremely complex array of non-linear algorithms over which we have little -or no- long term control.

That neoliberal and myopically pro-capitalistic economic policies remain dominant in our world seems to many to be quite self evident, and arguably these policies impact, well, every aspect of social life on this planet.  The respondents above articulate that quite well. They also make the point that there will always be a need for humanitarian aid because the dominant global powers insure inequalities and marginalization.

So, where to go from here? One answer might come from a social thinker from the past who’s ideas may be relevant today, “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”  This line, in fact, is his epitaph engraved in stone at Highgate cemetery.

More realistically (?) we can all ceaselessly work on shorter term goals of major importance.  One positive path is captured by this respondent, arguing for continued professionalization of the sector.

“The sector is professionalizing but still has a way to go. It is a complex sector to work in and would benefit from a more recognizable professional accreditation system to ensure recruitment of people into the sector is merit and competency based and to dispel the notion that this is an unskilled or vulnerable sector populated by idealistic adventure-seekers.”

Echoing a sentiment I have referenced previously, namely that ‘the problem of the poor is not the problem, the problem is the rich’, this next respondent encourages a paradigmatic shift by the affluent nations that can only be brought on by educational work.  Though I admire the optimism, I am not holding my breath on this one.

“I think the evidence base continues to show significant impact and improvements in many places. The big challenge is ensuring the complexity of systemic injustice changes the way the wealthy nations live so that aid doesn’t become a bandaid over deeper problems. For example, if people don’t live justly (ethical shopping, investment, simple, enviro friendly, peace building) in the west then we are not really addressing the underlying systemic issues. We need to move from a simple ‘give money to this poor child’ mentality to a social justice/change the way we all live mentality.  Thus increasing importance of educational work rather than just slick marketing and challenges the sector to tell the complex story of change…”

This one, more cynical but perhaps at the same time more accurate, sums up a big part of the battle.

“WTO, WB and IMF policies and corrupt/ignorant/criminal national elites matters million times more any humanitarian program implemented by NGOs.”  

To put it in the vernacular, draining the swamp is the only long term solution, and in this case ‘the swamp’ is only getting more entrenched.  This respondent makes the same point using what I think is a good analogy.

“Humanitarian aid work is more and more like firefighters. We are not the ones in charge of pursuing those causing the fire to stop them, we just jump from one emergency to the other, and that will not change things for good.”

That there is meaningful work to be done we can all agree.  What that work is and how to best do it is the question that must remain at the forefront all our strategic planning for the future.

And yes, more to come.

Contact me if you have comments, snarky or otherwise. @tarcaro on Twitter.

Follow

Share on Tumblr

Tom Arcaro

Tom Arcaro is a professor of sociology at Elon University. He has been researching and studying the humanitarian aid and development ecosystem for nearly two decades and in 2016 published 'Aid Worker Voices'. He recently published his second and third books related to the humanitarians sector with 'Confronting Toxic Othering' published in 2021 and 'Dispatches from the Margins of the Humanitarian Sector' in 2022. A revised second edition of 'Confronting Toxic Othering' is now available from Kendall Hunt Publishers

More Posts - Website

Follow Me:

“When you are 20, you want to change the world but you accept that it’s going to take maybe five years. When you are 25, you decide you just don’t want to make the world any worse through your profession, buying choices, politics etc. When you get to 30+, you realise ‘Fucking hell, it’s way more complicated than anyone can possibly get their head around’.”
–30something female expat aid worker

 “I don’t think we can change the world – just make it a bit better for a few individuals.”
–40something female HQ worker

Castles in the sand?  Responding as we must, but…

Castles in the sand 1.0
This is not an easy post to write in large part because I am the director of a program the purpose of which is to work with cohorts of students as they learn how to make sustainable change around the world through meaningful global partnerships, i.e., development work. It is also not easy because I remain unconvinced of my own arguments.

First, two opposing viewpoints, one from a founder of sociology and other other from a politician with a flair for rhetoric and, not coincidentally, the founder of the Peace Corps.

“. . . numerous survivals of the anthropocentric bias still remain and here [in sociology], as elsewhere, they bar the way to science. It dis-pleases man to renounce the unlimited power over the social order he has so long attributed to himself; and on the other hand, it seems to him that, if collective forces really exist, he is necessarily obliged to submit to them without being able to modify them. This makes him inclined to deny their existence. In vain have repeated experiences taught him that this omnipotence, the illusion of which he complacently entertains, has always been a cause of weakness in him; that his power over things really began only when he recognized that they have a nature of their own, and resigned himself to learning this nature from them. Rejected by all other sciences, this deplorable prejudice stubbornly maintains itself in sociology. Nothing is more urgent than to liberate our science from it, and this is the principal purpose of our efforts.” — Emile Durkheim (quoted in “Man’s Control Over Civilization,  An Anthropocentric Illusion“, pg. 330, The Science of Culture)

“Our problems are manmade–therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man’s reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable–and we believe they can do it again.” –– John F. Kennedy, Commencement Address at American University, June 10, 1963

The Durkheim statement warns of the anthropocentric illusion of ‘man’s control over civilization’ and, in contrast, Kennedy says we are masters of our fate and can mold the social world as we desire if we have the political will and resources.

So who is right?

What of the anthropocentric illusion?
We must continue to build castles in the sand -act on our conviction that we can change the world- because, as Leslie White told us long ago, we must.  This is part of what being human means.  As one aid worker put it, “There will always be disasters, there will always be poverty and there will always be some people who feel impelled to try and make a difference.”

To be more direct, we must ‘fight the fight’ of responding to the myriad hot spots of human suffering and injustice around the globe be they in Biafra then or Syria right now.  To do less is against not just our better nature, it is against our very human nature.  One prototype model for this type of response is Herni Dunant (he of the killing fields at Solerfino), but there were many before him and since that personified this inevitable playing out of our basic human nature.

One aid worker put it this way:

“If I didn’t believe the above [that aid and development work are making a net positive change overall]  I couldn’t continue working doing what we do. Someone I recently spoke with suggested that the world would be better if no aid was given anywhere to anyone, and whilst I agree that it is often a hindrance to development and helps certain negative situation perpetuate (war, etc), I found myself passionately defending it, as I truly believe that we have a moral obligation to help others in need of support, whether that is at home or overseas.” (emphasis added)

Evolutionary psychologists have reinforced my argument by providing evidence for a fairness module in our brain that, combined with an evolutionary tendency -most would say imperative- for empathy and, more generally stated, morality, we must respond to the suffering of others, especially that which we feel has been unfairly meted out either by natural disaster or human action (or inaction, if that is the case).

What Durkheim in the above quotation offers to us is a view some may argue is dismal at best and at worst a self-fulfilling-prophecy that will doom us to inaction or alternatively raw, selfish hedonism.  But those arguments fly in the face of what we know about human nature.  We must act as we are:  a moral animal.

So, what does all this have to do with what our survey respondents said about the future of humanitarian aid?  Here they are in the aggregate in response to Q59, Which statement below best describes your views about the overall direction of humanitarian aid work:

Even accounting for the design-challenged wording of the response choices offered, there is a visible, and I would argue both significant and sober, minority of respondents (10.16%) who might agree more with Durkheim than with Kennedy.

Why are they even in this field of work, you might ask, if they feel their efforts will have “minimal impact” on the lives of people?  This is a good question, but one answer might be what I have pointed out above:  it is who we are as humans.  Many human traits appear in populations (for example, height) as a normal curve, most (68% in a true ‘normal’ curve) appearing within one standard deviation from the norm.  But there are always those who are two and even three standard deviations from the norm on both ends.  Humanitarian aid workers may be one manifestation of the natural distribution of the innate human need to seek fairness, show empathy and act, well, humanely.  They exist clustered more on one end of the normal curve and, perhaps, spend their days responding to the actions of those who cluster at the other end of the continuum.

As a short aside I might present the thought that of the nearly 64% who responded “moderate positive impact” there are many who ticked that middle response box as a nod to their self-preservational need to view their work as meaningful.  Were they to dig deeper I offer that it is possible many would have come to the “dark side” and joined the those who were perhaps more realistic.  As an aside, I wonder how their sentiment would sound to those that provide money to support their efforts to make “moderate positive impact.”

Here are a few responses to the open ended  follow up question asking for respondents to elaborate on their views about the future of humanitarian aid work.

“This is specific to humanitarian work (emergency response, chronic humanitarian contexts). I do NOT believe that development work has a longer term positive impact, and I generally do NOT agree with development programmes.”

This first one represents many respondents who made a distinction between emergency response and development work.  Indeed, as one respondent put it, “There is really no comparing relief and development…”  While many felt that the former was necessary and doing positive action, the later not so much.  This next one made me smile and was a good summary of this sentiment.

“Aid work is a bandaid. Bandaids are good! Transformative structural change is better.”

This next respondent hits my above points directly, we can’t let people die that can be saved (Dunant’s ghost appears…).

“As much as I believe that in the long terms humanitarian aid might have a detrimental impact (dependence on aid), I do believe that too many lives would be lost without aid in specific situations. We do need to keep working on linking humanitarian aid to real development.”

Elsewhere I discuss the semantic landmine that is differentiating between ‘aid’ and ‘development’, but I am haunted by Leslie White and Emile Durkheim.  A bandaid is, indeed a bandaid and the beneficiary of that bandaid likely feels grateful having avoided bleeding to death, though I am not convinced that is always the case.

A question arises in my mind. In the case of famine relief can there be any other response than to provide food?  Of course not, or so says my Westerncentric and hence anthropocentric mind.  But is that the most culturally appropriate answer?  In part the answer to that question depends upon your point of reference, of course, but that is exactly my point.

Castles in the sand 2.0  What are we accomplishing after all?
So, more aid worker voices to move our journey down this path a bit further.

“I don’t think the goal of the development industry should be to eradicate poverty, disease, or save lives – it should be to reduce the barriers that keep people from making informed choices about how to live their lives, be they economic, political, social/cultural, or whatever. Our industry suffers from a persistent messiah complex that, despite its earnest efforts, it can’t seem to shake. It is dehumanizing, destructive, and patronizing. Idealism drives burn out, of the “compassion fatigue” variety. Pragmatism makes it easier to let things go when they don’t work.   

–30something female expat aid worker respondent w/ 10+ years experience

“There’s a reason all this professional jargon exists. It obfuscates the fact that at the end of the day most aid work doesn’t do much of anything.”

–mid 30’s male expat aid worker with 5+ years experience

“Something an old man told me in West Africa struck me. We were at a big conference on sanitation, and the guy stood up and said ’20 years ago I was at a similar conference where we discussed exactly the same issues, with exact same solutions. Now 20 years later we are still discussing the same things.'”

–mid 30’s female  HQ worker

Having recently finished Nina Munk’s book The Idealist:  Jeffery Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty (2013) I have a few thoughts on which I’d like to expand.

I’ll start by saying that Jefferey Sachs got it right, finally.  “It is what it is,” he says in last pages of the book in response to Munk’s hard questions about difficulties encountered related to the Millennium Villages Project.  The realization that he finally comes to -or reawakens to- is that everything is connected to everything else environmentally, politically and perhaps most importantly, economically both locally and globally.  He says exactly that to Munk at the end off the book, “For a long time, I wanted to simplify the problems by putting aside the rich world’s issues and so forth and focusing on extreme poverty.  But it’s all interconnected.”  I am reminded of the statement from the anthropologist Miles Richardson who said, “…the problem of the poor is not the problem, the problem is the rich.”  Much truth lies in that statement, and we now have an global Occupy movement that that is shining a bright light onto this reality.

The Sachs team’s 147 page  Millennium Villages Handbook used in the select villages in Africa reported on by Munk and elsewhere was, in a very real sense, the guide to put into place the prescription he expounds in his The End of Poverty (2005), his vision -some say promise- to eradicate extreme poverty by the year 2025.

The Millennium Villages Project did the world a great, sobering favor in that it gave perhaps our (i.e.,more specifically, the Western, ‘scientific’) world’s best shot at trying to solve the problem of the poor and came up, predictably, short.  Not because we didn’t try hard enough, but because the assumption is failed.

Certainly if we were listening to history we should have learned this lesson many times over.  In his Doing Bad by Doing Good: Why Humanitarian Action Fails Christopher Coyne outlines in good detail the failed Kajaki dam project in the Helmand Valley Province in Afghanastan, calling it a “planners problem.”  His alternative, a rehash of William Easterly’s arguing points in The White Man’s Burden:  Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (2006), is the so-called  ‘constrained approach’, not much more than a repackaging of Easterly’s ‘seekers’ idea. Both argue this general ‘bottom-up’ approach will have a better chance of success making lasting change.  

Coyne argues perhaps the obvious, i.e., that knowledge of the local culture is imperative for development work.  He posits, correctly I believe, that “…[we need to appreciate] endogenous rules because existing rules place a constraint on efforts to design and implement what are perceived to be potentially superior formal rules” and further that “…attempting to impose formal rules that are at odds with underlying informal rules is akin too banging a square peg into a round hole–it can be done, but only with significant force and collateral damage.”  Agreed.  But we’re still in the weeds here talking about how to engineer sand castles.

Both Easterly and Coyne find support from Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa (2009) by Dambisa Moyo and of course Easterly continues to beat the same drum in his recent offering The Tyranny of Experts:  Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor (2014).  

Easterly, for his part, argues very articulately for the position that by encouraging the rich and simultaneous exploration by many creative people -poor people-  for useful and effective solutions to human problems we will all be the better for it.  For my money, the Easterly/Coyne/Moyo (et al) arguments sound way too close to the neoliberal rhetoric washing around for the last several decades arguing that the poor just need to be given their rights and respect and they will solve the problem themselves or, rather, the forces of the market will make this happen and the efforts of the rich and newly rich(er) will ‘trickle down’ like so much sweet rain.

The Invisible Hand, in my view, tends to slap the poor while patting the back of the rich.  Just sayin’.

We are not in charge of how the future will unfold, nor can we ever be.  As aid and development work veteran Michael Hobbes put it “Maybe the problem isn’t that international development doesn’t work. It’s that it can’t.”  He chimes on on the above mentioned Millennium Development Goals here (spoiler:  he thinks they’re bullshit).

Is there something/someone else at the driver’s seat?  No, I will not go all InshAllah on you here:  the future is not in Allah’s hands nor any other God or gods hands, however much we would like to believe that.  If there were a loving God she would not allow the absolute horror that visits upon billions every day, especially the bottom 2 billion that are the focus of much aid and development work.  That’s my opinion.

It is what it is.  Our global community is an unfolding of what may be best described as a set of  incomprehensibly numerous and complex algorithms perhaps the two most important of which are biological evolution and capitalism.  The future will become what it becomes not because of what we -or those like Sachs, Gates, Easterly, Soros and others- want it to become but rather in spite of what we what we would like it to become.

To be clear, these fine folks, Easterly, Sachs and the rest are all basing their actions and arguments on one very flawed and hubristic anthropocentric assumption, namely that we are in control of how the global culture unfolds.

There are those who will point to the many human interventions over the centuries that appear to affirm the human capacity to control our civilization.  My counter to these examples is that, yes, you can -and as I noted almost ad naseum, we must-  build castles in the sand, and some of these castles will be magnificent indeed.  But nonetheless these are more testaments to human will than true ‘directing the unfolding of human history’ moments.

In the final pages of Munk’s book she talks about the challenging social and economic changes occurring all over Africa that raise a very important question about the efficacy of the MDV’s project, namely would much of the change that happened in the target villages occur even despite the massive intervention?  The answer, quite likely, is yes. That is, change in spite, not because.

I find good support for my position in Steven Pinker’s 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined in which he details the very counterintuitive argument that humanity is getting less violent over the centuries.

I disagree with what one respondent said when reflecting on the future of humanitarian aid.  She said, “Human beings, we are not good.”  Humanity is getting more humane in some ways as social institutions slowly evolve to tamp down our more violent tendencies and see ourselves more and more as one humanity.  Sociologist G.H. Mead encouraged us to look forward to a time when we would have all humanity as our reference group, our ‘generalized other’ not just those in our immediate clan.

Can we impact this or that specific life with our actions?  Of course. In fact that is what aid and development workers do every day of every year all over the world. Is that impact scalable, the kind that can ‘end poverty’?  That indeed is the question I am attempting to address.  I would say ‘yes’ in the short term we can create that appearance, but on a global scale not so much.

The problem of the poor will always be with us, I am afraid.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Ending thoughts on “eradicating extreme poverty by 2015”
Art, as sociologist Georg Simmel pointed out long ago, allows us to make observations about the world in creative, entertaining, and non-linear ways that are sometimes closer to the truth than we dare come with ‘scientific’ thought.  Movies, for example, can sometimes allow us to face realities otherwise too stark to otherwise voice.  The scenes below nod to Durkheim, I think.

“There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. … It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today.”

Jensen lectures poor Howard Beale further…

“There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state, Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business.” 

I am not entirely sure Arthur Jensen/Peter Finch got it wrong back in 1976 in Network when describing the nature of global capitalism.  No one is in control of how this algorithm plays out, though some learn how to benefit disproportionally.

Jensen uses phrases like “natural order of things” and “immutable bylaws” to describe the world, in effect citing Durkheim.  Can we ever reach our goal to “eradicate extreme poverty” at any point in the future?  Perhaps not. Though to be clear, I do think that poverty may someday, possibly, be eliminated in our world but that it will not be mindfully engineered by the likes of Gates and Sachs, et al, but rather happen as an organic product of the many dynamic systems at play, that is not because of human agency rather despite it.

With that,  I now turn next to examining in more detail the aid worker voices on the topic of their idealism and future of humanitarian aid.

[To be continued]

As always, reach out to me with your comments, feedback or snark by clicking here.

Follow

Share on Tumblr

Tom Arcaro

Tom Arcaro is a professor of sociology at Elon University. He has been researching and studying the humanitarian aid and development ecosystem for nearly two decades and in 2016 published 'Aid Worker Voices'. He recently published his second and third books related to the humanitarians sector with 'Confronting Toxic Othering' published in 2021 and 'Dispatches from the Margins of the Humanitarian Sector' in 2022. A revised second edition of 'Confronting Toxic Othering' is now available from Kendall Hunt Publishers

More Posts - Website

Follow Me:

“One man’s corruption is another man’s wealth redistribution system. I find it hard to judge others on this.”
–26-30yo  female

“Corruption is the biggest cause of poverty. If you are in aid, you deal with corruption.”
–36-40yo male

“Corruption is there throughout the developing world (and the developed world but on a less blatant scale). We are often asked or hinted to pay bribes lest our applications for import, registration, visas gets put to the bottom of the pile. We don’t because we have to account to our donors. But we did in one case buy drivers licenses as the ‘process’ was going to take about 6 months.”
–female  veteran aid worker

Cancer of corruption or the culture of corruption?

Difficult to define
How can we define, discuss and analyze the endemic social phenomena of corruption?  How do aid workers understand and deal with corruption?

I will agree completely with the many who will point out that corruption is impossible to definitively operationalize and that cultural context, history, point of perspective, motivation, etc. are all factors.  In fact I’ll argue that the term itself is a semantic land mine charged with power/Western-centric thinking.  Not the least of the complications regarding formulating one’s opinion on this topic is the fact that in many cases what is unethical can also be legal.

Defining corruption must include the fact that, well, it’s a matter of definition, and we need to understand the forces driving that definition.  To quote a German thinker of some note, “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas…”  Just as term child abuse did not come into common use in the West until recently (mid 20th century), I would argue that as a lived phenomena is has existed for as long as there have been children.  The same goes for corruption.  My generic definition of corruption would be that it is a form of dishonest or unethical conduct by someone or some organizational entity entrusted with and/or structurally in a position of authority or power.  Though since Greek times this idea has been bandied about, I submit that much like my example of child abuse, corruption has always been with us but not recognized, labeled  or defined as such.

Begun in 1993, Transparency International has earned a reputation for generating both useful data on corruption internationally and in playing a part guiding policy changes that address this issue head on.  Their efforts have done much to raise the level of awareness about corruption internationally, though much remains to be accomplished both in terms of refining the measures and in being more inclusive in terms of differentiating the units of analysis that engage in corrupt behavior.  The ubiquitous slippery slope between ‘business as it has always been conducted’ and overt corrupt actions remains, and in many cases around the world there will be push back from those in power if ‘legal’ actions are termed corruption.

Regarding corruption, the trope “no rules, just right” captures my perspective in that if by “just right” we mean that which is fair and just to all based on some universal understanding that the lives of all humans have equal value and should be treated fairly.  I am reminded of various ethological studies, primarily among primates, indicating that we have inherited a deeply wired sense of fairness and, by extension, that we are all capable of sensing abuse of power, i.e., corruption.  Point being that corruption may not be entirely a cultural construct, adding yet another level of nuance to our understanding of this term.

This respondent added even another, critical dimension to the semantic soup concerning corruption.

“Corruption happens but does not affect me. Internal audits are quite strong and cases do happen. What is missing (for UN organizations at least) is the same vigilence against prostitution and sexual harassment.”  

An argument can be made that popular culture definitions of corruption imply an almost myopic focus on misappropriation of money or materials, though most people would include favoritism, cronyism and nepotism.  Is sexual harassment an abuse of power and thus a major form of corruption?  Absolutely.   Transparency International has a good -and growing- data base of information on this topic and elsewhere on this blog I have addressed the topic of how gender impacts the role of aid workers.

Survey says
Let’s drill into what aid workers had to say about the issue of corruption, first looking at the quantitative data.  We asked two closed-ended questions, first regarding corruption within their current organization and then in the context of the sector in which they are currently working.  Here are the data in response to the question, “To what degree do you have to deal with corruption within the organization with which you are affiliated?”  As you can see, about 70% reported having to deal with at least some corruption.

My wonder as I looked at these data was the mindset of those 30% that responded that “My organization has zero corruption.”  Drilling down into the data I found that among those who reported being affiliated with UN based organizations were only slightly less likely to report zero organizational corruption, and the percentages ranged very little among all the different affiliation groups.  Given the broad definition of corruption that I outlined above, I frankly have no explanation for these results other than poor question construction.  As one respondent put it,

“I work for the UN where unethical behavior is a constant.”  

Another put it this way, 

“If someone response zero corruption, could you please publish the name of that institution so I can apply? Corruption exists within society and in situations of potential power abuse [it] flourishes…” 

The second closed ended question on corruption asked, “To what degree do you have to deal with corruption within the region you work?”  As you can see below, the problem of corruption appears to be pervasive and serious, with 93% of the respondents indicating they have deal with corruption at least occasionally.  That over a fifth of the respondents saying that they have to deal with corruption “constantly” is telling.

Though the quantitative results are interesting, it is the narrative responses that paint a much more complex picture, one with many nuances.

Narrative voices on corruption
Just after the two closed ended questions on the survey discussed above the following prompt was given, “Please use the space below to elaborate on the questions above related to corruption.”  There were a total of 313 narrative responses, many providing some useful points of departure.

Affirming the most recent rankings of Transparency International, here are some representative responses getting directly to the point, indicating simply that dealing with corruption is a given within certain countries.

• “Uganda…need I say more?” (TI ranking 139/167)
• “I live in Cambodia.  It’s all corruption.”  (TI ranking 150/167)
• “I work for an Iraq country office.  Everything is corrupt.”  (TI ranking 161/167)
• “It is embedded in the Liberian culture.” (TI ranking 83/167)
• “Somalia. That is all.” (TI ranking 167/167)

Unpacking aid worker views on corruption
These next thoughtful response captures several themes that merit close attention:

“Where do I begin? One of the problems of BIG AID is the endemic corruption it carries with it. In poor countries, lots of money connected to faceless donors creates a magnetic field around it which distorts markets, expectations and integrity. Battling this is a full time job and demands a canny understanding of the context. This demands battle hardened veterans who stay around and can manage the corruption issues. However, the nature of humanitarian work is one of constant turn over, so this is an issue.”

The idea that large sums of money or resources simply ‘distort’ the equation in many ways and humans being, well, humans, there is a natural tendency to be tempted to pilfer from what may at times appear to be limitless resources.  The antidote to this suggested above, “battle hardened veterans” who manage corruption is undercut by the sector wide high run over rate.  Younger, less experienced staff come in and can be easily pulled into illegal or corrupt practices especially when there is a strong need to be culturally sensitive and ‘fit in.’  As one respondent put it,

“Indonesia has a lot of corruption.  Not just bribes, but more “personal favors” that they don’t view as corruption, so it’s hard to battle.”

“Corruption is a way of life here and most of the local authorities see it very differently than in the West. national staff get a lot of family pressure and struggle to explain how things are done differently.

The slippery line between corruption and standard cultural practice was made evident in many comments.  This is especially true in the case of favoritism, cronyism and nepotism.

“Corruption means different things to different people.  Family hiring and ‘bak-shish’ are just the way of doing business here in the Middle East.”

Let’s first look at family hiring and then ‘bak-shish.’  As one young female aid worker put it, “One man’s corruption is another man’s wealth redistribution system. I find it hard to judge others on this.”  If you have a job and are in a position to hire people or to award contacts then in many countries you are bound by cultural expectations to “redistribute the wealth” in order to help out family and friends.  This is a textbook example of role conflict where the ‘father’ role is expected to override the ’employee’ role.

And what of nepotism?  It may be hard to convince some from the Global South that George H. W. Bush didn’t hand down his Presidency to his son George H. Bush, and that Bill Clinton is now attempting to pass the Presidency to his wife Hillary Clinton and, in an earlier generation, President John Kennedy appointed Kennedy as Attorney General because he was his brother.

As for ‘bak-shish’ as a way of doing business, yes, tipping someone willingly for good or extra service seems to be fairly ubiquitous not just in the Middle East but elsewhere around the world.  But when does ‘bak-shish’ morph into ‘rashwa’ or asking for bribe?  In pre-invasion Iraq ‘rashwa’ existed, but asking for a bribe was a punishable -and punished- offense.  The current situation in Iraq is that now there is no shame in demanding ‘rashwa.’  The cultural disintegration caused by war has led to this situation. One must ask to what extent has massive and at times sloppy monetary and resource aid -both from the US military and perhaps less so from the humanitarian aid world- contributed to that ugly cultural shift.  Aid workers come into contexts like this and face a difficult task not becoming enmeshed.

And with this example a fairly obvious conjecture can be put forward:  as cultures face disintegration from disasters -both human made (e.g., war) or natural is it inevitable that the level of corruption will rise?  In the broadest possible terms, social order, which in general can tap down and control our baser tendencies, can generate corruption muting norms, and any breakdown in the social order will lead to a breeding ground for the ill-use of power all levels. Just a thought.

This next comment summarizes several points made above and raises a new one regarding “fixers”:

“Corruption is a tricky term. Internally there are the no-bid contracts and consultancies dished out to friends. None of it violates the letter of the law or policy, but it certainly feels unethical.  In country its just the little things, traffic cops, pushing government processes along. Most of this is anecdotal as, with most organizations we use ‘fixers’ to navigate local bureaucracy. Of course local practices vary widely, in much of Africa I am pleasantly surprised but how little major corruption I am confronted with. Alternatively, in Afghanistan, the utter shamelessness of it was exhausting. This was probably as much a function of the massive sums of money floating around as it was culture.”

If you use local “fixers” how much can one know about how they are navigating the terrain, especially in situations where language is a major factor?

Yes, I am bringing up Easterly
The following observation has a clear “Easterlyesque”  tone (as in William Easterly) and questions the impact of the entire development sector.

“When it comes to “development work”, then they have no excuse for the rampant corruption, which I have witnessed. I really feel that development aid of the big dollar variety has in many places really created corruption, dependency and undercut local efforts at self-development. It’s almost as if this industry was in the business of keeping itself busy under the myth of lifting people out of poverty.”

This respondent, a thirty-something female, further critiques the development sector and waxes poetic about the nature of the human condition, imperialism and the fine semantic distinctions that arise when talking about corruption:

“In the organisation, it is bloated with money and many people simply gorge at the trough of development aid. I am thankfully removed from this in my field, I have little reason to interact with others in my organisation. I do see the old boys network everywhere, the British upper middle classes in particular seem to have taken over other organisations, such as parts of the UN for example. Corruption is endemic to the human condition however. Regarding the region (mostly Africa) – there is a fine line between helping ones friends and families and corruption, in some cultural contexts this line is not where we expect. It is imperialism to impose our values on others like this when we have so much ‘acceptable’ corruption in our own private and public sector. We should get our own house in order (for me, the UK) before we judge others.”

Elsewhere in this blog [book]  I comment on Easterly’s overall critique well summed up by this veteran aid worker.  Painting with a brush so broad is always dangerous, though, and may short-circuit more detailed discussions.

Pot calling the kettle black
Here are several comments pointing out that corruption is a fact everywhere and that to narrowly focus on corruption in the developing world is classic Western-centrism.

“Corruption is a problem everywhere. Worst corruption and influence peddaling is in my home country, the US. It bothers me that people complain so much about corruption in the developing world when it is literally magnitudes greater in the US political system.”

“Four out of the last seven governors of Illinois have been charged with crimes related to corruption. It is a constant presence in all fields, aid work and otherwise.”

“Corruption exists everywhere -and the biggest $ corruption over the years has been in the ‘first world’ banking/investment sectors.  It is perhaps more obvious day-to-day in other places – but exists everywhere.”

As a sociologist and as a US citizen I must say that I agree with these assertions.  Cockroaches scatter in the light, and to the extent that the spotlight on corruption tends to point outward and not inward, corruption in the West will remain a mostly hidden, metastasizing cancer.

The impact of corruption on organizations, beneficiaries and on the aid workers
That corruption is a negative force seemed to be a common, obvious theme, and some respondent’s were quite forceful about this point.

• “Corruption is the biggest cause of poverty. If you are in aid, you deal with corruption.”
• “Non-internationally recognized government – corruption is everywhere all the time from the shopkeepers and the drivers to the vice president. It is expected.”
• “The government is corrupt, the UN is corrupt, really the whole system is inherently corrupt.”

The human resources and time that are devoted to dealing with corruption can in some -most?- cases drain from efforts to realize the central mission of an aid or development organization.  This respondent put it this way:

“Although I have not witnessed any corruption in my organisation, the paranoia about corruption affects us all negatively because it is the primary reason for the monumental bureaucracy, box ticking, accountability and reporting requirements, which take up 90% of our time, pulling us away from our real work. It is also the reason why our procurement and recruitment processes are so complex and take forever.”

Indeed, if we could all be and act with integrity the world would be a better place.  This comment does lead to a good question, though, namely how much overhead -broadly defined- is invested in dealing with corruption within the humanitarian aid sector?

This next respondent summarizes one likely common systemic issue and sheds even more light on how aid and development initiatives contribute to corruption.

“As I have gained experience in and knowledge of the institutional environments of many different countries, regions and cultures, I have come to understand how deeply corrupting the influence of developed-world institutional actors can become when local authorities and political insiders manipulate the characteristics of engineering-related aid projects to feed the existing hierarchy of endemic corruption within a particular locale, and the aid institutions simply don’t have the time or the longer-term awareness to place a higher priority on preventing or avoiding that sort of cooption because of their own internal deadlines and personnel advancement objectives.”

A second question, perhaps as important, is what psychological toll does dealing with the complex moral, ethical and personal issues related to corruption (in all forms) days after day take on aid workers?  To what extent does this lead to burnout, loss of idealism, and painful soul-searching?  How many aid workers have been in situations where making the call to refuse to give a bribe cost necessary succor or even lives in the short run?  Every situation is unique, and the “right choice” will always be a judgement call on some level.  Living with that burden can be onerous at best, mentally destabilizing at worst.

Concluding thoughts
I began this post with some thoughts about how to define corruption.  As I read through all 313 narrative responses to our question I learned to appreciate more and more the gift I was being given by all of those who responded to the survey.   The aid worker voices concerning corruption were thought provoking, to say the least.

At the end of the day I will support the argument that there is much to consider when considering this concept of corruption.  I am reminded  of a comment by Antonio Donini, namely that “Humanitarianism started off as a powerful discourse; now it is a discourse of power, both at the international and at the community level.”  I think part of the power the West wields is the power to drive the narrative in a self-serving manner and, in the case of corruption, perhaps not looking in the mirror long enough.  I also think that this is a conversation worth having often, in depth, with passion and with concrete out-come oriented action as its goal.  The topic of corruption raises many issues that for many aid workers are fact of life on a daily basis.  The responses to our open ended survey question, a small sample of which you read above, were all over the board, some people responding with confusion, some snarky, but there were many that were well thought out indicating that at least for this question our survey served to generate a cathartic or at least reflective moment where frustrations could be vented.

So, cancer of corruption or the culture of corruption? Yes.

As always, please contact me with questions or comments or to add your thoughts for discussion.

Follow

Share on Tumblr

Tom Arcaro

Tom Arcaro is a professor of sociology at Elon University. He has been researching and studying the humanitarian aid and development ecosystem for nearly two decades and in 2016 published 'Aid Worker Voices'. He recently published his second and third books related to the humanitarians sector with 'Confronting Toxic Othering' published in 2021 and 'Dispatches from the Margins of the Humanitarian Sector' in 2022. A revised second edition of 'Confronting Toxic Othering' is now available from Kendall Hunt Publishers

More Posts - Website

Follow Me:

“I think that if every overly bright, well-dressed 20something would just get together and co-run the skinny jeans appreciation society in their respective countries, the rest of us could put all that money and press to actual use.”
-20 something female, HQ aid worker w/5+ experience

“Deep breaths.    Too many.”
-41-45 yo female HQ worker [extra spaces for emphasis in the original]

“They are petty indulgences normally of middle class white people who want to help someone and feel better about their privilege.”

Aid worker views regarding MONGOs (My Own NGO):  mostly negative

The 2014 kidnapping of two young Italian women in Syria (see here) underscores the fact that being an aid worker comes with risks. There may be something specifically about this particular episode that merits a deeper understanding, and a start might be to examine aid worker voices about the kind of organization to which these young women were associated, namely a very small, new, self-started NGO.

What kinds of organizations are best suited to doing aid work?  Does size matter? How do our survey respondents feel about smaller humanitarian aid entities and what are some of the positives and negatives from their perspective?  These are some questions that I examine below using our survey respondents views to illustrate and, hopefully, provide a deeper perspective.

Overview
Aid worker’s views on MONGOs are out there, but there is very little data that I have been able to find on this question.  Let’s turn over this rock and see what we find.

We had 479 (of 1010) people respond to our open-ended question regarding MONGO’s.  Here is the prompt for Q58:  “What is your general view of so-called MONGOs (My Own NGO) or other smaller humanitarian aid work entities?”

I went though every response and tagged each as  “positive” , “neutral” or “negative,” and the results indicate clearly that MONGO’s have a mixed and mostly negative image among aid workers.  Here are the results of my tagging:

• Overall positive:  11%
• Neutral/mixed:   46%
• Negative:              43%

The short of it
The vast majority of respondents had a very negative view of MONGO’s, with “negatives” outnumbering “positives” by almost four to one and most of the responses that I tagged “neutral” pointing out that there were both positives and negatives to be argued, stressing the negatives of those organizations which are not “done right.”

As many of the “neutral” responses correctly pointed out, MONGO’s are not a monolithic whole.  An attempt to list and categorize types of MONGOs even within one country would be extraordinarily difficult, and doing a comprehensive listing internationally would be even more difficult certainly by an order of magnitude. The numbers of MONGOs is on the rise every year internationally and thus any list established would be out of date immediately.

Certainly one of the beginning points of any typology would be differentiating between those that have their origins in one country and have a focus in some other part of the world (a NGO based in the US dealing with homeless boys in a specific region in Honduras, for example), and those that are originate in the country where they function (e.g., a micro-finance scheme organized and run by locals in rural Zambia).

From the narrative survey responses I gleaned a number of differentiating characteristics.  Some of the most important appear to be:

• Type and motivation of leadership
• Western primarily (e.g., US and UK) originated and based vs locally/community organizations
• Degree of focus or lack thereof on mission
• Breadth and clarity of and fidelity to mission statement
• Level of overall professionalism
• Whether or not aid or development focused
• Ability to make sustainable change/scalability
• Ability and/or willingness to communicate and work with others in the sector
• The length of time that they have been established
• The existence of an active governing board overseeing activities

Many of the “neutral” responses leaned negative but qualified their answer, tending to say, in short, some MONGO’s can be great/effective if the leadership is good, there is a narrow, defined focus and they are run professionally.  MONGO’s that score high on all the variables above can have many positives:

• Flexible; can change and modify very quickly
• Have generally low overhead
• Can have very creative responses to niche conditions

Perhaps one of the more astute observations made by one respondent was that, after all, this is the way all aid organizations started (see Red Cross, MSF, etc.).

The list of negatives that appear in both “negative” and “neutral” responses is long and damning, and I invite you to read the sections below for some great examples.

• Lack of professionalism
• Lack of standardization
• “White savior complex” underlying motivations
• Just adding to noise and confusion for beneficiaries, donors and the aid industry

  

• Poor/misguided mission
• Ego-driven leadership
• Just reinventing the wheel
• Inefficient
• Do harm in some cases
• Self-serving
• No accountability
• Prone to corruption
• Thinly disguised proselytization
• Overall give aid section a bad reputation

Many respondents touched on a current debate voiced succinctly in the comment made by an experienced female aid worker, namely:  “Humanitarian aid is a profession not a hobby.”

In short, MONGOs: not so good except in rare cases.

A thought from my sociological perspective:  I believe that it is human nature to have empathy toward others and to want to help somehow when one sees other’s in need.  Indeed, that is what prompted Henri Dunant to do what he did in response to the wounded at Solerfino and later help establish one of the very first humanitarian aid organizations, the Red Cross. The urge to create MONGOs is there.  What to do with individuals who act on it is the question we must explore in more detail at some point.

Below I present representative responses from each of the three groupings.

Positive

• “Great! I love the small initiatives, but I’d qualify it since it depends a lot on the origins, agency of the organization and what they’re up to (since many depend on assumptions we give them that we say works, when it very well might be ivory-tower driven). We can’t work with them because of rules from up top, but generally, I think they do our work better than we do.”
• “Have limited reach but have the potential to be better with adaptation, better at identifying nuances to local development, and may be better at small scale development.”
• “Can be useful if service providers in niches. But no way to partner with at scale.”
• “Some are quite nimble and do good local work and focus very effectively on social justice. However they can lead to too much fragmentation and some serve the egos of their founders too much.”
• “Often the smaller ones achieve more with fewer overheads and admin costs.”
• “Some can grow to be great organisations as long as they learn from their mistakes and have clear leadership which understands the complexities of the isssues they are dealing with.”
• “There is plenty work to be done, problems, issues to be adressed. Plenty spaces for MONGOs. And it is good as well to have a variety of organization.”
• “Some made the critical differentiation between local and Western/Us based organizations.”
• “If they are local NGOs/CBOs, they can make very good work because they can understand and address the very local issues and problems. Creating an NGO in the US to do fantasy projects to rescue poor dying African children is ridiculous.”

Neutral
Some respondents just had no opinion, some gave both sides, some qualify in very insightful ways:

• “Can’t write all off with one brush. If they are filling an actual gap that can be a good thing. The big boy ngos are not necessarily flexible or nimble so small can be good. However the ones that show up without a clue are making things worse.”
• “They can be frustrating in the sense that they rarely coordinate “with the big kids” – i.e. they tend to go off on their own and don’t connect or feed into the broader humanitarian system. However, if working in partnership, they can be helpful when working in isolated locations since they are sometimes the only ones willing to go and do work in tough places… especially National NGOs.”
• “(chuckle… I think I’m running a sort of MONGO at present, but we try not to act like it!) It varies, some can do good work if they have a specific niche that they can fill, often as a sub to a larger organization. Others are of questionable competence and can have an outsized regard of their own importance. If not well-focused (“I’m here and want to help!) they tend to be ineffective.”
• “Specialized NGOs in particular sectors or communities or nations are only successful, effective and good when run by individuals who understand humanitarian principles and values and ways of working; those run by enterprising individuals or those who have money and “care” tend to make situations worse for everyone, including the people they are trying to help.”
• “Impossible to generalize. Yes, I tend to roll my eyes. But there are some that are really good, a lot better at responding to local needs than the large INGOs. There are a lot that are bad. But even a bad MONGO is probably not going to do a lot of harm (in a global sense). I could say the same about large NGOs. Some are good, lots are bad. MONGOs have a similar track record.”
• “Some are great and because they have very little resources they find innovative ways of delivering services. Others are terrible and completely undermine what the international aid community has aimed to achieved e.g. Standardisation, principles, good practices, do no harm, etc.”
• “I think it depends on the experience and motivation of the person behind the NGO. If the person either has a background in development, or makes and effort to learn – and has the backing of the local community they seek to assist, then it can be a good thing. However, I think too many of these groups think ‘NGOs are doing it wrong, so I can’t learn anything from them’. Yes, there are many things wrong with the NGO system that can be improved. But the development system has also learned a lot of lessons the hard way that all NGOs can benefit from.”
• “There is some truth to all sides of this debate.”
• “Find it very interesting and thing there is definitely a place for them in the sector as the more established and larger INGOs start to move toward professionalisation and expansion processes that often make them more inefficient and less receptive to and understanding of needs on the ground. there is generally a fairly condescending and negative attitude of INGO and NGO to MONGO which is highly questionable given that none of us are exactly perfect…”
• “Usually no harm, little large-scale impact but nice to see people trying to help people. I don’t feel the condescending outrage about this stuff that many of my peers do. If missionaries from Kansas want to hold AIDS babies for 8 weeks, as long as no one is interfering with treatment and care, and local communities don’t mind, why not?”
• “This is extremely complex. People don’t give unconditionally, even if they think they do. Some people will only contribute if they can maximise their own opportunities for self actualisation. MONGOs are not generally the most efficient way to give aid. They also often result in aid that is sub-standard. However, some people will only contribute to a response when they do it largely themselves. This is, to a certain extent, their right, as long as they meet agreed standards. Small NGOs also have the capacity to be very nimble and innovative, this shouldn’t be stifled. Essentially there are both good and bad aspects and I don’t have the time or energy to write the thesis that one could on this topic!”
• “Great in for small-scale community work in development settings. Horrible in large-scale relief/emergency settings.”
• “I think MONGOs like small businesses begin when the larger NGOs or companies don’t listen to a good idea. Of course there is that bit of hubris in being able to say back home I have my own NGO. I think a more realistic term would be “my own short term project” like most start ups unless they are bought out (or funded) by a larger organization they won’t last long. I think any large INGO would be wise to create a space for ideas and innovation in programming to be heard from all members of staff not only the grants and program development people. This would help the INGO to grow and develop better programs while keeping their staff from quitting to start their MONGOs.”
• “I feel they can still have a good impact if managers/staff are extremely talented and have a clear idea of their mission, vision and goals. Otherwise, funds would be better used within bigger orgs.”
• “I don’t think it’s possible to clump them together. Some represent true citizen action and real empowerment within people’s own communities and within their own contexts. Others are purely ego trips that do more harm than good. The key is to understand the difference and support the potentially transformative ones that could potential become bigger players.”
• “Get the skill set and capability to work for an NGO before going MONGO on us. And being 19 and reading Kristoff doesn’t count. Some small NGO’s are agile and well managed and if they have the resources they can help, but there is a challenge in coordination and doubling of efforts.”
• “They’re like hipsters: super easy to mock. But maybe just maybe we should reserve our mockery for the enormous for-profit development firms that regularly generate batshit clusterfucks on a scale no MONGO –not even a celebrity-run MONGO– could ever match. That girl who runs a one-person NGO teaching yoga to ex-combatants? She’s fun at parties and has no money. Let’s talk about Chemonics. Snarking on MONGOs is fun, but let’s be honest with ourselves: it’s not serious.”
• “THEY CAN BE MORE ESILY [sic] CORRUPTED”
• “I think if they want to work to address to a particular problem in a particular place where no one else is working then it can be a good thing. If it’s just ‘water in africa’ probably best to use people already doing that.”

Negative
It has been argued that the aid industry has three parts:  the beneficiaries, the donors and the aid workers (you!), and what the data shows is that MONGO’s create concerns about all three of these prongs.  Many of you felt that these smaller organizations harmed the entire industry for a variety of reasons. Other major issues included incompetence, corruption, ineffectiveness, poor preparation and questionable intent.  Here are some examples of what you said illustrating the many negative views, some of which are very critical and offer no reason for the reactions, but others offering a bit of depth in their critiques:

• “Small NGO is a waste of financial and human resources. It also create confusion among the beneficiaries and the donors.”
• “It is inline with the online age of personal world wide connection. MONGO’s are generally more efficient with their resources but lack the resources to demonstrate that they are effective. It is easy for a MONGO to fail which also brings down the reputation of the industry”.
• “Most people I’ve met conducting this type of work are hardcore idealists who genuinely want to make a difference. However, they lack the realism and practical skills to further the organization from the backyard-project level. In fact, most of the time these are conducted by expats who are not always accepted by the local community, and they think good will is enough to make a change, but it evidently isn’t. It takes extraordinary beneficiaries to meet them halfway, but most of the beneficiaries just don’t care about that white person’s crazy idea, they’re too busy living their lives within their context, and the initiative will die out before it has any sort of measurable impact. The remaining MONGOs I’ve encountered are people stealing money and justifying it through creative financing.”
• “More prone to corruption, less likely to have strong mechanisms to ensure transparency and accountability, more likely to rely on unrestricted funding from private donors (which exacerbates the first two challenges), less likely to have any genuinely collaborative/democratic internal decision making processes.”
• “In my experience, some are really fantastic, but others are at best laughable and at worst causing harm. Those I have seen that are most effective is when the organization is truly community-based and is founded and run locally with a specific focus. Those founded by well-intentioned white people who ‘just couldn’t stand to see the suffering’ are the worst.”
• “When they originate from the West: hate them. I’m sorry, but we dont need another church group flying out to country X to build another goddamn orphanage. If it’s a local organization supporting their own community then I’m all for it.”
• “MONGOs are wasteful because the majority of one’s I know are incapable of recognizing that they are reinventing the wheel. They don’t even know the next NGO down the road, and repeat efforts. Guatemala has tons of NGOs and many of them serve the same populations. There is a lot of serving the same populations over and over again with the same services. They often refuse to collaborate. The worst are international tiny NGOs that have no clue how things work in country. They execute things badly and are very often uninformed of government policies and interventions in the field they work in.”
• “I would like to sponsor an anti-NGO proliferation treaty. There are too many NGOs, lacking coordination, going after less funding, and all claiming to have the best solution, so they’re less willing to learn.”
• “Noise. Their mistakes are blown up into ‘sector problems.’ They ruin it for the larger entities. Charity is not humanitarian work.”
• “Well, they are called MONGOs for a reason – b/c the focus is on “my own” and not the work they are doing. This is exactly the type of stuff aid organizations are training political parties about – to be about the stakholder articulated needs and not your cult of personality.”
• “Can’t stop them as some people are impelled to do something when they see a disaster or crisis. However, they are sometimes symptomatic of the lack of trust people have in the larger humanitarian organisations. We need to be better at explaining and justifying our overheads, added value and the economy of scale we can provide particularly in the big disasters. We absolutely have to do this in conflict arenas to reduce the number of people risking their lives going off in a small van with bit of clothing and a few medicines.”
• “In Nepal, there are more than 30,000 registered local NGOs. Many of these are MoNGOs set up by idealistic foreigners with little technical knowledge and who lack familiarity with the Nepal context. These agencies poorly coordinate with other actors and often work outside the government systems. They often provide donated goods which are of low quality (e.g. Expired meds) and are not purchased on the local markets, thereby undercutting local businesses.”
• “Ugh. Don’t get me started. Unless they are LNGOs in which case, good on ya if you are making a small, clearly planned impact in your own community.”
• “KILL THEM ALL. Seriously, can we start weeding out the stupid and ineffectual?”
• “Generally, I am highly critical and skeptical of USA-based MONGOs (I like this term!) as they generally have little background, experience, or understanding of the communities they’re trying to assist. I also generally take issue with the “at least we’re doing something!” attitude that is rampant among smaller NGOs and their supporters. I have a more positive view of fledgling local NGOs, in general.”
• “They are petty indulgences normally of middle class white people who want to help someone and feel better about there privilege.”
• “They should be banned, typically unprofessional, often distort markets, mostly don’t know what they are doing, often doing harm.”

Conclusions?
So, what is the take-home from all of the above?  One thing clear is that aid worker professionals have a generally negative view of MONGO’s, but I am assuming most of the people reading this post would say that’s not a new insight (though we do now have some data supporting this commonly held perspective).  That said, what does the general public know about these opinions? If they were more informed about much of the above listed downsides of MONGO’s would they be more cautious about their support and perhaps support the “big box” organizations more?

As for the two Italian young women kidnapped by al-Qaeda who were later released, I wish the best for them.  I harbor the thought that in a more well informed world–where aid worker voices are made more public and prominent–this situation might never have happened.  Their intentions were good, perhaps, but the money they likely earned for al-Qaeda for their return only adds to problems in the sector.

The fact is that there are many books and web sites that encourage and instruct how to create and run your own NGO, and there is a constant flow of those with big ideas and skinny jeans coming from the global north to ‘save the world.’  That is, MONGOs are here to stay and will, I feel, remain a factor to be reckoned with.  The question is how and by what body?  Perhaps the Core Humanitarian Standards could be stressed more and established as an industry standard for any aid related activity?  Perhaps there could be national or international laws established (or those established, enforced more aggressively) that monitor NGO activity for competence?  Perhaps the secret handshake at the entrance to cluster meetings should be more intricate?

In other words, I think the data indicate some very fundamental issues with MONGOs and that these issues should be first more clearly articulated and then addressed at the highest levels.  Get back to me later with specifics on that, K?

As always, please contact me with questions or comments or add your thoughts for discussion over at Aid Source forum which accompanies this project.

Follow

Share on Tumblr

Tom Arcaro

Tom Arcaro is a professor of sociology at Elon University. He has been researching and studying the humanitarian aid and development ecosystem for nearly two decades and in 2016 published 'Aid Worker Voices'. He recently published his second and third books related to the humanitarians sector with 'Confronting Toxic Othering' published in 2021 and 'Dispatches from the Margins of the Humanitarian Sector' in 2022. A revised second edition of 'Confronting Toxic Othering' is now available from Kendall Hunt Publishers

More Posts - Website

Follow Me:

Getting our survey out:  exploratory research

Aid Worker Voices:  Survey Results and Commentary
I’ll start with some very deep and reflexive background.  In 2000 I published a book that was used by colleagues here at my university in a required course by the same name, Understanding the Global Experience.  When I was asked to teach one section of the pilot for this course in 1994 I used that moment to begin taking a deep interest in global affairs.  I recall reading Benjamin Barber’s The Atlantic article Jihad vs McWorld and being immediately absorbed by the vague (or is that vacuous?) concept of global citizenship.  My interest in all things global only accelerated from there.  As past President of the Association for Humanist Sociology my attention regarding social justice issues was already advanced.

In 2003 I founded a program at my university designed to offer a three year pathway for students who wanted to do something about global social issues as they deepened their knowledge.  Our program is now well into its second decade of “creating and sustaining meaningful global partnerships.”  As director of this program I have made it part of my job to learn about humanitarian aid and development and have read, taught and written about this area for many years now.

As part of my reading I encountered Missionary, Mercenary, Mystic Misfit by this mysterious J person. Through networking I found a mutual friend and he and I met on line, immediately connecting on the idea of finding out more about the lives and views of aid workers.

The survey
My collaborator (J) and I worked to construct the survey over many weeks, sending out versions to beta readers several times and making edits, adding and deleting questions, and finally ending up with a 60 item survey with 41 forced choice questions and 19 “elaborate on your thoughts” open-ended questions.  The url for the survey was sent broadly via social media targeting at aid workers worldwide.   At the end of the survey was a link to the AidWorkerVoices blog so that people could see our reporting and comment on the results as they came in.  J gave a detailed clarification of who should take the survey on the blog that casts a pretty wide net.  See here his answer to the question “Who should take this survey?”  We stayed live  for a little over a year and during that time we had 1010 responses, most coming in the first three months.

There were a total of 8,162 total responses to the 19 open ended questions, an average of 430 per question, including nearly 900 on the last two open-ended questions (Q58 and Q60), indicating that the interest levels of the respondents remained high and consistent throughout this long survey.

Our sample of aid workers
There is no master list of aid and development workers around the world nor for that matter any clear consensus as to (1) where aid ends and development begins (what is Dadaab, exactly?), (2) who could or should be included under the umbrella term “aid workers” (do volunteers count??) or even (3) how one would define the “aid industry” (does corporate social responsibility count, for example?)

To do a representative study of aid workers around the world we would need access to data bases of staff from everywhere in the aid industry, and effectively and efficiently get a culture and language specific version of the survey to a stratified random sample of these folks and hope that enough respond to make the results meaningful. If that were possible then we could make scientifically valid generalizations about the data.

Our survey was never intended to yield results that one could -with certainty- generalize to all aid workers. From the very beginning we were sober about the fact that our respondents were self-selected and, in the end, only fluent in English.  What you read throughout this blog are aid worker voices from women and men who graciously gave their time to complete the survey.  In my posts (soon to be book chapters) I summarize and commented on the quantitative data and the themes that appear in the hundreds of responses to each open-ended follow-up question.  I make every attempt to present a balanced representation of the responses as a whole, highlighting particularly well articulated observations.

That the 1010 respondents tend to overrepresent expat aid and development workers from “rich” countries  (the Global North and in particular the US, Canada and Western Europe) seems quote certain from both the quantitative and qualitative data.  The title for the blog is Aid Worker Voices because “Mostly international aid and development worker voices from mostly ‘rich’ countries” was a bit too long.

What we have in this body of work is a positive step forward in exploring and giving voice to the views and lives of aid workers.  Our results are scientific in the same sense as much anthropological work and, in the end, adds to our knowledge about the aid industry.  The hope is that the book-length treatment of the results will be useful to students, journalists and academics wishing to learn more about the aid industry and will provide interesting and  perhaps affirming reading for those already in the sector.

Our attempts at inclusiveness
Though we were able to generate over 1,000 responses to our survey it is clear that we have nothing close to a representative sample of all aid workers, however defined.  Nor was that our goal.  We simply hoped to move forward conversations about the lives of aid workers and to give voice to some of the concerns and perspectives of those willing to come forward, and I feel that that objective has been reached.  In the vernacular of my academic area of sociology, our efforts represent an example of exploratory research intended to do exactly that, explore and share information about the lives and views of aid and development workers.  More needs to be done, and a second version of our survey may happen at some point.

In the meantime, looking back at our efforts to get a wide range of voices I see some failed attempts.

Translations
A great deal of work was put into translating our survey into Spanish and Arabic.  As soon as the translations were completed and vetted by native speakers we used various social media platforms to aggressively invite non-English speaking aid workers to respond to the survey.  As we were putting the word out about the Spanish and Arabic versions we also spent time getting a version translated into French. Sadly, our energy and focus waned when our invitation on the Spanish and Arabic versions  received literally zero reaction and the French version was never vetted or made public.

Why this lack of response?  Two interrelated reasons are that (1) our social networking failed to get the word out effectively and (2) those that were reached felt unimpressed by our offer. But why?  There are many reasons from various cultural perspectives, one of which is that the trust in the confidentiality of an internet survey may be low.  Another is that the survey, if read at all, was seen as unworthy, off point, or otherwise not worth the investment in time.

Here’s a comparison note, though.  As part of another research project in 2008 and again in 2012 I put out an internet based survey targeting non-believers -atheists- that was of comparable length and depth to our aid worker project.  The survey was called “Coming Out as an Atheist” so there was little doubt as to our target respondents.  Using social media connections to get the word out in both 2008 and 2012 we were able to generate over 8,000 respondents for both versions – over 16,000 combined.

Detailed analysis of the data indicates minimal trolling; the answers were consistent, sincere and detailed.  Over 92% of those who started the long surveys completed them.  And here’s the kicker:  though most of our respondents were from the US (about 70%) a good minority were from around the world.  Though a relatively few were from the global south, about 4%, this population was reached.  The massive success of both of these surveys (in terms of getting a robust response) even though the topic was potentially stigmatizing was what made me feel like we could get a good response from aid workers world wide.

Indeed, we are comparing apples and oranges in terms of numbers here.  Globally there are likely far less than 500,000 aid workers, however defined, just now.  The number of nonbelievers/atheists worldwide is in hundreds of millions, with as many as 30,000,000 in the United States alone.  That said, coming out as an atheist is far more risky in many places than coming out as an aid worker, so the fact we got so many responses is partially a function of the fact that, as expressed by many in the open ended questions, taking the survey was cathartic.

We did find the same responses in our aid worker survey, though.  Here are a couple examples:

“Very interesting survey and I appreciate the chance to share my views – it is surprising how little time (and few opportunities) one has to actually *think* about things in the busyness of the day-to-day. I wish your survey results could be shared in an open forum (not only virtual) where significant players can be present and honestly reflect for a moment.”

“These are great questions; very thought-provoking. It’s rare to have an opportunity to share ‘my truth’ so I appreciate this initiative!”

So, given that many people thanked us for the survey and appreciated the chance to share, the question remains why didn’t we get more responses overall and none from the translated versions?

Local aid workers
We were also concerned that we did not get many responses from local aid workers. Though our social media messaging about the survey was meant to reach all aid workers, the outcome was far more homogeneous and, well, white.  Over half of the local aid workers that responded to our survey worked
for humanitarian aid organization and comprised a paltry 5% of our total sample.  How this could have been more effectively addresses is open to question, but certainly one large gap in our goal of hearing and reporting the voices of aid workers is the very critical local aid worker segment.  In some senses our blog [book] could be said to be “International aid worker voices”, sadly so.

Concluding thoughts about being inclusive
That we had failed attempts at inclusiveness is obvious. But what can we learn from these failures? Here are some final thoughts:

• There could have been different versions of the survey pointed at various audiences and written in collaboration with (and in the local languages of) the local aid workers themselves and/or other academics and researchers.
• The Arabic version needed an Arabic person to lead the social media awareness efforts about the survey and that this version should have been written by an aid worker who is a native Arabic speaker.
• All versions of the survey could have been launched at the same time.
• A larger, more inclusive set of beta-testers could be identified.
• Our assumption that all aid workers want their voices heard needs questioning.
• Our means of making people aware of the survey need reassessment.

In the end, as they say “it is what it is” and the best that we can do is learn from the past so that we can make future efforts more robust and, yes, inclusive.

Next steps
Now that this exploratory phase is nearly done, where to from here?  I have begun doing in-depth interviews with select respondents, but I suspect this will not yield any major revelations.  I would very much like to probe more deeply into the lives of local aid workers and am open any discussions that could make that happen.

As always, please contact me with thoughts, feedback or snarky comments.

Follow

Share on Tumblr

Tom Arcaro

Tom Arcaro is a professor of sociology at Elon University. He has been researching and studying the humanitarian aid and development ecosystem for nearly two decades and in 2016 published 'Aid Worker Voices'. He recently published his second and third books related to the humanitarians sector with 'Confronting Toxic Othering' published in 2021 and 'Dispatches from the Margins of the Humanitarian Sector' in 2022. A revised second edition of 'Confronting Toxic Othering' is now available from Kendall Hunt Publishers

More Posts - Website

Follow Me:

Race, identity and branding

Some introductory thoughts
Racism and sexism are, sadly, cultural universals.  The recent evidence of human warfare going back at least 10,000 years points to how long we have found reasons to kill in large numbers.  Evolutionary psychologists present data-backed arguments that we are ethnocentric by nature and some degree racism is inevitable.  Just as gender differentiation easily can devolve into gender stratification [read: structural sexism], racial/ethnic differentiation perhaps as easily degenerates into racial/ethnic stratification [read:  structural racism].  Though we cannot change human nature we can change human institutions, and though socially created institutions can and do increasingly mute and redirect this basic part of our nature (e.g., the Universal Declaration of Human Rights), we will have to be forever vigilant in efforts to control our darker angels.  Expanding on that idea is beyond my present task, but those are my views as a sociologist.

Both racism and sexism exist in the sector, but which is worse?  Here’s how a small sample responded to that question.

So, by a good 10% margin, those sampled see widespread institutional racism as a bigger problem with the aid industry than institutional sexism.  Given that, let’s explore some aid worker voices on the issue of race.

I have previously written about the impact of gender in the aid industry.  This post addresses race, racism and the intersection of ‘race’ and identity.  That racism and sexism exist within the humanitarian aid system is not in question, nor, to point out the obvious, is the fact that one’s perceived gender and race impact the construction and maintenance of one’s self identity. Though this discussion raises the issue of intersectionality of race/ethnicity and gender, that also is for another post.

Our survey responses
Below I go into detail presenting, analyzing and commenting on our data relative to the topic of race.  The voices presented below are in most cases on point, insightful and bitingly critical.

As an appropriate place to start, here is one comment written in response to Q7:  “Why does it have to be white as point of reference?”  

Indeed.

Why, in English language discourse related to development work, why is white the point of reference is an on point, critical question, the answer to which the likes of Jared Diamond and other cultural historians have grappled with in great detail.  Ironically, the thinkers of which I am aware are all Westerners because I am from the Global North, speak and read, embarrassingly, only English and hence this is all I know.  My point of departure for all thought and analysis is, well, necessarily Western/ethnocentric and, since I have a penis and identify as male, perhaps even phallocentric.  And so it goes, my cards -embedded biases- are on the table.

Branding is for all of us
Branding is important.  Indeed, organizations spend a great deal of time, effort and money to “get their name out there” and to have their logo be recognized as something desirable or positive.  The vast majority of all social entities -be they for-profits, political parties, social clubs or, indeed, non-for-profit humanitarian aid organizations- worry about public relations and will make efforts to “spin” what is known about them using social media, press releases, advertising and a myriad of other techniques.

You and I do this as well, constantly, albeit not always consciously.  Sociologist Irving Goffman‘s work on impression management remains part of the canon, and his 1959 book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life could be useful reading for aid workers at any stage of their career.  In a previous post I go deeper into the ‘moral career’ concept.

Brand = identity to some extent regarding both units of analysis, the organization and the individual.

One of the key insights that I gained from reading Abu-Sada’s (ed.) In the Eyes of Others is that though an NGO -in this case MSF- may go to great lengths to brand themselves, people on the receiving end of aid tend to see the aid workers collectively as a monolithic Western entity.  Just as organizations can only be partially effective at managing their identity, the same is true for individuals.  All of us, though we may try to “brand” ourselves as our own unique person (“I am truly wonderful! — in a complex and nuanced kind of way, of course”) find that sometimes we are not seen as who we think we are but more so a generic category like “female”, “white”, “young person”, “Western”.  And, yes, that does describe our modal survey respondent.

Here is what our sample population looked like.

The race question on our survey
Most surveys ask at least some demographic questions, and the phrasing of these tend to get complicated and for good reason.  When writing the “race” question for our survey we wanted to get at the tremendous depth and complexity of this part of one’s self concept and in the end decided a more or less direct approach.  Q6 asked “Which below best describes you?” giving “white” and “non-white” as the only possible choices.  That was the bait.  The followup Q7 then asked “Please use the space below to (1) react to the inappropriateness of the choices in the question above and (2) describe how you identify yourself based on common cultural-linguistic, ethnic, racial, tribal, national or other categories.”

Most everyone who started the survey, 991 people, answered the “race” question (Q6) and 542 (56%) giving at least some narrative comment in Q7.  The bait worked, and in numerous instances the respondents were insightful, articulate, poignant and often hilariously funny.  As is the case when nuance is used, some did not appreciate and/or understand our intent.

Of note -but somewhat predictable- is that a higher percentage of “non-white” respondents chose to write a followup Q7 response, nearly two thirds, 66%, doing so as compared to just over half, 53% of those identifying as “white.”  Not only did more “non-whites” respond, their average word count was about 19% higher as well.  They had a bit more to say.

Many themes in the written responses
This first example hits well on two main themes generated in the responses to Q7, and is well worth a close read, methinks:

“(1) I think the choices in the question reflect the notion that aid workers can be classified in just two categories: white (either North American or European, expats with higher salaries and more leadership positions than locals) and non-white (the locals from whichever developing country the organization is established, working alongside the white leaders, doing most of the grunt work on a lower salary. Much like the Lone Ranger’s Tonto, if that’s not too rude of an analogy). Is this notion inappropriate/politically incorrect? Perhaps. Is it false? I don’t think so. They’re simply caused by the resulting power dynamics in a context where whites are generally better prepared to handle the global networking required for the growth and expansion of an organization, and the non-whites/locals, who are better prepared to conduct all the field work without wreaking culture-shock havoc on the beneficiaries.

(2) As for myself… I always say I have a nationality crisis. I was born to a Costa Rican mother and an Jordanian father. I have dual Costa Rican/Canadian citizenship, and spent most of my childhood and adolescence between countries in a culture-neutral household (because of the cultural differences between my parents, my home life never mirrored the culture of the outside world, wherever we may have been living at the time), so I grew up as more of a cultural observer rather than replicating any of it. Physically, I’m ambiguous, people can never place where I’m from. I think and express myself more naturally in English, but I write all my “romantic, thought-out masterpieces” (I’m one of those frustrated writer people) in Spanish, I also speak French and I read and write Farsi (although the vocabulary has long been locked up in my brain, having fallen out of use when I was three years old). The only place where I don’t feel completely external to the culture around me is in an office full of converging personalities from all over the world where the dominating atmosphere is “tolerance”, not some unspoken attitude pattern that everyone seems to know except for me. And this is not because it sounds so “Oh, I’m a citizen of the world, y’know?”, but because everyone is just as awkward and culturally-misplaced as I am. But, for practical purposes, I am Costa Rican in Costa Rica, and Canadian everywhere else (less visa issues).”

The first theme has to do with white being the point of reference.  The gap between how things are and how we would like things to be is wide in this context.  In the field, at HQ and perhaps especially in our personal lives we want for skin color to be no factor at all, but it is.  Can we ever close that gap?  We all create or happily find color-blind bubbles in certain contained contexts and for some limited periods of time, but most of the time, especially in the field, this is not the case.  To pull a line from the above,  “Is this notion inappropriate/politically incorrect? Perhaps. Is it false? I don’t think so.”

The second theme has to do with identity and how people define themselves. That we live in a globalizing world is obvious.  There is a small but rapidly growing number of people worldwide for whom national/racial/ethnic identity is very complex.  Cosmopolitanism is on the rise, and the 400,000 or so humanitarian aid workers worldwide are a rapidly growing part of this trend.  All the more reason to hear their voices and tell their stories.

More themes
We have the pithy:

“Outraged at above question, passed on outrage to the office, before seeing this question [Q7]. Identify as White, British.”

Some appeared to dislike the question and judged:  “(1) This is racism and sexualism. (2) World inhabitant.” and others just the opposite: “I love this question but (predictably) fit into the categories above.”

Funny/Sarcastic
These examples made me smile, though all for different reasons.  The last one hits what was a common point made above, i.e., whether we like it or not, color matters.

• 1. inappropriate response to inappropriate question. 2. I identify myself and others based on a complex correlation of the amount of stamps, number of passports held and whether or not a person uses a mac.
• I had to check with my colleagues about what my answer should be. I have a white skin, but the definition of white in survey usually is caucasian white, which I am not. I am Lebanese first then an Arab.
• 1) I get it, most expats are white, f*ck us for caring 2) Yooper
• I’m not sure “white” appropriately captures the whiteness of a white Canadian woman working in development. You should have used “pasty”.
• HA! I was wondering why that was so horribly stated. Points for humor. I am American, white, English-speaking, blue-collar-rust-belt SES, yet ultimately over-privileged in the grand scheme.
• White but not Anglo-Saxon. No post-colonial guilt trip.
• 1) Sadly reflects the world view in many cases. 2) Why can’t we all just have two boxes: human and non-human?
• I’m really white. White, middle class American. Blonde, even.
• Not surprised — when we’re “in the field” we are often self-identified as being either white or non-white. It’s icky, it feels wrong, and yet, there it is. Skin color tells half your story for you before you’ve even opened your mouth.

Some perhaps missed the point

• 1) only albinos would consider themselves ‘white’ in my opinion. 2) I am me. I accept me. Just the same as I accept all those not me. Colour is irrelevant.
• The world thank god is not so black and white.
• Appropriate or not, skin color simply does not provide any meaningful data. Despite its limitations, a regional identity would be more significant here. In my case, my identification as a European suffices for this survey.
• This description works for me as I am white bread, but if I had to identify as non-white as my only option I would not be very happy! It is like colonizer or colonized. Possibly we could look at a description of pigmentally challenged vs not pigmantly challenged? But seriously I have never understood the value in these types of questions…

Thought provoking
There were many responses that underlined the main point I am making in this post.  Here is one that hits that perfectly:  “Those choices were very inappropriate. Yet, I am still white. It is not so much that to me, this is my most distinguishable feature, but living in Africa, it somehow seems to be so to others.”  Where you are in the world -your social context- has a big influence on how you are seen.  The following examples restate that point in various ways and illustrate the sad fact, again, that skin color matters.

• I’ve noticed that in the African country where I work, everyone who is not ethically African (black) is “white.” So I’m not sure how this question plays out with say ethnic Indian Africans?
• I think that there’s absolutely a place for this question, provided that we’re given the opportunity to react. Perhaps the question is halfway there, and you should be asking how we identify versus how we’re perceived. This probably comes from my time prior to entering the aid sector, when I worked with Indigenous Australian communities, and was familiar with extensive debates regarding whether you were ‘black enough’- I worked with a number of Indigenous Australians who appeared outwardly ‘white’ but identified strongly with their Indigenous heritage. So while these people were absolutely Indigenous, they were often treated as ‘white outsiders’ who had no place making policy decisions or managing community programs. It’s a complicated issue, but it’s often perceived as (pardon the horrendous pun) black and white. So maybe the question comes from this perspective and is appropriate in that sense. I would be really interested in hearing the discussion that took place around this question some day! As for me, I’m a white Australian of German and Namibian heritage. I was raised speaking English and some German. Aside from the cultural-linguistic/ethnic/etc business, I also identify as a queer woman.
• It sets up a dichotomy and forces one to choose between two categories that don’t best describe an individual. There are many more adjectives that I would use to describe me. It sets up a world view which I have to deal with on a daily basis but would like to see us move beyond.
• It would be best if it didn’t matter, but it usually does, and it’s most often the distinction above that does matter. you can’t list every race, every selection will be inappropriate to someone… I’m European.
• It’s pretty blunt. It’s certainly imbalanced and biased to see a global minority written down as a majority, and other majority generalised as a “other” group. Many expat aid workers are white, and are defined as such by each other and local populations (whether ethnically white or not), so the options reflect conversations you hear but it’s stark to see written down.

This last one makes the point so clearly.

• In terms of how whiteness tends to inform differential treatment of and reactions to aid workers by both their organisations and the populations they serve, this split may be depressingly appropriate.

“White” and “non-white” differences
There was a slightly higher percentage (66%) of “non-white” respondents that chose to respond to Q7 than “white” (53%), indicating that this was a slightly more important question for those that self-identified as “non-white.”  What I have found in these “non-white” responses are the same patterns as in the “white” responses, mostly that identity is both incredibly nuanced and at the same time quite binary.  This one sums it up well:

“I am Filipino-American. Colleagues in the Philippines treat me as a local/national with a foreign passport. I have similar experience in other countries within South East Asia. In West and East Africa, I am often perceived as Chinese. In the Middle East, my ethnicity is often associated with hired domestic help. I am extremely proud of my ethnic background and cultural heritage but there have been times in the field when I wanted to look like the typical expat aid worker – 6 feet tall, blond and very white. The color of one’s skin shouldn’t matter especially in this line of work, but who are we kidding?”

Here are the “word clouds” from both. Quite obvious which is which.

Aid Worker voices regarding identity
Many respondents used this open-ended question to riff and reflect on their identity, and I was a bit surprised at the range of identifiers that were used beyond the obvious country/region of birth, etc..

“Atheist” was not uncommon as was “queer“.  Many used the opportunity to express a sense of global citizenship  (“Global citizen of Georgian origin.”) and/or anti-or a-nationalism.  One respondent simply wrote “nomad.”  Those who were comfortable as seeing themselves as fitting neatly into a category (e.g., German or ‘Murican) were one large group, but a roughly equal number went into some detail about how what they saw themselves as was quite complicated (as seen in many examples above).

Conclusions?
What, if anything, can be concluded from the responses to Q6 and Q7?  First, aid workers in general have a sense of humor but more importantly most have an in-depth and critical sense of identity -both who they are and who they are seen as.  Most recognize the reality of white bias both within and outside of the aid industry and many struggle with the “race” question on many levels.  Those with more stamps in their passports will recognize the fact that “white” or “non-white” matters a great deal in some parts of the world (much of Africa) and less so in others. I will hazard that seasoned aid workers manage their identity as much as they are able in order to maximize their effectiveness (and/or personal safety) in various situations and locations, accenting or downplaying gender, race, SES, or other status markers so as to get by successfully in various contexts. But despite our very best efforts and intentions we are as we are seen by others much of the time.  Here is an example that sums up the complexity of identity and ends with a direct statement about how clients view her (emphasis added).

“I am European but I left my home country to go to university and have not lived there ever since, so I don’t think I can be defined by my nationality. Language, none talks my language so that does not work either. As silly as it sounds I am global, my colleagues speak the same language I do and they understand the issues I talk about. I think my identity is very much linked to my work, or not work rather to a community of people who have to move around a lot too working on similar thematic areas I do. Yes I am white, but it is not an important part in my own identity but it does play into how clients I work with perceive me.”

This response from a female aid worker adds an additional twist to our understanding.

“I just choose white as the locals here perceive me as a white woman in a political sense.  That’s what I have been felt here, and that bothers me a lot.” 

What is true on the personal level is also the case for organizations.  All of the logo flags, branded t-shirts and other forms messaging cannot fully counter the naturally monolithic impression that many beneficiaries have of the generic ‘do-gooder” organizations that they encounter.  In an earlier post I wrote about the views aid workers expressed about MONGOS, most of them negative.  I’ll assert that one factor is the fact that the actions of one small MONGO can despoil the image of the entire array of humanitarian aid organizations. One bad apple spoiling the bushel is, well, a universal phenomenon.

What are the take home messages from all of the above for individual aid workers and aid organization staff who are tasked with monitoring the branding?  For the aid worker, you should take the message that your struggles with identity are shared by many of your colleagues, certainly, but as well the obvious message that you need to see how you are seen by others both in the field and elsewhere and act accordingly.

As always, contact me with questions or comments.

Postscript
A question:  What does it matter how you see yourself or even how others see you -that is, what is happening in the minds of people- as long as the job gets done?  Perhaps the more important question is to what extent does your sense of self and how others see you in the field impact what you do and what gets done?

Follow

Share on Tumblr

Tom Arcaro

Tom Arcaro is a professor of sociology at Elon University. He has been researching and studying the humanitarian aid and development ecosystem for nearly two decades and in 2016 published 'Aid Worker Voices'. He recently published his second and third books related to the humanitarians sector with 'Confronting Toxic Othering' published in 2021 and 'Dispatches from the Margins of the Humanitarian Sector' in 2022. A revised second edition of 'Confronting Toxic Othering' is now available from Kendall Hunt Publishers

More Posts - Website

Follow Me:

The moral career of a humanitarian aid worker

Sit back. This one may take a while.

The goal of this post is to meaningfully apply the concepts of ‘moral career’ and ‘looking-glass self’ to better understand the lives of aid workers as they move through their professional lives. In this post I want to emphasize the overall journey of a career as opposed to a snapshot of single moment. This will make it possible to consider the evolution of self identity that occurs over the course of an aid worker’s career.

Moral career and self identity
I borrow the phrase ‘moral career’ from sociologist Erving Goffman. His classic book Asylums was published in 1961 as a “collection of essays on the social situation of mental patients and other inmates”. Goffman defines moral career as “…any social strand of any person’s course through life…the regular sequence of changes that career entails in the person’s self  and in his imagery for judging himself and others.”  He continues by explaining that,

“The moral career of a person of a given social category involves a standard sequence of changes on his way of conceiving of selves, including importantly, his own….Each moral career, and behind this, each self, occurs within the confines of an institutional system…and can be seen as something that resides in the arrangements prevailing in a social system for its members.”

Finally he concludes that, “This special kind on institutional arrangement does not so much support the self as constitute it.”  (Asylums, 1961: 168)

Here Goffman brilliantly foreshadows the groundbreaking works of first Stanley Milgram (author of Obedience to Authority and then, later by Phillip G. Zimbardo (famous for the Stanford prison experiment and The Lucifer Effect). Both researchers stress the “institutional arrangement” and its impact on behavior and, hence, sense of self as one reflects on their behavior. And, not inconsequentially, their free will as well.

Is it possible that in most instances instead of thinking and then deciding to act, we act and then explain our actions to ourselves and then to others? Questions of this nature are challenging, to be  sure, but important to consider.

There are two main points to keep in mind as we move forward. First, the idea that we all go through stages in various parts of our lives is now fairly standard social science fare, perhaps made most famous by Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’ book On Death and Dying. Her detailing the five stages of coming to grips with death remains a useful tool for many. This post will serve to extend the idea of stages to include the lives of aid workers. The second point is harder to grasp because it is counterintuitive, namely that our sense of self is, in many ways, outside of our control.

Looking-Glass Self
Social psychologist George H. Cooley is generally credited with the term ‘looking-glass self.’  One’s sense of self is, to a certain extent, a product of how we imagine others to see us -both physically and our behaviors-, and how we imagine how others evaluate what they see.

Humanitarians all know intuitively how beneficiaries will see them when driving up in a white land cruiser or, alternately, on public transport.

To merge another of Goffman’s ideas with Cooley for a moment, we all manage our identity by manipulating how we are seen by others. What both Cooley and Goffman are saying is, simply, that our identity is in flux and depends upon social context to a good extent. For aid workers, the ‘social context’ one finds themselves in can be a challenge and is something that is thrust upon them more frequently than it is chosen.

That said, we can put everyone on a continuum with two end points. On one extreme there are people who’s sense of self are totally driven by how they see others seeing them. We’ll call these chameleon-like people ‘other directed’.  On the other extreme are those who are totally unwavering in their self concept and are driven, as it were, by an internal gyroscope. We’ll call these people ‘inner directed.’ The two ends of the continuum are, of course ideal types and only exist as points of reference.

Key to note is that where one is on the above continuum is in flux most of the time and depends on many factors, perhaps most importantly (1) the age and maturity of the person and (2) the social context in which the person finds himself/herself. Very young people are always reading social cues from others and, in general, are very other directed: if an authority figure tells a young person they are stupid they tend to believe it. All of us, in various social situations, look for cues to see how we are fitting into our social surroundings with appropriate cultural sensitivity.

The remainder of this post will focus on using Goffman’s term ‘moral career’ to better understand the lives of aid workers and to suggest that they too have a moral career.

A fitting, fictional example
Perhaps the most prominent example of fiction writing about the lives of aid workers is the series of books by J.  Here Mary-Anne and Jon Langstrom speak to us from Missionary, Mercenary, Mystic, Misfit:

“Somewhere I read—can’t remember where, exactly. Anyway, it was a description of aid workers as missionaries, mercenaries, mystics, and misfits. And the longer I stick around, the more I see it.” Jon looked around for the waiter, and then motioned for two more bottles of St. George. Mary-Anne could already tell that she’d probably miss curfew. Again.

“The problem is that when people use that phrase, they’re usually describing where we’ve come from. They mean it’s what we were before we accidentally found our way into humanitarian work. But I think they’re wrong. I think it’s about what we become. It’s a description of states of being toward which humanitarians gravitate.”

Mary-Anne was suddenly on the edge of her chair, hanging on every word.

Jon Langstrom’s tone was matter-of-fact. “We all start out with these altruistic intentions. We’re going to save the world, or at least a little corner of it. We’re going to do everything properly, we’re on the ‘right’ side of all the issues all the time. We’re self-styled warriors for truth and light. That’s the ‘missionaries’ part.”

Two more bottles of St. George appeared and Jon held one out to her. Mary-Anne took it although somewhere in the back of her head she knew she’d probably regret doing so. But for now she was in the mood to drink a bit more and listen to Jon Langstrom bequeath his wisdom. She took a sip and said, “Go on.””

Jon took a sip himself and nodded.

“So, we’re all on the side of right and light, warriors for the poor, and all of that. Then we get into it a little way and we see that it works by calculus, not math. We see what goes into the sausage. We see that for all of our dialogic, participatory, multi-stakeholder, community-led, bottom-up, embrace-and-empower-everything-local ideals and maybe even practice, that the decisions that truly matter are made elsewhere and on the basis of other things entirely. We come to understand that we have to play hardball. If we stick around long enough, we usually get to the place where we’re willing to fight for a program or strategy we think is the best one, even when it means throwing a colleague under the bus. There are times and places in this industry where, for all of our professed love of all humanity, a win-win is just not possible. We choose this poor community rather than that one because the donor wants this one, not because the needs are greater. We sacrifice little bits of who we are and what we believe in the service of some alleged bigger picture. Then the little bits get bigger. We become extreme. We’re willing to execute more tactical bad in the name of an increasingly elusive and vague strategic ‘greater good.’ For some, it becomes an ‘ends justify means’ thing. But one way or the other, we become mercenary.”

He exhaled sharply. It was almost totally dark in the courtyard at Billy-Bob’s now. Without waiting for a response from Mary-Anne, Jon continued.

“That altruism, or what we took as altruism that drove us to this line of work isn’t a bad thing. We want the world to be better. We can envision a more just or a less unjust world. Some of us become hyper cause-oriented. We delve into the theory or maybe the technical nuts and bolts of practice in a particular sector. And in that sense some of us become mystics.”

“But as in everything else, there are trade-offs. There is always the danger of spending so long immersed in the language and culture of humanitarian aid that anything outside feels incomprehensible. We spend so long focused on a particular way of thinking about issues, like reproductive health or third world hunger, that we lose our ability to engage with those who see the issues differently. Or, and this is the even greater danger, we lose the ability to really engage with those who simply haven’t thought about them at all: the ordinary people in our families and social circles.”

“It’s a paradox, but we can spend so long out here that we begin to treat home like we treat ‘the field.’ Which is to say that we become perpetual temporary interlopers who embrace our ‘not from here’ status as an excuse to see everything clinically and still always have a way out. Our visa is about to expire and we have to go home or to the next mission. Or we have another mission and have to leave home…”

Jon stopped mid-sentence and paused, as if weighing his words.

“We become misfits.”

J does several things with this dialogue.  First, he acknowledges that the alliterative phrase “missionary, mercenary, mystic and misfit” is an oft used trope, but he immediately distances himself from the traditional two-dimensional use of these words as mere labels for static categories.  An example of this is the otherwise insightful article published in 2006 by UK researcher R.L. Strait entitled “Mercenaries, Missionaries, and Misfits:  Representations of Development Personnel” .  J’s character, Jon Langstom, is quick to note that these four stages -missionary, mercenary, mystic and misfit- are “states of being” and points along a journey; he anticipates the utility of the moral career concept.

But what exactly is this utility?  Let me be clear in pointing out that neither J nor I are selling any version of the truth, but rather doing what comes naturally to those who seek to understand, namely describe and categorize and then offer, tentative as it may be, analysis and explanation. In the words of Miguel de Unamuno,

That is to say, any conceptutal framework that one imposes on social reality can be usefully judged by the kinds of questions it generates.  Since this blog [book] intends to report on data gathered rather than spin out deep analysis, I will not go into answers to some of the questions below, but perhaps simply suggest them as useful points of departure.

So, what questions do emerge as we think about the “moral career of the aid worker?”

• Can further describing these stages be of therapeutic value to an individual aid worker as she attempts to examine her career?
• Are human resource personnel responsive to and aware of these stages?
• When mental illness becomes an issue, how does this impact these stages?
• Are these stages different/progress through these stages different for relief/aid versus development workers?
• How do life-partners help or hinder awareness of stages?
• How does this play into the concept of compartmentalization (e.g., ‘deployment smoker’)?
• To what extent are these four stages exhaustive?  Are there stages that are missed, jumped over or just ignored?  If so, what are they?
• What kinds of events or experiences move a person from one stage to the next?
• How long does one stay in each stage?  Is is possible to get permanently “stalled” in one of the early stages?
• Can you regress through the stages and/or can there be a cycling through?
• How do you communicate with someone in another stage?  How is social networking helping or hindering progress through stages?
• After misfit….what is there?  Does one ever fit back into her ‘home’ world?
• Finally, how do you know who you really are?  As Berger pointed out, we are all reinterpreting our past. How do we know our present self is fully formed? How can you know your motivations are true to who you are? When are you you and when are you just playing the role into which the social situation places you?

Yes, the above list does drill down to the existential core. Too deep for some, but valid nonetheless since considering these questions might serve as a useful backdrop for more deeply understanding the data. Asking these detailed questions allows us to better understand the reality of the aid workers experience and it allows us to better represent aid worker voices.

For example, my post “You are as you are seen: race/ethnicity/identity” includes numerous touching and thoughtful statements from aid workers as they reflected on their identity and, in retrospect, on their journey though some stages. Other posts [chapters] include similar points of departure for our understanding. Take a look at this post “The impact of gender on the lives of aid workers” regarding the impact of gender on identity.

I’ll end here with a nod back to Goffman. He argues that only by understanding both one’s structural context and the internal dialogue that takes place can we fully understand not only our own identities but as well the identities of those around us.¹ I agree.

As always,  feel free to contact me with your thoughts, feedback or snarky comments.

¹A contemporary of Goffman, C. Wright Mills tells us the same message,“Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.”

Follow

Share on Tumblr

Tom Arcaro

Tom Arcaro is a professor of sociology at Elon University. He has been researching and studying the humanitarian aid and development ecosystem for nearly two decades and in 2016 published 'Aid Worker Voices'. He recently published his second and third books related to the humanitarians sector with 'Confronting Toxic Othering' published in 2021 and 'Dispatches from the Margins of the Humanitarian Sector' in 2022. A revised second edition of 'Confronting Toxic Othering' is now available from Kendall Hunt Publishers

More Posts - Website

Follow Me:

Of bureaucracies and aid organizations

The is a followup to my most recent post which focuses on the question “what is the ‘humanitarian aid system?”.

Framing the discussion
In his 2014 essay The Humanitarian Future Paul Currion points out that, “Of the Fortune 500 firms first listed in 1955, nearly 90 percent no longer exist in 2014, and this type of creative destruction is sorely lacking in the humanitarian sector.”  This ‘lack of creative destruction’ is my point of departure for this second post focusing on the question “can the humanitarian aid system be fixed?”.  Currion is spot on with his observation and below I discuss why this is such an important point from a sociological perspective.

There are many typologies of bureaucracies, and here is a simple version in which includes (1) for profit entities like Apple, Halliburton or Barkleys, (2) governments or governing bodies like the United Nations, the Parliament of Italy or FIFA, and (3) not for profit organizations such as Oxfam, the Catholic Church or the LSE.

One of those types is not like the other two relative to the pruning force of ‘creative destruction.’  The second two do not have nearly the same level of competition for survival as does the first.  It is beyond the scope of this essay to discuss type two, governing bodies, but much of what I point out below is as relevant to this type as it is the not-for profit world of humanitarian aid organizations.

The business world functions according to Darwinian ‘survival of range fittest’ principles: big fish eat little fish, and only those corporations with the most myopic focus on maximization of profits tend to survive in the fiercely competitive global marketplace.  Efficiency and focus of operation equals success, certainly, but in the long haul -say between 1955 and 2014- the ability to adapt to all manner of cultural, technological and social changes is even more critical.

The not for profit organizations which are the core of the humanitarian aid system are largely outside this algorithm of capitalism, thus lacking a natural pruning process.

The ‘creative destruction’ phrase that Currion uses above is perhaps misstated.  ‘Creative’ infers a mind and the algorithm of capitalism is merely a blind machine, allowing the survival of economically competitive businesses and selecting out the others.  The forces of capitalism naturally prune weak/failing companies and failure is possible and actually imminent for those that don’t adapt to changing economic and social trends.  Business are bureaucracies and therefore they are forced to be as efficient as possible to cope with the burdens of increased overhead, internal cooperation, and communication.

Weber 101:  The problem with getting bigger
The intellectual grandparent of the analysis of bureaucracies is Max Weber. Below is some of what I have learned from studying his works.

A truism relative to bureacracies is that all organizations have a tendency to get bigger as time passes. Two quickly stated reasons are (1) adding features is always less painful than subtracting and (2) the economy of scale comes into play.  As bureaucracies get inexorably larger, many things begin to happen, most bad.  Here’s a partial list:

• Overhead -administrative and otherwise – increases
• Ability to alter course and mission – decreases
• Bureaucratic ritualism – increases
• Efficiency of internal and external communication channels – decreases
• Access to leaders – decreases
• Dependence upon experts at all levels – increases
• Ability of leaders to stay in touch with all aspects of functioning – decreases
• Tendency to gravitate toward exclusively quantifiable indicators of success – increases
• Overall efficiency in achieving mission – decreases

In the for-profit world these negative factors are muted and dealt with by the forces of competition, but much less so in the non-profit world in which the humanitarian aid systems inhabits.

It is a given that businesses that are on top, like those on the Fortune 500, must stay lean, mean and on task to continue being successful.  But how does a not-for profit humanitarian aid organization deal with all of the entropic forces listed above?

One strategy is to avoid getting too big, and a second is minimizing noise by remaining focused on a specific mission.  More discussion on these strategies below.

‘Crisis caravans’ are clusters of bureaucracies 
Another critical dimension of this discussion is the hurdles faced when two or more bureaucracies must/need to interact with each other.  In the business world market forces insure that over the long-haul inter-organization communication is done efficiently.  In the non-for profit world this is not the case and the forces insuring smooth interagency communication and coordination are much less robust.

To illustrate, here is a specific personal example.

For well over a decade I served as director of Project Pericles at Elon University, Elon being one of 30 like-minded colleges and universities nationwide answering the charge to raise the level of civic engagement and social responsibility in our respective institutions.  The directors of each institution meet once a year to share information and move forward collaborations and initiatives generated by the Project Pericles national office.  The bigger picture is that there are a good number of other similarly missioned national consortia such as Campus Compact and Imagining America.

Here, yes, are gaggles of academic types who have common cause, are all passionate about their missions, and certainly are aware of the explosive and positive synergy that can come about when like minded, well resourced individuals come together. One might think that certainly within the Periclean institutions there would be constant, productive communication and that between the national Pericles office and the national offices of the other consortia there would be coordination and cooperation.

Not the case.

Despite many and compelling reasons to make more and better inter-organizational communication, coordination and collaboration a high priority and despite the fact that, when asked, the various administrators and directors would say, yes, they would like it to be so, the grade card on this effort reads a C- at best.

One factor that plays a part in this ‘failure’ is that we are all perpetually occupied with the day to day work on our campuses, always “putting out the fire nearest to us”.  The same is true for people in most jobs:  looking at the big picture is a rare luxury, and spending time on activities which don’t fall clearly in our job description (read: for which we get rewarded, i.e., “count”) is hard to justify.

That is to say, if you think intra-organizational communication and overall functioning is a challenge, the situation only gets worse when you add efforts toward inter-organizational communication, cooperation and collaboration.  It almost goes without saying that the more organizations in the consortia (or cluster of like-missioned entities), the lower the chances for productive, concerted action.  This is not a problem specific to higher education, of course, but rather a general truism regarding interaction among and between large organizations in general.

And so it is with the ‘humanitarian aid system’; Polman was shooting fish in a barrel with The Crisis Caravan (2010).   [Look here for a post on the ‘crisis caravan.’]

Muting the inherent challenges of a growing bureaucracy
Though I have not done a thorough reading of the history of MSF, I’ll suggest that the fissioning into now 24 semi-autonomous entities over the years was a natural reaction to the sense that they were getting too big to handle as one bureaucratic organization.  MSF has, essentially, followed the franchise model from the business world with the Geneva main office remaining in charge of branding control and much of the administrative work while the many semi-autonomous affiliates remain smaller and leaner.  They have also dealt with the challenges of inter-organizational coordination and cooperation by having stated and unstated policies of being as self-sufficient as possible.  Cluster meetings, peut-être, but not much beyond that.

As a side note, another possible reason for having several affiliates in different countries is making the most of fiscal regulations (i.e., some governments offer tax relief on charity donations as long as the charity is registered in country) and/or local grants (again, some  grants are restricted to charities registered in a specific country).  It’s not necessarily the case for MSF but it is for other organizations.  For instance, the European Commission Humanitarian Aid & Civil Protection Office (ECHO), which is one of the biggest humanitarian aid donors, only funds charities that are registered in one of the EU member states.

Though there are many other examples of organizational fissioning, here are just two.  Founded in the 1940’s, OXFAM is now a confederation of 17 organizations around the world. The  International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) was founded in 1919 and today it coordinates activities between the 188 National Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.

The brute force of positive human will
It is a testament to the dedication of workers within the humanitarian aid sector that coordination and communication among the various humanitarian aid entities happens at the high level that it does.  In May 2016 the World Humanitarian Summit (WHS) will be held in Istanbul. The WHS is happening in spite of the overwhelming challenges to intra-organizational coordination. It is happening because of the brute force of positive human will and collective desire within the humanitarian aid sector to respond in dignity enhancing ways to the needs of those who have been crushed by wars, famine and marginalization of all types.  More and more humanitarian aid organizations are adhering to trans-organizational agreements on standards (e.g., the Core Humanitarian Standards).  Sector-wide cluster meetings are becoming increasingly organized and coordinated.  The humanitarian aid system moves forward despite a multitude of challenges, such as:

• the above mentioned inherent and inevitable bureaucratic functioning hurdles
• a work force that tends to have dysfunctionally high turnover
• a mission that is increasingly compromised by the actions of various militaries
• changing technology allowing for real-time social media scrutiny and kibitzing
• all manner of MONGO-types muddying the waters
• a decreasing respect for the sanctity of the humanitarian space (read: good people die in the line duty).

Is the aid system broken?
That there will be constant chatter about how the ‘aid system is broken” is a given.  Recent The Guardian op-eds  by J and Currion are great examples. People experience frustrations when they see inefficiency, stupidity, waste and lack of coordination, especially when lives are on the line. But is the humanitarian aid system broken? No.

Are there aspects of the system that could be improved? Definitely.

My guess is that Weber would be astounded at the frequently creative but always relentlessly stubborn actions of many devoted individuals who have mightily resisted and overcome the many challenges faced by these large, complicated bureaucracies

No, the humanitarian aid system is not ‘broken’.  Just the opposite, it embodies a heroic response to the greatest human challenge of them all, that of harnessing our innate human urge to make the world a little bit more free from unnecessary suffering and indignities.

I agree with J.  We should all just calm down, but at the same time never ease up in our efforts.

Contact me with your thoughts, feedback or snarky comments.

Follow

Share on Tumblr

Tom Arcaro

Tom Arcaro is a professor of sociology at Elon University. He has been researching and studying the humanitarian aid and development ecosystem for nearly two decades and in 2016 published 'Aid Worker Voices'. He recently published his second and third books related to the humanitarians sector with 'Confronting Toxic Othering' published in 2021 and 'Dispatches from the Margins of the Humanitarian Sector' in 2022. A revised second edition of 'Confronting Toxic Othering' is now available from Kendall Hunt Publishers

More Posts - Website

Follow Me:

What is the “humanitarian aid system”

Context
This note is in part prompted by an op-ed piece in The Guardian by J in which he asks, “Is humanitarian aid really broken? Or should we all just calm down?”. J points out that, “The answer to ‘What can we do to fix the aid system?’ depends on what exactly you think is broken and what you think it was meant to do in the first place.”

Agreed.

But I would like to ask an even more basic question, namely ‘what is the humanitarian aid system?’  This question became very germane to us as we imagined our survey of aid workers, the discussion of which is the purpose of this blog.  As a sociologist, the first thing I was taught in my research methods class was that before you sample and survey a population you have to, well, define exactly what that population is.  In this case we are studying “aid workers” (hence the title of our blog AidWorkerVoices).  But again, just who are these ‘humanitarian aid workers’?

Used as an adjective, as it is in this context, the simple dictionary definition of ‘humanitarian’ is “concerned with or seeking to promote human welfare.”  To be accurate, then, an inclusive definition of ‘humanitarian aid worker’ would have to embrace a wide range of people approaching this goal of promoting human welfare from many directions and from a staggering array of organizational platforms.

That said, our data indicates that most respondents to our survey worked for what would be traditionally defined as humanitarian aid work,  i.e., big budget, large global reach organizations.

Note
Here is what our sample population looked like, all self-identified and all presumably representing one time point along a career path.  Less than 30% were what the public might stereotypically label “humanitarian aid workers”, the rest doing some sort of development-related work.  Our phrasing of the question left much room for interpretation by the respondent, but I think it is interesting that most (53%) put themselves in the “development” category.

And now for this
Several points I want to make below, all interrelated and all critical to examine as we move forward in our efforts to understand and make more effective humanitarian actions of all kinds. These will come from my admittedly mostly US perspective, but nonetheless the points remain somewhat universal.

First, the humanitarian system includes innumerable points along a continuum from pure aid (e.g., emergency relief) to pure development.  Ask those working for, say CARE in Ethiopia, to tell you exactly where aid ends and development begins and they will respond with a shrug.  In the words of one aid worker, “…it’s always a challenge, especially in this context, in this environment, when does emergency begin, when is it development?”  And so it is with many individual aid workers as they progress from one point in their career to another, sometimes doing aid, sometimes development, most times a blur of both or neither.

A second point is one that seems obvious and was underscored in Caroline Abu-Sada’s (editor) MSF commissioned book In the Eyes of Others:  How People in Crisis Perceive Humanitarian Aid (2012).  From the ‘beneficiaries’ perspective it really does not matter from where aid or assistance of any sort comes.  Frequently, the outside entity offering immediate to long term ‘help’ is only perceived in the most vague manner; organizational messaging and logos remain an undifferentiated blur.  That is to say, the ‘humanitarian aid system’ is a construct that can have very little relevance in the minds of those for whom the aid system’s efforts are intended. Imagine you are working on a development project in a certain community, then a disaster affects those same people: “sorry we only do development” does not seem a good way to lift them out of poverty. Luckily it is typically not the case, but you do have humanitarian actors that refuse to carry out development activities.

A third point, and one for which more detail is needed, is that actors within the humanitarian system include many entities and individuals outside of the traditional insider’s definition of what aid or even development is.

Although I agree with the wordsmiths at ALNAP (The Active Learning Network for Accountability and Performance in Humanitarian Action) who describe the humanitarian system as “an organic construct, like a constellation: a complex whole formed of interacting core and related actors.” I do feel that their model (below), elaborate as it may be, falls short of being usefully inclusive.  Their premise is that aid work is a profession and their model thus emphasizes the 450,000 aid professionals worldwide.

To the extent that aid work is a profession -and I agree that it is and should be seen as a profession- there are umbrella entities like ALNAP that are taking proactive measures to both understand and make positive changes to the humanitarian aid system.  Indeed, the establishment of the Core Humanitarian Standards, a product of the Joint Standard Initiative, is a positive example of forward thinking efforts.

My point is that in reality the humanitarian aid system is far more inclusive than even the complicated ALNAP model infers, and this fact is ignored in discussions about “fixing the (broken) aid system.”

Expanding on what they include, here are some additional -though far from exhaustive- thoughts where new categories are suggested and some that ALNAP does mention are elaborated upon.  These appear in no particular order.  My reason for this is explained below.

• Peace Corps volunteers and their European counterparts from other typically Global North countries number in the thousands with impact in over 70 nations worldwide.  They are doing -or at least are intending to do-humanitarian development work.
• MONGO’s (My Own NGO) -of which there is an increasing number. Many are US based, but this creating your own non-profit organization to help “save the world” seems to be a generally Western phenomena that is only getting stronger. Note for example the rise of social entrepreneurship programs in US colleges and universities and elsewhere fueling the rise in number of small non-profits.  Though MONGO’s are largely a Western (and/or global north) phenomena these is a trend upward around the world of these entities, though some many have ‘ghost’ partners from the north.
• Everyday individuals, part of the global diaspora, sending remittances while working and living in the US or in other parts of the developed world.  These funds -totaling as much as US$550 billion in 2015- are aid of the increasingly popular “cash transfer” nature and make a huge impact. Remittances from various diaspora account for a massive amount of ‘aid’, the total in USD dwarfing that of what is more traditionally thought of as ‘foreign aid.’
• All of the many Corporate Social Responsibility personnel working around the world.  Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is becoming more of a factor in the sector in ways that can no longer be ignored or marginalized.  The 10 principles of the United Nations Global Compact to the cynical (read:  realists) may sound like so much hot air, but increasingly the millennials and  generation x students are making a change in CSR from within.  In large part this is caused by a long term trend in higher education emphasizing community and global service in American higher education.  Our own Periclean Scholars program at Elon University is an example where students who graduate from the program have global citizenship and humanitarian ethics embedded in their DNA and will take that into their profesional lives.  In the last 15 year or more US higher education has had an increasingly central focus on “civic engagement and social responsibly”, indeed there are many consortia specifically devoted to just that (Imagining America, Campus Compact, Project Pericles, to name a few).  Of special note along these lines is the long history that CARE has working with scores of corporations.
• Academic/service learning students from American colleges and universities doing aid and/or development work  (the “service learning” mentioned above) during both short and long term travel abroad experiences count in the tens of thousands annually.
• Church groups from the US (mainly) doing ‘mission’ work and the many individuals doing 1-2 year outreach experiences (e.g., Mormons).  European-based Catholic missionary work also continues apace. In many parts of the world massive sums of money go to ‘help the poor’ from church, temple or mosque coffers and/or is simply done by individuals whose motivation is to satisfy religious expectations.
• Civic groups such as Rotary International  have a footprint around the world that cannot be easily measured but certainly is part of the mix.
• Though this is obvious, the impact of those affected by disaster and/or long term needs who help their family, friends, neighbors is massive.  The families in Jordan and Lebanon, for example, who have absorbed refugees from Iraq and Syria are not only doing humanitarian aid, but arguably are the largest provider.  These are all cross-national examples (either working outside of their country of origin, or working with foreign populations), but clearly there are many who do feed the malnourished or teach the illiterate across US (or replace US with virtually any other nation) communities, and this highlights how broad the community is.

• People working for donor agencies, especially if headquarters-based. They often have technical expertise in humanitarian and/or development aid provision, and sometime travel to the field for monitoring missions, but at the same time they are not your typical aid worker. They spend most of their time in western capitals with their families, they have somewhat regular working hours. Some of them are actually employed by another entity (e.g. ministry of Health or of Agriculture) and only temporarily seconded to the humanitarian/development arm. 

• Consultants hired by external firms to provide for instance monitoring and evaluation of aid projects. Some of these firms focus solely on aid, but others work in several sectors. Are their employees aid workers? More broadly, how do we consider companies that are subcontracted to provide works/services for an NGO or UN agency in the framework of an aid project? Strictly speaking they are only doing business, not aid work. In practice however the type of activities they do (e.g. give out cash to beneficiaries, carry out a survey on beneficiaries’ needs, etc.) are indistinguishable from the same things done by “real” aid workers.

• Civil protection/defense, fire brigades and other similar corps: they are usually among the first responders to emergencies. Sometimes they work together with humanitarians: for instance, the European Commission has a single structure that oversees both humanitarian aid and civil protection. Yet I would argue they are somewhat different, perhaps because their focus is “at home” rather than in third countries,  but isn’t it a bit neocolonialistic? Similarly, military personnel also sometimes distribute relief or implement development projects to “win hearts and minds” (and they often label their own initiatives as “humanitarian”, as in the Balkans in the 1990s). But I would say they are not “true” humanitarian workers.

• Another example of work that is done to ‘promote human welfare’ though not direct and hence not traditionally seen as aid work are the efforts of those international organizations (like UN agencies) working with myriad governments doing normative work (e.g setting international standards or benchmarks) or developing capacity of national officials in, for example supporting the ministries of education or health in areas like planning or technical cooperation.

And the list goes on.

An organic construct
In short, the take-home from the above is as simple as this.  “Fixing” the humanitarian aid system cannot be done.  Period.

Why?  Because, inclusively defined, the humanitarian aid system is not closed, involves (literally) innumerable entities and actors along a complex and fluid continuum, and many of these entities and actors by their nature transcend governance and policy influences of any kind.  Systems theory 101 tells us that although you can limit your definition of what is or is not included in your model -in this case “the humanitarian aid system” -the reality as it is perceived by the beneficiaries is more complicated and must be accounted for as you assess impact and imagine changes.  And a butterfly flaps its wings.

Take that, Joint Standards Initiative.

But there is hope.  The ‘humanitarian aid system’ in any one particular geographic/cultural context likely does have a relatively finite number of entities doing work.  Efforts to maximize the communication, coordination, cooperation and principled functioning among these players in any given location is a step towards ‘fixing’ the system.  This will never be easy, simple, quick or, in the end, terribly effective.  In the words of one aid worker, “the aid/hum/dev sector cannot be considered as a whole, so we basically have to pick what we think is broken, define and circumscribe, and fix it.” Paul Currion adds additional layers of complexity to this discussion in his article “The Humanitarian Future“.

These local fixes will be by no means “one size fits all” in nature, and thus we’re always back to square one as we move around the globe, location to location.

‘Is the aid system broken?’, J asks.  Well, yes in some specific and narrow cases, as he accurately points out. The humanitarian aid system is a growing, amorphous and uncoordinated array of ‘do-gooders’ being pulled by our natural human urge to respond to those in need, just as Henri Dunnant did in 1859 in Solferino.

We are both blessed and cursed with this very powerful urge, but we can at least deal positively and productively with the our humanistic impulses by taking a broader approach to defining the ‘humanitarian aid system’ and earning satisfaction at successfully, on occasion, protecting some of our castles in the sand.

Post scripts
Though I say above that there is hope for ‘fixing’ the system I really am far short of closure on that point. I invite you to read here and here for my thoughts about the very premise of humanitarian aid and to decrypt the reference to sand castles above.

Look soon for a second part to this post explaining why the humanitarian aid system is -all things considered- doing an amazing job.

Contact me with your thoughts, feedback or snarky comments.

Follow

Share on Tumblr

Tom Arcaro

Tom Arcaro is a professor of sociology at Elon University. He has been researching and studying the humanitarian aid and development ecosystem for nearly two decades and in 2016 published 'Aid Worker Voices'. He recently published his second and third books related to the humanitarians sector with 'Confronting Toxic Othering' published in 2021 and 'Dispatches from the Margins of the Humanitarian Sector' in 2022. A revised second edition of 'Confronting Toxic Othering' is now available from Kendall Hunt Publishers

More Posts - Website

Follow Me:

“Being a guy is like playing the easy setting. Less harassment, more respect.”
–31-35yo male expat aid worker

“Being female and working in many male dominated cultures I have to be extra mindful about how my actions are perceived, especially in management positions. Also, safety.”
–25-30yo female expat aid worker

The impact of gender on the lives of aid workers

One person’s view from 50,000 feet
That one’s gender is a factor in daily life is a cultural universal.  Gender differentiation has always existed among human cultures all over the planet and for our entire existence, starting in those caves hundreds of thousands of years ago in what is now South Africa.  Humans, a species blessed -or cursed- with the ability to engage in complex thought and having the ability to possess and, more importantly, pass on cultural learning from one generation to the next, have made gender differentiation a major and lasting social factor.

Though with only rare exceptions all of us have either a penis or a vagina -and the attendant secondary sexual characteristics that go along with said equipment, unlike other mammalian species, humans have socially constructed gender.  Further, we have taken our sexuality -who we feel an urge to have sex with- and conflated it with gender identity.  We are a complicated species and, unfortunately, have tended in most cultures to find a way to morph somewhat benign and perhaps functionally useful gender differentiation into a not-so-benign and, for 50% of the population markedly not advantageous, gender stratification.  My personal theory is that gender stratification is fairly “new” and that up until about 15,ooo years ago we lived actually most of our existence in a non-sexist manner.  Social differentiation transforms into social stratification in cultural settings where a surplus of food, etc. is being regularly generated (i.e., concurrent with the rise of the domestication of plant and animal species) and this transformation, methinks, gives rise to gender stratification, i.e., sexism.

Yes, sexism.  An ideology of domination and subordination based on the assumption of the biological and/or cultural inferiority of those with vaginas and the use of this assumption to legitimate and rationalize (commonly grounded in our modern Abrahamic religions) the inferior or unequal treatment of these vagina possessors.

Are we doomed forever to a world based in gender stratification, dominated by varying degrees of sexism?  Perhaps not, but I think it will take several more generations before we live in a world where we simply enjoy our differences instead of exploiting them.

Same same, but different; now, from 35,000 feet
Aid work is, well, work.  It is a job in a sector.  Of the 400,000-500,00 people around the world which might fall into this category, there exists a healthy mix of both males and females.  In many organizations there are more females than males, and of those that took the time to complete our survey, 70% were female.  Representative of the sector?  Likely not, but a good indication of strong female presence in the sector.

Given that we live in a gendered and, yes, sexist world, one can conclude that there are few if any occupations where to one degree or another one’s gender is not a factor.  Well, duh.

On to data from our survey 
I have previously written two posts having to do with the male-female differences in our survey responses.  Check here and here for these posts.  I turn now to the results from our specific questions about the impact of gender.

Two questions
Which of these four factors is the most important in influencing how we see ourselves:  race/ethnicity/cultural status, social class/relative wealth and power, gender or age?   Which of those four factors is the most important in influencing how others perceive and react to us?

Certainly every one of these factors is critically important for all of us no matter where we are in the world or what our occupation might be.  Indeed, that is a basic truism in the social sciences. Though Max Weber was referring more narrowly to wealth and power when he first used the term, his concept of “life chances” can be usefully applied more broadly to all four of these factors. Each can and frequently does play into how we go through our lives and our work days, that is, what “life chances” we enjoy -or don’t enjoy- depending upon where we are vis-a-vis these four major social variables.  Which factor is the most important for an individual can change quickly, even moment by moment as we transition from one social setting to the next, for example getting off a plane to a deployment faced with immediate and dramatic cultural shifts.  In short, all four factors are critical, and various combinations can lead alternately to open or closed doors.

This comment from a young, white, male expat aid worker sums this point up nicely:

“In Muslim countries, being a male makes a lot of things easier, even though in West Africa you are generally perceived as white before being perceived as a man or a woman. The only disadvantages in being a Male in some unstable countries are that it makes you more of a target for ‘extremist/hostile’ groups in some contexts.”

Vaginas and penises
That one’s perceived gender can influence how a person is responded to is the focus below, and by presenting some  representative narrative responses from our survey I hope to shed light on the deeper contextual nuances of perceived gender identity among aid workers.

As a related note, how you feel about yourself at any one moment is influenced by how you believe others are seeing you and how they are evaluating -judging-what they see.  Perhaps that is part of the allure of being an aid worker: “How wonderful you are to help other people!”  Though the “looking-glass self” can have that positive side, the way you are perceived by others can sometimes be negative (“When two thousand years old you are, see how many times a week you are accused of being ‘too male, too pale, too stale.'” stated one male respondent to our survey).  

To go one step further, looking through the lens of sociologist Irving Goffman’s concept of “impression management” when we are at home and/or in our cubicle environment we are able to use myriad props, cues and affectations to enhance -or mute- any or all of our gender, ethnic/race, age or class statuses.  We are in control of how we are seen by others and can manipulate -albeit most times doing so unconsciously- the looking-glass effect, somewhat.  By stark contrast, while in the field there are times when we have very little control over how we are perceived.  One important interpersonal skill any aid worker must have is the ability to imagine what people in an array of contexts see when they look at them and then act in accordance with that knowledge.  To the point:  a young, black, female, American aid worker gets of the plane in [fill in the blank].  What do the beneficiaries see first, i.e., which of these four demographic variables is most salient?  Yes, it varies.  Yes, it is culture/situation specific.  But in the end, the person getting off the plane is not the one in control of how she is being perceived, how she is identified and reacted to.  The choice of whether or not you wear your aid organization branded t-shirt is trivial.  You will -despite your intentions otherwise- be seen as a “Westerner’ first.

Some results
Below are our results to the question related to gender being a factor for aid or development workers.  On one level I am a bit surprised that nearly a third -30%- of the respondents indicated their gender was not a factor at all in their work.  When broken down by male compared to female, the percentages differ in what I would consider a predictable manner with females lower at 28% compared to 36% for males. I can understand that a male might not be habituated to thinking in terms of gender, but for well of a fourth of the females to report gender not a factor sounds, well, a bit odd, especially as I look more closely at the other numbers and read through some of the comments that were offered in the open-ended followup question (Q41). That said, perhaps these numbers nod at the points I made above.

What we do see very clearly in the data below is that that by a very wide margin, gender is a more negative factor for females than for males, with 39% of the females indicating that their gender was a negative factor compared to only 7% of the males indicating the same.

Q 40:  To what extent has your gender been a factor in your humanitarian aid work experience?

Combined responses:

In the words of women -and men- in the field
Among the 443 (thank you all!) that provided a response in the followup open ended question (Q41) several themes and patterns emerge.

Gender impacts both relationships with colleagues in the aid worker industry and those with the non-aid workers (both aid/support beneficiaries and non-beneficiary community members) in both negative and positive ways. Below are examples.

• “It’s been creeping up on me … I never thought it is an issue but over the years I did notice that it is. Either with project clients and sometimes with colleagues.” (30+yo female expat aid worker)
• “I would say the positive aspects outweigh the negative. As a woman, I have been able to work with women and children in communities more closely than if I was a man. I also feel blessed to have close female friends in this field and we try to support and nurture each other as much as possible. I have not witnessed men bonding in this way. However, I have experienced sexism and harassment quite a bit in the course of my work. In some countries the harassment was significant and carried with it the threat of violence. On a couple of occasions I have not received jobs due to my gender. I have also experienced female bullying.” (41+y0 female expat aid worker)

These next ones gets pretty specific regarding power dynamics and expresses anger that I suspect may generate some head nods among the women reading this post.

• “Because white women like me can still be viewed negatively, dismissed, ignored, by other white men – yes, really. So, a white woman in a senior position in Africa? Tough. African men ignore me routinely, especially if I am in the company of a male colleague, I may as well not be there sometimes. Only when they realise they need me to get to the money, do they talk to me. By then it is too late. Enough assholes in aid work, I am not supporting those who do not acknowledge a white woman.”  (31+yo female expat air worker)
• More risk associated with being alone/out Sometimes I get the sense that people don’t take what I’m saying as seriously, and I noticed they’ll look to or defer to the man in the group, even if I’m the one in the position to answer/position of authority.

The next few examples highlight the nuance of gender impact and, importantly, voice clearly the point that in gender stratified cultures getting free access to -and generating a sense of trust with-women is much easier for female aid workers.

• “My answer will change based on the day. It is definitely a large factor but in some instances it is positive and in others it is negative. I deal regularly with sexist rules and comments made by other expat staff members who I am sure do not even realize what they are saying or doing (e.g. no you cannot ride a bike, no you cannot drive a car. you are too emotional you must not be able to cope with stress. no you cannot attend this meeting with us, etc. etc.) When dealing with locals I have found that being a woman is often a positive as people seem to open up and trust women more than men and are more likely to feel they must take care of a woman, therefore offering me more access to people’s homes to be able to talk to them.” (41+y0 female expat aid worker)
• Being a woman can be exceedingly difficult, especially in conflict zones where I’m working with mostly men. All of the decisions are based on a 2-dimensional perspective. It takes a lot of explaining to bring about a holistic approach and/or incorporate the lives of women in planning. Sometimes, as an expat woman, I’m considered androgynous and given the same access as a male. But that can also be isolating, depending on the context since I end up in the male category and have to fight to speak to a woman or plan things that factor in women’s lives. Sometimes, I’m a critical bridge between the women/vulnerable and decision makers, a “voice” for women when they’re kept out of the process. That can also be a burden if decision makers are expecting you to be the voice for millions of women.  (40+yo female expat aid worker)
• In my organization, “rank and file” staff at HQ level are dominated by young women, whereas senior managers and leadership continue to be dominated by men. This is changing, but still observable. In the HQ setting, being a driven female was positive because my motivation was rewarded with opportunities. In the field, the overwhelming majority of “rank and file” staff (local nationals) are men, as well as heads of local organizations and government, and often fairly traditional. This made being a senior leader challenging at times, as I had to work harder to earn respect from my male counterparts.

More thoughts on safety, sexism and the advantages of being a female
Many respondents referred to the fact that being a woman carried -or was perceived to carry- more risk:

• This was a challenging question. While I don’t feel I have ever been discriminated against for being female in my job, there are certain implications. In my organization, the majority of staff at HQ are actually female – so I am at a slight disadvantage were I to try and work at HQ. In the field it is different – there are some perceptions by male coworkers that some deployment areas are ‘too dangerous’ for women so this can limit your movement.
• It’s been difficult in two ways: 1. There is certainly an “old boys network” in my work context. My bosses are more likely to listen to other male workers’ opinions, especially on academic or theoretical topics. 2. Being a woman in a Central American context is frustrating on a daily level (catcalls, threats to security) which I think decreases my productivity.
• I have experienced sexual harassment from “locals” and staff alike too many times to count. I have at times felt like a liability to male staff when confronted with armed groups who use the threat of rape and kidnap of females as pressure to get what they want. I also believe my gender has enabled me to connect with children despite language barriers and open conversations that may not have happened otherwise.
• The only issue that my gender has caused is that it was a factor in deciding whether or not to go to work in Afghanistan. That’s the only time it has influenced any decision I’ve made.
• In a lot of countries being a woman means working ten times harder than men just to be taken seriously (even by your own colleagues). And I have been in situations when me being a woman put me in more physical danger.

This pity response provides a great summary of the above:
Sometimes positive (interviewing female participants) and other times more dangerous.

Which is the most salient demographic variable?  In many cultures (most?) age is traditionally a major factor regarding to whom respect and attention is given.  The first comment below captures just that, and the second one, from a male, illustrates that even physical stature can have an impact.

• I think as a woman, there are still issues in respecting me in some cases, likely. I think my age (I’m still young compared to most local colleagues) has probably been a bigger factor than my gender though.
• Being a (tall) male has helped to gain respect, especially among beneficiary communities and local partners.

Being able to access female beneficiaries is critical and is an advantage for females.

• Being a woman can sometimes help in communication and negotiation
• When I am able to work directly with poor or marginalized women in visual storytelling processes, my gender creates a more open and safe environment for them. As such, I always ask for a female translator, if needed, when working with women.
• It has been relatively easy to speak with authority figures in other countries as a male, however I know how much is lost because I have not been able to speak to some females in some countries. (male expat aid worker)

Here is the view of the same situation from a few male expat aid workers stressing the access issue:

• Being male, and given the strong pro-male bias in all developing countries, it makes the decision making aspect and coordination aspects of the work easier; however, due to my focus on maternal health, it is a problem in getting full access to women in all cultural contexts and when you do have to do a needs assessment or medical interview, you may not get all the information you need, you need to rely on translations that are often not so good.
• It has been relatively easy to speak with authority figures in other countries as a male, however I know how much is lost because I have not been able to speak to some females in some countries.
• In most of the world, being male has come with added respect, increased security access, and the ability to bully when necessary. Unfortunately, i don’t have access to the female voice.

This final thought comes from Annalisa Addis, a female aid worker who wonderfully sums up most of the above.

“Regarding Q40, a partial explanation of why so many respondents said that gender was “not a factor at all” might be due to how the question was formulated (i.e. too generic and/or lacking a “mixed impact” answer). Let me elaborate a bit. It is clear that gender might play a role in several aspects of the life of an aid worker: for instance in their recruitment, in their interactions with their bosses, in their interactions with local colleagues, in establishing relationship with beneficiaries, in the way they spend their free time, and so on. For some of these things, being a woman might be detrimental (e.g. personal security), but for others it can be an advantage (e.g. easier access to female beneficiaries). Some people (like me) may feel that, on average, the impact of their gender is neither negative nor positive, and thus they may have chosen “no impact”. But literally speaking, “no impact at all” is very different from “there are both positive aspects and negative ones, but I can’t choose which one is stronger as they somehow even each other out”. I bet that you would have gotten different percentages had you asked to evaluate how gender has affected a series of separate things (for instance: recruitment, professional relationships within the office, professional relationship with local authorities, life outside of the office).”

Some take-home thoughts
Being a female aid worker is, in sum, not the same as being a male aid worker in many, many ways.  The quantitative results from our main question highlighted the fact that one’s gender is more of a negative factor for women. The qualitative data produced the insight that though there are negatives and positives of being a female when working with colleagues as well as with beneficiaries and locals, the negatives working with colleagues were much more commonly cited than the negatives when working with beneficiaries or locals.  Indeed, what I am reading is that in terms of doing her job, being a female was frequently a distinct disadvantage.

One take-home point from all of the above is that aid and development organizations recruiting and hoping to retain qualified females need to be constantly aware of the impact of gender and ceaselessly work to minimize the negatives in whatever ways they can. They should begin by hearing the voices of the women already in their ranks and using their insights and growth to support those who come behind them, both males and females.  A second and critical point is that the gender mix of the team in any aid situation needs scrutiny and work needs to be done to insure maximum effective use of gender differences.  Finally, this comment from a male expat aid worker nails much of the above pretty well.

“I find that most people in this sector are women. They have a monopoly on a lot of jobs around gender and child welfare. So for a man, it is good as we are under-represented in a lot of areas. Having said that, it seems to me that there are too many men at the top end of the sector, and this should perhaps change, although I think the humanitarian sector must be better than average regarding equality.”

With regard to the different demographics variables (gender, age, ethnicity, nationality) and how all of them, not just gender interact is critical.  There is a growing literature about “intersectionality” focusing on how an individual’s many biological and social identity characteristics interact on multiple levels, and for me this phenomena is even more complicated when imagining how aid worker identity is understood both from a first person perspective and in the eye’s of the beneficiaries.

In the words of Annalisa Addis (cited above),

“In the context of aid work, all these things get reshuffled, so being a woman might actually be an advantage (or a non-issue) in certain situations, but you may still get problems (or special treatment) due to your skin colour, or your age. At the end of the day, you are ALL these things at once – what changes are the implications attached to each of them, and which ones prevail. This resonates with those respondents who felt sort of genderless, but very much racialised, in the context of aid work. Crucially, intersectionality illuminates why the simple fact of “being a woman” is not sufficient to make any sort of generalisation (you need to differentiate among women of different ethnicities, from different backgrounds, of different age groups, etc.). Local authorities may listen to NGO country directors regardless of their gender, because they can provide or withold critical resources: in this case power is more relevant than gender, but there may be millions of examples where other considerations prevail.”

There is so much more to report from our survey data about this general topic, so stay tuned.  In my next posts I’ll comment more about gender differences and about the impact of all of the social variables on the lives of aid workers.  Perhaps the sociologist Irving Goffman was on to something when he said “This special kind of institutional arrangement [that we find ourself in] does not so much support the self as constitute it.” Indeed, in many respects we are as others see us, like it or not.

Thoughts, questions or comments?  Reach me via email.

Special thanks go to Annalisa Addis who contributed to this post.

Follow

Share on Tumblr

Tom Arcaro

Tom Arcaro is a professor of sociology at Elon University. He has been researching and studying the humanitarian aid and development ecosystem for nearly two decades and in 2016 published 'Aid Worker Voices'. He recently published his second and third books related to the humanitarians sector with 'Confronting Toxic Othering' published in 2021 and 'Dispatches from the Margins of the Humanitarian Sector' in 2022. A revised second edition of 'Confronting Toxic Othering' is now available from Kendall Hunt Publishers

More Posts - Website

Follow Me: