Local aid and development workers in Zambia: preliminary results of a survey

Posted on: February 15, 2017 | By: Tom Arcaro | Filed under: Zambian local aid workers

Local aid workers Dealing with nomenclature when discussing the aid and development sector can be both a challenge and an opportunity, and this is clearly the case when talking about ‘local aid workers’ as I have done in my last several posts.  Certainly domestic (in this case within the United States) workers like Jennifer Foy and Marlene Myers fall within a very broad definition of ‘local aid worker’, but these women fall outside the more classic (stereotypical?) image of local aid workers that, for example, made the news recently in Afghanistan. By some estimates, local aid and development workers outnumber expat aid workers by a ratio of as much as 10 to 1, with one US based aid and development NGO of which I am aware reporting only 5% of their international staff as expats. Here is a statement from an OCHA report, “National aid workers constitute the majority of aid staff in the field – upwards of 90 per…

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