Aid Industry – Aid Worker Voices

April 21, 2014November 5, 2017

The Role of Humanitarian Aid & Development?

Question 60: “Please elaborate on your views about the future of humanitarian aid work.”

The majority of respondents who have answered this question thus far seem to have focused their comments on things ultimately to do with technical delivery, implementation and efficiency. But a few have chosen take on what I consider to be probably the most important question facing the humanitarian aid and development industry today.

“I think the aid industry is still figuring out what its role should be and how it should have an impact – and the people who can support that (taxpayers, donors, etc) still aren’t sure about its value. I am hopeful but somewhat skeptical that the aid industry will continue to grow and always have a positive impact, as a result.”

This response hits it on the head. What is our role, as aid workers and aid organizations, vis-à-vis the bigger picture? Maybe times were simpler 30 years ago, before Rwanda, or 20 years ago, before Hurricane Mitch and Kosovo, or 10 years ago, before The Tsunamis. Now, in a post-Haiti earthquake and full-on Syria, South Sudan, Central African Republic period the standardized, pat answers fall flat. That famous quote about aid being “a measure of humanity, always insufficient…” (widely attributed to ICRC) is great marketing but it doesn’t really help us analyze either the increasingly complicated contexts where we work, or the less obvious, sometimes long-lasting effects that we often have on those contexts.

“I think the line will become more and more blurred between humanitarian aid work and military aid/stabilisation/restructuring/military operations in the future and we will need to stop pretending that aid organisations are not implementing the policies of donor governments and are not neutral (in the vast majority of cases) and are spreading the capitalist ideology of the “western” world.”

This response hits closer to home with reality than many of us wish was the case. It seems clear that the humanitarian principle of impartiality and neutrality are aspirations, not descriptions of how things are in fact.

“Humanitarian aid will always be needed and will have a positive impact on lives, however I am increasingly concerned about the reality that we are responding to political crises and conflicts of which there is no end in sight and no political will to solve. Humanitarian aid cannot and should not be used as a political tool and the frequency of how often that is happening currently is worrying.”

And then…

“I hope that the amount of cash we funnel through humanitarian aid will change; though that’s unlikely given the governments who need to support their foreign policy interests. I do think that aid as we are currently doing it is on track to become irrelevant and boring, and not a core part of change-making in the world.”

Personally, I remain a believer in what I call the humanitarian enterprise. I think we have a role to play in changing the world for the better, and I hope that we can find a way out of the irrelevant-boring loop.

What do you think? What is our role? What does our future look like?

Take the aid worker survey. Comment in the thread below this post. Talk to us on Facebook.

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J.

J. is a full-time professional humanitarian worker with more than twenty years of experience in the aid industry. He currently holds a real aid world day job at a real humanitarian organization as a senior disaster response manager. In a previous blogosphere life J. wrote a blog about aid work called Tales From the Hood, and was half owner/curator of the uber-awesome Stuff Expat Aid Workers Like.These days he occasionally blogs about serious topics at AidSpeak (aidspeak.wordpress.com). J. has written several books, including the world's first humanitarian romance novel, Disastrous Passion, and a non-fiction book entitled Letters Left Unsent. Follow J. on Twitter @evilgeniuspubs

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March 28, 2014November 5, 2017

More voices coming soon….

Non-English versions of the survey coming soon

Though I don’t have any firm numbers to go by, a quick scan of available data is that English is not the first language of most humanitarian aid workers. While it is a fact of life that the default language of many (most?) organizations in the aid world industry is English (with French coming in a very strong second), of the over 300,000 aid and development workers globally I’ll repeat: for most English is at best a second language.

This fact is perhaps reflected in our data in that we have attracted a very small number of local aid workers:

Our main goal in taking on this project was to provide a space for more discussion about the lives and views of aid workers and so, toward that goal and more specifically toward the goal of hearing more -and more diverse- voices, we are working on translating the survey into Arabic, French, Spanish and German. Please send us a Tweet if you have suggestions for other languages – especially if you have someone able to do the translation.

In other news, check out this article in Devex International Development Career Forum that mentions our survey and also quotes my collaborator J.

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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

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March 9, 2014November 5, 2017

PSA: Who should take the survey?

The humanitarian survey has been live for about two weeks, now, and so far we’re very pleased with the response. We’ve had over 500 respondents to-date, and yes, we know it’s not a statistically viable sample just yet, but nevertheless we’re seeing some fascinating trends already beginning to emerge.

At this point, though, we need to pause and answer what is apparently a burning question in the minds of many: Who should take this survey? Or, put another way, who do we want to hear from?

You’ve tweeted us, DM’d us, emailed us, Facebooked us, biting your bottom lips, voices wavering… wondering if… is it really… for you?!

Should I take the humanitarian worker survey?! (hint: yes)

The answer is, “Yes!” If you do now or have ever worked in the aid industry, we want to hear from you via this survey.

Yep, we know. It says “humanitarian”, but you’ve always fancied yourself as a development worker. No short-term, all-output-no-impact, disaster zone adrenaline junkie shenanigans for you. The decades-long debates about “aid” and “development” begin to coalesce in your mind. Should you take the survey?

Yes. If you do now or have ever worked in the aid industry in any way, whether relief, development, advocacy, policy, shuffling papers, managing spreadsheets… aid industry? Yes? Then yes, we want to hear from you.

Or maybe you’re hung up on the fact that we appear to be asking about NGO staff only, and you’re a consultant or maybe you work for an institutional donor (we’ve updated a few of those questions, by the way). Should you take the survey?

Yes. If you do now or have ever worked in the aid industry in any way, whether NGO, INGO, SLONGO, MONGO, BINGO, employed by a donor organization or institution, or as a HRI-style reasonably-paid consultant, then yes. We want to hear from you!

My personal favorite (see my prior rants here and here) is when some of you worry aloud over the fact that you sit in a HQ, far from the action, providing passive “support,” while the alleged real work is being done by the alleged real aid workers far, far away. Should you take the survey?

Yes! If you do now, or have ever worked in the aid industry, whether in DC or Dhaka, Brussels or Bujumbura, Geneva or Genoa… Whether your job is something about shuffling papers, responding to donor information needs, making operational decisions, directly handing relief NFIs to survivors, attending meetings, attending really important and high-level meetings… Then yes, we want to hear from you.

The same goes for all the other permutations, too. You retired years ago. You’re super angry. You’re super happy. You’re expat. You’re local. You’re too busy for blogs. You’re an expert in surveys and you have serious concerns about the assumptions being made by some of these questions. You’re in ‘transition’ work, and so neither really relief nor development. Your job is highly specialized. Your job is very general. You’re very senior in your organization. You’re very junior in your organization. Should you take the survey?

Yes. If you do now, or have ever worked in the aid industry….

You get the point.

Just take the survey. (please)

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J.

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February 18, 2014November 5, 2017

Thanks for taking our survey….

Thanks for taking our survey…. and what was that all about, anyway?

Don’t know what we’re talking about? Take The Survey!

Thanks for taking the time to join this conversation. You’re probably wondering who are we are why are we doing this?

First things, first. Meet the research collaborators:

Dr. Thomas Arcaro, Professor of Sociology at Elon University. Founding Director of the Periclean Scholars Program, and lead researcher on this project.
“J.” 20+ year aid industry veteran, co-founder/blogger at Stuff Expat Aid Workers Like, blogger at AidSpeak, and author of two humanitarian novels:

This project, according to “J.”

I’ve spent the better part of the past twenty years believing that something was wrong with me. I knew the cause, of course: I am a professional aid worker, and I have been for some time. And that fact alone seemed, for a while, to explain it all. Aid-work-induced weirdness was for many years something easy to hold up as a pseudo-explanation for why I couldn’t or couldn’t be bothered to try to fit in or get along.

But you get to a point—or at least I did—where the simple acknowledgement that “aid work affects you” is no longer sufficient. It’s not sufficient because we want to understand ourselves, and others like us. I am now in a space where I need to understand, supervise, lead, and in a few cases even mentor actual, young, newly-minted aid workers. The ability to analyze and make some sense of my own experience, including those moments of jarring disconnect, is a critical attribute.

But there’s also more to it than enhancing one’s own level of self-awareness. There are real world—real aid world—consequences to not understanding ourselves, as aid workers, too. In her paper entitled ‘Living Well’ while ‘Doing Good’? (Missing) debates on altruism and professionalism in aid work, Dr. Anne-Meike Fechter argues that:

“A persistent and exclusive focus on the ‘other’ obstructs more open and necessary debates on the role of aid workers. Such academic invisibility allows popular and misleading stereotypes of aid workers to flourish; more pertinently, it hinders honest appraisals of the experiences of aid work and its challenges.”

In other words, it is important to understand us, too. Aid workers. We are part of the aid equation, too, and if we’re not understood, neither can our roles and contributions be understood. And if our roles and contributions cannot be understood, then we cannot make improvements to it all. Good aid requires good aid workers, and good aid workers require and understanding about what an aid worker is in the first place.

All that having been said, we’re an understudied and largely misunderstood group.

Which is why, I’m particularly proud and pleased to be part of a new project meant to address exactly this. It’s my privilege to be able to collaborate in my personal time with Dr. Tom Arcaro of Elon University on a project to study us! The first step, as any real aid worker will appreciate, is to do a survey, and that is what brought you to this blog.

This project, according to Tom:

As founding Director of the Periclean Scholars program and Mentor of the inaugural Class of 2006, I have mucked around on the edges of aid work for the last 12 plus years. Guiding my Class through their experience partnering with HIV/AIDS related NGO’s on the ground in Namibia gave me a deep appreciate for the complexity of aid work and thus began my long and serious emersion into the world of humanitarian outreach and development work. In the last several years I have been teaching a course on ‘global citizenship’ in general and more specifically about the issues related to humanitarian aid. The work that I am doing now in studying the aid world is important to be on many levels but most critically because (1) I believe that a robust conversation about the realities of how we are responding to our global issues is vitally important and that (2) knowing more about the views of those most directly involved in this response is a positive step toward a more just world for all.

So, thanks for being part of the conversation. Stay tuned to this blog for frequent ‘mini’ polls which will appear on the right side up this page (see above now for the first one), ongoing presentation and analysis of the emerging data from the survey and, we hope, both heat and light.

Thanks for stopping by! Please promote this survey on your Facebook page, Twitter, or by any other mode you might prefer. Be sure to check back here often for updates and discussion as our research progresses.

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