I just read a BBC article where a large aid organization (in this case, Care International) still refers to the Niger Famine Scam as valid information.
In my heart, I will never be able to understand the aid industry, but if I follow its logic, here are some lessons to be learned:
- Assume that all of Africa is in a state of emergency as the majority of its population does not eat our foods, nor do they have access to electricity.
- Knowing you would never want to live that way, conclude that their lives are miserable, and that they will grab at just about anything you bring them. After all, your “anything” must be better than the “something” they are eating!
- Distribute food for free. En masse. When critics say they don’t need it, point at the havoc you just created as “proof” of their neediness.
- With your excess money, give out cash for free. After all, people will only accept food for so long, and it does not look good when your “emergency food” is traded at the market for luxury items.
- Conclude that the dependency of the aid recipients is the best strategy to ensure your future growth within the business.
All this I have learned from the recent Famine Scam in Niger, and I am learning more by the day.
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Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackAs a volunteer supporter of Oxfam, I just don’t recognise the picture you paint. This is simply not the attitude of people I’ve come across at Oxfam or of people I know who work for other agencies.
Your work on local crops is clearly a very successful long-term intervention. You’re in a very good position to criticise the failings of major agencies. But your criticism seems to be completely black and white, all good or all bad.
You seem to dismiss entirely the countless projects that support local communities’ traditional agricultural and pastoral activities. I’ve certainly never come across anyone who has suggested that hunger in Africa has anything to do with “They don’t eat our foods”. Many of the agencies I know campaign very forcefully against the dumping of European and North American surplus (subsidised) agricultural produce. I’ve been involved in different aspects of Oxfam’s Make Trade Fair international trade rules campaigning for years. You make me wonder whether I’ve been living in a parallel universe.
The global scale and persistence of poverty suggests that aid agencies don’t need to create dependency in order to support the future growth of their business. When I first became involved with Oxfam a long time ago one of the first projects that caught my eye was a very simple approach to increasing soil water storage in Burkina Faso. The scheme involved the creation of bunds to hold back storm water runoff and allow repletion of groundwater reserves. That and many of the other projects I’ve come across have been based on the notion of promoting sustainability and independence.
A lot of the agencies have been in New York this last week trying to push governments to fulfil their commitment to achieving under the Millennium Development Goals. I’ve been campaigning on the issue of universal access to primary education for over a decade. Campaigning for fair access to education is hardly working to ensure dependency. I’m not clear how the rest of the MDGs contribute to that either.
Crisis intervention certainly can be chaotic and in the long run it has sometimes been counterproductive. I think that Ethiopia in 1984 made a lot of agencies aware of the problems. They put quite a lot of thought into analysis of crisis intervention issues. But crises do happen. Crisis intervention is much more organised and thoughtful than it used to be, but crises still arise where an emergency response seems to be called for. Avoiding mistakes may mean not intervening. Not intervening is a similar to gambling on the outcome. You may win, you may lose. But the problem that skews the gambler’s judgment is the knowledge that the person at risk is likely to pay a pretty high price if the gamble is lost. I think your insistence that self-interest is what drives agencies’ decisions makes you overlook the less tractable problem of humane misjudgment.
I do respect your work and the views you express based on your experience but I think you’re seeing too narrow a picture.
Dear Owen,
I strongly believe that there are things in life that cannot be compromised with, and truth is one of those. There was no famine in Niger in 2004-05; the malaria-stricken children were not dying because their mothers did not have food to give them, and people caught in the act of eating Boscia senegalensis/hanza (or any of the multiple edible leaves that Niger’s nature’s pantry has to offer) were not in “desperate need of food aid” as the media and agencies of the aid industry portrayed.
Many aid agencies, Oxfam included, still refer to the Niger Famine Scam as a valid scenario, and this is where I want to see the record set straight. Having lived through one such scam and seen the unattractive consequences of it, I maintain that the country of Niger deserves an apology.
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