Secret aid worker: 'It's time to talk about the dark side of development comms'
It’s expected that communications professionals will use their contacts to get their organisation as much coverage as possible, but where do you draw the line? Photograph: Moof/Getty Images/Cultura RF
“Think outside the box,” I was told by my manager back in the US, when I asked them how on earth they expected me to promote a programme that was clearly failing.
I come from a small country in Asia. I have been working at this development organisation as a communications person for several years. It has not been quite the journey I’d expected but, unlike my other colleagues, I get to write about the community, interact with them and get their stories out – that has been my biggest pleasure so far.
Running a development programme educating citizens about their rights is not easy in a country fraught with political instability but writing about it is even harder when the programme is battling to get off the ground. I struggle for good stories.
The problem is perhaps me rather than the organisation. Like many communications professionals, I come from a journalistic background, but despite several years of being immersed in the PR world, I can’t quite get beyond the idea that most of the outreach projects we run are essentially propaganda, with little weight to them.
In this job, telling it as it is, writing what you see is not good enough. A capacity-building workshop or a report can’t just be called that, it should have several glorifying adjectives and a social media campaign.
Worse though is the feeling that much of what I’m asked to do by my superiors is ethically questionable. In a previous job with another big aid organisation, I was asked to make up quotes to “enhance” beneficiary case studies. When I refused, the programme officer acted surprised and told me: “It’s fine, I know what that person would say.”
It’s also expected that communications professionals will use their contacts to get their organisation as much coverage as possible, but where do you draw the line? I don’t think it’s OK to call in personal favours to get out positive stories about a programme that isn’t delivering what it promised the community it would. My boss disagrees.
The international community is too focused on using gimmicks in outreach campaigns rather than considering who their audience is and what they want. I was recently asked to design an outreach campaign to educate the local community we work in about the work we do. So keeping in mind the low literacy rate of our audience and the limited access they have to online and print media, I designed a communcations campaign accordingly. However, that was considered old and outdated.
For my organisation, the use of new technology such as apps and social media held priority over the local regional media, even though I explained much of these were inaccessible to the people we were trying to reach. Too often people think that if a country has access to the internet and mobile phones, every one has access. They don’t consider the cost of mobile data, the literacy rate, or if the locals would even use their devices the same way as in the US and Europe.
Instead, we are told to shape our communication strategy around the coolest buzzwords making the rounds in the US or Europe. All because one person back at headquarters, who has no idea of what goes on in the more rural districts of this country, says so. There is little understanding that projects need to be tailored to each community, rather than just replicated on a grand scale.
While discussing my frustrations with other colleagues, I found out the reality of working in development comms was the same pretty much everywhere in the aid world. If the design of an outreach programme isn’t the problem, the focus of the communication concentrates too much on one person rather than the issue it is meant to be highlighting, or on the gimmicks, drawing attention to meaningless events with celebrities rather than grassroots outreach activities promoting behaviour change vital for the programme’s success.
Often the programming team don’t think we know how to do our jobs either. With the best intentions, they want to squish each and every detail of their work into one story. They do not understand that the readers don’t care much about the technicalities of the programme. If they did, they would read the project documents and progress reports.
Ultimately, I’ve learned that in the aid world, the visibility of a project based on its results, its intent and scope of work holds no value compared with the visibility of the department responsible for the project, or for the career progression of the few within a huge organisation.
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Secret aid worker: buzzwords are killing development
International development professionals love their buzzwords. Empowerment. Agency. Community-based. Human-centred. Equal partnership. Grassroots.
I work for an NGO in sub-Saharan Africa that uses all of these words on its beautifully designed website, full of high-resolution photos of smiling African babies. We are all about “empowering the community” with a battle cry of “Healthcare for everyone!” We take every chance we can find to let you know that we, like apparently no other humans on earth, believe that health is a human right.
When I was offered the chance to work here, all I knew about the organisation was what was written on its website. I was impressed. A small NGO with high quality graphics? Smiling babies? Empowerment? Sold. They spouted all the words I had learned about community-based development in class, so they had to be doing things correctly, right?
Wrong. Oh, so so wrong. Here’s what I have found.
We talk about empowerment, yet our patients and our staff members, many of whom are beneficiaries of the organisation themselves, have zero input into how decisions are made. In fact, many of our lowest-paid employees are expected to use their own salaries to pay for work-related costs, leaving them effectively with no salary at the end of the month.
We talk about agency, and yet our board of directors is 100% white. Not one person of colour or from the beneficiary country.
We talk about grassroots development, and yet many of our programmes are defined by the whims of American “experts” thousands of miles away.
We talk about equal partnership, yet the local government offers few to no resources to our health programmes. What motivation will they ever have to provide these necessary services to their own population when foreigners are continuing to provide it for them?
As a person of colour, I cannot help but see how my parents must have felt in the post-colonial country they grew up in. People who do not look like you, who do not come from your socioeconomic background, who do not share any of your life experiences are the same ones who are making decisions for your people. And it’s difficult to question these practices when you know you are receiving services that would otherwise be unavailable. I know I am part of the problem.
We Americans continue to make decisions, citing positive feedback and eternal gratefulness from African beneficiaries as justification for not involving them in the decision-making process. They’re happy having access to the healthcare we gave them, so why take the time to involve them in decisions that directly concern their lives?
Empowerment and agency and human-centricity have come to seem like euphemistic ways to get donors to feel like they are not engaging in neo-colonial practices by defining and determining the presence of healthcare for populations worlds away from their own.
To address this issue, we know we should be actively searching out local leaders in the community, hiring should be more diverse, and foreigners should be taking the role of support staff, not local. So why don’t foreign NGOs make these changes, when they know that they should? Crude pragmatism is the most often used excuse. “We’ll have an American in this role now, but eventually, we’ll hire local staff.” Or perhaps, “We’re doing our best, and it was just too difficult to find anyone else who could do this job.” Or, as all NGOs state, “We did not have enough funding.”
However, practices such as seeking out diversity and being intentional about the role of foreign staff often does not require additional resources. It does, however, require a commitment to critical reflection and to a constant, rigorous analysis of whether practice is truly reflecting the intention of the buzzword. And “doing our best” cannot be good enough when the future of communities and countries are at stake. Yes, perhaps it will take longer to train local staff to do the jobs young Americans can do with their fancy university degrees, but it is the responsibility of organisations who have taken on this work to do it correctly, or at the very least, in the way they say they are doing.
Sure, formalised colonialism is over. But now we have to make sure we aren’t implementing an even more insidious, neo-colonial system that gives white, rich people around the world the power to make decisions for countries that are not their own.
Do you have a secret aid worker story you’d like to tell? You can contact us confidentially at globaldevpros@theguardian.com – please put “Secret aid worker” in the subject line. If you’d like to encrypt your email to us, here’s instructions on how to set up a PGP mail client and our public PGP key.
Join our community of development professionals and humanitarians. Follow@GuardianGDP on Twitter.
http://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2016/mar/08/secret-aid-worker-buzzwords-are-killing-development-human-centred-grassroots
