courtesy of bioweb.uwlax.edu
One of the best things about the Great Tshirt Debate has been the variety of voices and perspectives that are weighing in. This one potentially misguided project was able to catalyze a huge discussion on the nature of ‘aid’. Once again the power of social media to engage people in debate and dialogue was demonstrated.
There are a lot of angles to follow up on from last week’s blow up. There’s a lot to unpack and it goes much deeper than a conversation about t-shirts. One thread I find particularly interesting is the use of social media and ICTs (information and communication technologies) for bringing greater accountability and generating input and dialogue around ideas for aid and development.
Christopher Fabian, Owen Barder and @Morealtitude wrote about this specifically in relation to the Tshirt Debate; and Duncan Greene, Owen Barder, Aidwatch, Tim Ogden, and others in a broader debate about accountability, aid and development. Certainly there are many posts and discussions out there on this topic.
Some things that stand out for me in the aftermath of the tshirt discussion:
Broadening perspectives.
It’s easy to forget that we all mean something different when we use the terms ‘aid’ and ‘development.’ There is a big difference between emergency aid and longer-term development. And there are countless theories and approaches and understandings of both of those terms (Alanna Shaikh and Talesfromthehood have both written on that). This was really apparent throughout the discussion last week and in the on-going commentary.
I’m still trying to sort out in my own mind the difference between the various aid and development theories, the perspectives of the ‘aid bloggers’ that I follow, and the frameworks of other people who were involved in the Tshirt Debate. People’s views are intimately linked with cultural, political, economic and religious worldviews, and varying levels of snark (which I have to say can be very intimidating) making it even more interesting. Before Twitter and the blogosphere, I certainly didn’t have daily exposure and access to such an array of thoughts. Score one for social media.
The elephant in the room.
All this access to all these perspectives and on-line debate and open participation is great for me. And for you. Because we read English and have access to the internet.
But there is a really big elephant in the room. One that was lurking on the global conference call hosted by Mobile Active on April 30 and that is still standing around quietly as the discussions continue. I’m talking about the voices and perspectives of the people that the 1millionshirts project was aimed at helping.
I would bet money that some of those voices would have said “I want a tshirt.”
There are a lot of possible outcomes when ‘beneficiaries’ and ‘donors’ actually talk to each other. Like donors wanting to give t-shirts and people wanting to receive them. Then what? Most of those involved in aid and development and work with local economies can and have listed a myriad of reasons why handouts are not a good idea, but most also believe in listening to voices of ‘beneficiaries.’ It seems paternalistic to say that NGOs or businesspeople know best what people need. What will happen when more donors and beneficiaries are using social media to talk to one another? And what if NGOs or governments or business people trying to improve ‘developing country’ economies don’t agree? Then what? That’s going to be pretty interesting. For a taste of this can of worms, read this post and related comments.
Development education.
This brings me to thinking about the educational processes that contribute to good development results. Around the world, people have been presented with hand-out and silver bullet ideas around development and aid for a long time. Donors need to be educated about effective aid and development, but communities do also. People have been trained to gravitate towards one-off donations and charity mentalities, and need to learn why that isn’t actually very helpful in the long term. They’ve been taught that there is a silver bullet we just need to find. People have also been trained to take hand outs and see themselves as victims and need to re-learn how to take the reins and do for themselves. This is true everywhere – people look for the easy way out. Consider how many people in the US for example prefer to get plastic surgery or take miracle diet pills and medications over adopting healthier lifestyles involving a good diet and exercise. Complicated situations require integrated approaches and often need cultural shifts and behavior changes. Those take time and effort and are hard to explain. How does social media impact on or shift this in terms of aid and development, and in which direction is it shifting?
Barriers to social media participation.
Both #1millionshirts and Kiva were held up to a huge amount of scrutiny online via social media. But again, who was scrutinizing, and who had access to the tools and means to participate in these widespread discussions? It was not the people getting loans from Kiva or the eventual t-shirt wearers. It was donors and ‘experts’. I would hope that there are plenty of discussions happening about Kiva programs at local levels, in person, in meetings and in local media or newspapers. But these don’t normally make their way to the internet.
I don’t know Kiva’s programs well, but I would also hope that Kiva staff and/or partners, for example, are listening to that local input and using it to improve their programs on the ground to make them more useful to participants. And I would hope that those discussions take place within a longer term education, training and relationship building process as with many NGOs. This kind of input from and dialogue with program participants is every bit as important for adapting and improving programs and initiatives, and maybe more important, than all the public discussions on the internet…. as long as it’s being listened to and responded to, and as long as local offices are taking these messages up the chain within the organization, and as long as local offices also are being listened to and carry weight within the organization. What might be the role of social media there to move those offline discussions further within organizations and to educate, inform and engage the broader public and ensure that responses and changes are forthcoming and everyone learns from it?
There are still huge barriers to social media participation for many people in communities all over the world… not having electricity, computers, smart phones and internet, to start with. There are also barriers like language, literacy, age and gender based discrimination, hierarchies and cultural norms that limit participation in general by particular groups in discussions and decision making. When working face-to-face, good organizations are in tune with the barriers and find ways to gather input from those typically left out of the discussion. How can organizations use what they know about engaging more marginalized populations and apply it to a more creative use of social media to ensure that all voices are heard? What resources and ICT tools would be needed to do that effectively?
Offline to Online to Offline
And how could more of the discussions that happen on the ground with communities, when programs are being designed, implemented, evaluated and re-designed; be shared in the open by those who are involved – whether participants, local bloggers, citizen journalists, NGO workers or others? And how can the debates happening online make their way back to communities that are not connected? It would be amazing if more program staff and community workers were blogging and sharing their work and their challenges and accomplishments. And if more organizational decision makers were listening to what their community workers or other staff who are blogging and tweeting are saying. And if more people participating in programs could share their viewpoints via the internet. This would be useful to the global commons and would also help the fields of aid and development to improve.
How can we support more communities to have access to social media and ICTs as tools to participate more broadly? And how can community members be the owners and drivers of this discussion and input. How can we help bring voices from the grassroots to a broader public and also bring these broader public debates back to communities. How can the access, language, literacy and cultural barriers be addressed? There are some programs out there doing this, for example Global Voices Rising, MIT’s Department of Play at the Center for Future Civic Media, and the Maneno platform, but we really need more of it.
Youth.
I think as connectivity becomes less of a challenge, we will see the younger generation claiming spaces in this way. More organizations should be working to engage more young people in the development process and supporting them to access ICTs and social media. When a consultation with children and youth was done after the Haiti earthquakes, for example, young people did not say that they wanted hand outs. They said that they wanted to participate. They wanted to play a stronger role in the recovery and the reconstruction. They said they wanted education, a voice in how things were to be done, decentralization.
Staff that I’ve worked with on youth and ICT programs in several countries have said that ICTs and community media are excellent tools for engaging youth in the development process and maintaining their interest, for supporting youth-led research and collecting opinions about community processes. With advances in technology, these voices can reach a much broader and public audience and can be pulled into donor communications as well as used as input in the resource and problem analysis, program design, program monitoring and evaluation processes. Youth can access information previously unavailable to them which broadens their own views and helps in their education processes. They can also contribute information and images of themselves and their communities to the online pool of resources so that they are portraying themselves to the world in their own image as opposed to being shown by and through the eyes of outsiders.
In addition to the Tshirt Debate stirring up questions about good donorship, I really hope it stirs up the debate about the value of more local ‘beneficiary’ voices in aid and development discussions, and that it fuels more efforts to use, adapt, and develop social media tools and ICTs to support these voices to join the debate.
What about you? What do you think?
Related posts on Wait… What?
Children and young people’s vision for a new Haiti
It’s not a black and white photo
Putting Cumbana on the map: with ethics
Wait... What? 
Excellent post, Linda. Really.
One dimension not yet discussed much in aid circles – at least so far as I am aware – is the problem of how to deal, theoretically and also practically, with the reality that “beneficiaries” can almost always be found who want something – a good, a service… – that years of experience already tell us would be a bad idea to provide. In my direct, personal experience, no matter how bad the aid idea is, no matter how unsustainable, no matter how paternalistic, no matter how likely to create or prolong dependency there can always be a person or community or partner who says they want it.
Asking rhetorically: how and on what bases do we decide when to privilege the voice of aid recipients over the experience of aid providers, and vice versa?
Great post!
I followed the twitter debate and listened to the conversation on Friday and while I celebrate the velocity that social media added to the debate I also missed more voices from Africans. I don’t know enough to predict what the specific communities to which this initiatives is addressed, but my guess is that they would get the shirts and do something useful with them. We have a saying in Colombia -that reflects our violent nature- “regalado hasta un balazo”, it means “if its free, I’ll even take a gunshot”, and I think it expresses very well the attitude that aid receivers had taken over the goods and money that comes in. Something on the lines like sure, why not, I won’t even bother telling you how I don’t need this.
What was really impressive for me was the educational aspect of the whole thing for the people who actually have access to twitter. The ignorance in the First World regarding the Developing economies is so extended that people just think ANYTHING they do is help. And they pat themselves in the back for that. I just saw a thesis project from Parsons that proposed joining online gambling with charity donations, so people feel good about their vice. Great. So I applaud the conversation, and the fact that it was held basically in a sphere that is the one that needs educating. Africans know they don’t need more aid the way is understood in the 1 million shirts context, as TMS Ruge stated in that conversation. Dambisa Moyo also argues they don´t need ANY aid, period. The same is true for countries like Brazil, Bolivia or Argentina that had rejected the money coming from the US, and its true for many civilians in Colombia (sadly not for the government).
So in this case I think aid went where it was needed: to the public reading the debate on twitter and facebook who will hopefully learn to think and research before coming with “thoughtful” initiatives.
I agree with the previous comment–this is a really excellent post. In successful projects the reciepient and the donor are partners. Equal partners- helping, learning,working and laughing together in the most perfect of worlds. Partnerships are built through conversation, connection and collaboration.They take time. Years and years and years and years.
Relationships are key. You must create connections in neighborhoods, schools, businesses, congregations, and other settings across all generations.
Everyone must contribute to teh vision.
J. thanks for your comment. Would really like to debate that question more. I have some thoughts…. and I’m sure you do too. 🙂
Carolina, also thanks so much for your perspective. Que dicho! I am going to slip that into a conversation one of these days. I also like your comment that the aid went where it was needed. You’re absolutely right. I hope we can keep the momentum up and continue to help people in the US see people from other countries in a new and more truthful way, not the way the media (and most NGOs) portray them.
Desiree, thanks for reading. I really enjoyed your recent post on the topic of partnerships and long term relationships with communities, and I totally agree!
If you ask people if they need free used shirts many will tell you that they do. But if you give free shirts you are killing local, viable business models that are based on the trade in secondhand clothing. I am currently concluding a PhD dissertation on the trade in secondhand clothing – from Britain to Togo, Benin, Nigeria – and my friends and informants will simply go crazy at any suggestion of giving free used clothing. These are people who range from big time importers to small scale retailers, people whose livelihood is intricately linked to secondhand clothing. So, my advice: don’t touch that, except in cases where there are humanitarian disasters. Like my friends would say, they are already going through some tough competition from cheap, new, made-in-China textile products.
The case of who speaks for whom is also important. There is probably no way that one can get a fairly representative voice or voices to speak on behalf of Africans. On most issues, I couldn’t even speak on behalf of Nigeria, my country. Many who would claim to speak for Africa, and who live on the continent, are themselves unaware of what people in rural areas really want, mainly because it is really difficult to know.
Then there is corruption. A friend once told me that the Nigerian NGO industry resembles the Nigerian public sector very much – they are both terribly corrupt. As an example, I have worked on some evaluation projects in Nigeria and I know how shallow the evaluation process is. In most cases, the funders who demand the evaluation also know this and the only reason they ask for it is because it is demanded of them from their headquarters. This might be peculiar to Nigeria but I strongly doubt it.
I have followed the Great Tshirt Debate on Twitter and on blogs, and I listened in on the call. Everything that has been said is valid, and there is really little to add. For me, the question is who are development workers listening to? There certainly is a need to help people, but an understanding of the local space is needed before any meaningful thing can be done. My thoughts lose coherence when I start thinking about how diverse Nigeria is, and how very specific the needs of people are.
A great and very necessary job of unpacking. And aid went to where it was needed is an excellent reflection. It echoes Robert Chambers’ call for a pedagogy of the non-oppressed, which he says should start with development experts.
I’m very interested in how you use this technology to bring ‘beneficiary’ voices into the debate, where they should be central. When I was first being shown the internet, it was all black screens with luminous text, mostly detailing the musical preferences of 15 year old boys. I wasn’t a 15 yr old boy so I didn’t see the point. A few years later I was trying to improve communications between head office and a myriad of field offices. I told my boss we needed blogs on the intranet; he said “What? Bleughs? It’ll never catch on with a name like that.” We wrote policy for community-based telecentres, trying to address social and technical issues of access but we couldn’t change the fact that there wasn’t much on the internet – beside the NGO-supported pages – that would seem relevant for the people we were working with. Technology develops much more quickly than we do. Now, finally, I wonder if there is sufficient stuff going on to change ideas. Are there facilitators in community-based ICT projects showing people with skills in English that here – Facebook, Twitter, blogs – is where they can interact with some of the leaders of the organisations behind the logos? (as a monoglot I’m glad to be alerted to stuff in other languages because I won’t find it by myself). Are organisational development people picking up on these debates and showing how they can be used to leverage organisational change? Do we have to wait a couple of years for academic publishing to produce some peer-reviewed papers before we can say ‘no really, look, this change is real’? Maybe the point I’m fumbling around for is that acknowledging the elephant means redistributing power. That means not only welcoming in more voices but accepting that those of us who are currently being heard, might be less so in the future. I think it’s a necessary and good deal if it leads to organisations more aligned to the ideals that attracted us into this industry in the first place.
Loomie, I’d be fascinated to see your SHC thesis as/when it is finished. Part of my frustration is that there is little precision as to exactly which Africa we are talking about, which Africans, which country, etc etc etc. Even the proposed solutions appear to me to be imprecise.
Joe,
I have yet to see this book mentioned, but ‘The Travel of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy’ by economist Pietra Rivoli might be a good place to find what you are searching for in terms of solid research. The last section is devoted to the mitumba in East Africa and discusses how it works and the impact it has had on the economies/industries of specifically Kenya and Tanzania.
It is a pop-econ book and it is probably best to use its sources to find the more complete research on the subject. I also borrowed it for about a day, so I could only page through it for a few hours so I cannot speak to it as a complete book.
Either way, I think it might help out while you wait for Loomie’s dissertation.
http://www.amazon.com/Travels-T-Shirt-Global-Economy-Economist/dp/0471648493
Tom, I’ve read quite a number of books on the impact of clothing and have interviewed British SHC wholesalers about how the system works. I have also read a number of academic papers considering the impact of SHC, but it seems that there are few written from the context of the people most directly involved on the ground in Africa, hence my interest in what Loomie is studying.
Loomnie, thanks for commenting! I can’t wait for your study to come out. Also agree with you on representation. There’s no reason to think that one African, by nature of being African, can speak for an entire continent, any more than I could say I speak for all Americans, or all women. I really think voice and participation at the local level, close to the project implementation site, is most important given that for a project to be successful it needs to understand all the local nuances. Then I wonder how some of those voices and experiences can be shared in a wider way for the benefit of all.
Booksquirm, I love Robert Chambers. Had the luck to participate in a workshop with him. He’s got it going on. I also remember seeing internet (eg., something besides email) for the first time in El Salvador in the late 1990s and really not being able to wrap my head around what I was supposed to do with the search function, or what the point of websites were. I couldn’t think of anything I needed or wanted to search for. I found out my youngest brother had created his own personal website and thought that was about as conceited as carrying around a mobile phone attached to your belt. (It was probably a MySpace page but I didn’t understand social networking)…. But anyway, the second half of your post…. I’m working on a lot of the same things and feel that there continue to be a lot of challenges. Some staff working in more remote areas still have their own barriers of skill levels, access, culture, language, and equipment, not to mention they are busy doing a huge amount of other work and this seems like an added burden on their time without much added value. Staff have started a few blogs but most have died off after a few posts. Other staff, who spend more time in the office and do have good internet connections and the required skills, etc., may not have embraced the ‘open’ nature of social media yet and fear staff may abuse it. They may also see social media projects as a way of ‘beneficiaries’ producing media aligned with the organization’s mission/vision, rather than seeing it as an additional community capacity that should be strengthened and content produced for and by communities with their own agendas. I think a lot of organizations have a long way to go internally before there will be a lot of social media happening among staff and ‘beneficiaries’. We are working on a pilot initiative right now in 4-5 countries where we will try to connect local communities with donors and staff in a closed (for child protection reasons) social media site. It will be a really interesting experiment and I will share about it as it moves along. I really wonder what else we can do to move this forward and what it will take to overcome the fears and power redistribution issues that you refer to. Part of it I think is getting a groundswell going, and probably access and tools, but also languages and local content that is created by, useful to, and appealing to people that don’t use English or one of the other major languages, and who don’t live in particular countries who dominate content right now. I don’t have a solution but think together we can all help to think more about this and move forward those things that people find to be useful and we can learn from some of the folks with experiences already in this area.
Joe – totally agree with you – there needs to be a much more detailed study and precise program plan, and that’s going to take some time and work…. I hope it’s forthcoming.
Tom – thanks a lot for sharing that resource!
Joe,
Thanks for your interest! There shouldn’t be any problem in sharing the dissertation once it is done.
Pietra Rivoli’s book is really nice. It shows that probably the only place where there is actually a ‘free market’ in textile products is in the African secondhand clothing market. In every other place there are subsidies and all kinds of protectionist strategies.
Anthropologist Karen Tranberg Hansen wrote a book in 2000 about the global secondhand clothing trade, especially as it concerns Zambia. I cannot praise the book enough. She has also written a number of journal articles. I don’t know whether you have access to journals. If you don’t I could share them if you leave me a message here.
Iraftree,
Thanks for the comments – and for your blog in general. I read it regularly and I should leave comments more often, but I am about to finish the PhD and it is literally living off my blood and time.
Loomie, thanks for this. I am not an academic economist, but I am really interested in this. I will see if my wife can get hold of the books/papers you mention as she is a university academic. I was contemplating postgrad study in economics but couldn’t really see how I could use it in the future so have been thinking about it for fun..
I am not an economist myself. I am an economic anthropologist and I am interested in many of the issues economists deal with… just from an anthropological point of view.
Thanks for your interest. I will let you know when there is anything to share…. even before the dissertation is ready for circulation.
Linda – excellent thought provoking blog post on the multiple trains of thought set off by last week’s events.
I just wanted to follow up on one specific point – the elephant in the room, and what is really meant by involvement of beneficiaries.
I think most of us working in the development field believe that the purpose of aid is to help the poor, and that it should serve the interests of the poor, and that the poor should hae a key role in decisionas that affect them. Where this becomes challenging is when the wants and needs expressed by “the poor” clash with what we as aidworkers (or donors) think is good for the poor. There are many good examples, especially in the area of promotion of human rights such as traditions child marriage and female genital cutting., or even whether to vaccinate your child. In fact most of the development issues we deal with are around people and behaviour change as much as they are about resources and things. These issues of what’s in the public good versus what people want isn’t confined to development or developing countries either (think obesity, climate change etc.).
I see two challenges here, one easier to solve than the other. The first is that it’s hard to expect people to make good decisions if they are not empowered with the knowledge they need to make them. I think with all the emphasis onthe potential of technology, there is a real risk of giving people a voice without giving them the information, skills and experience to make informed choices. So I think that any effort to increase participation through ICT access needs to be careful to address real participation by giving people opportunities to learn more about the issues they are participating in and reallly engage with them, and also ensuring that the nature of participation doesn’t mirror the existing inequalities and prejudices that might exist in existing decision making systems.
The second challenge is that once you have “impartially” empowered people with the knowledge they need to be participate effectively – we still might end-up with different views about what is important – in fact this seems more likely as giving people an increased opportunity to participate is (one would hope) likely to make them more vocal and active in making sure they are listened to, and less likely to unquestioningly accept solutions from outside. sometimes it’s easy to say OK – I’m not sure this will work “their way” but let’s give it a try.
But as an aid worker, I’m also working for a set of values I believe in which include participation – but might on occasion also conflict with the outcome of participatory processes. What should one do in this circumstance – I have my own answer which is: i) I always put human rights first because these are universally agreed standards and ii) rather than provide assistance to something I don’t agree with I can always walk away and the beneficiaries can get help somewhere else. But if I’m honest I’m not sure how satisfactory or defensible this is.
Ian, I really like the points you bring up. It seems like we keep coming back to the education part — for both donors and ‘beneficiaries’
I also like your point that empowerment needs to be ‘impartial.’
I have a whole bunch of devil’s advocate thoughts, but I’ll save those for another time…. 🙂
I am loving this discussion!
Something else to consider: we have to remember that most poor people tend to think about commodities, money, and savings very differently than do those of us who live with comfortable safety nets. (There are studies on this; I don’t have time to look them up right now, so sorry for the lack of references.) My mentality as a rich Westerner is that it’s better for the long-term development of country x if we don’t go around handing out freebies, undermining the secondhand clothing trade, and stymieing local industrial development.
Would I feel the same way if I had virtually no savings & little guarantee of future income? I’m guessing not. Can we overcome the mindset differential through conversation and consensus-building?
Hi Laura,
Yes, people without Western style safety net think about money etc. and investment differently. Which reminds me of the book Portfolios of the Poor. I haven’t finished reading it, but it shows the different ways poor people invest in order to take care of kinship and communal obligations – like marriage and funeral – in the future. So, there are different ways of investment that would not be apparent to people with a different economic and cultural background.
Another thing is that historically – and I mean up to the first half of the twentieth century – the relationship between people in the trading areas of the coastal parts of West Africa and money was radically different from the way it was with Westerners. The way they counted numbers and calculated profits were also very different. One could argue that the world is the poorer for having about lost that richness of diversity – much like the loss of a language and the wealth of knowledge that it holds. Despite these differences they traded quite well and profitably with European traders.
Back to the main point. I too think it is a lot better for longterm development not to give things to people for free. There will definitely be exceptions, and not only during humanitarian crises and disasters. That is the point that dovetails with your comment about having conversations (meaning trying to understand what is really going on) and building consensus. I think that those are about the only tools that one could really employ in order not to do more harm than good.
Loomnie, I’m really looking forward to reading your dissertation!
Laura and Loomnie, those are also really good points. I love digging into these debates. Maybe I need to go back to school :-).
[…] the Room 4 05 2010 Linda (@meowtree) has a fabulous line in her excellent post entitled “The Elephant in The Room”: Speaking of those voices not on The Great T-Shirt Conference Call, actual potential recipients […]
[…] The elephant in the room […]
[…] The elephant in the room […]
[…] The elephant in the room […]
[…] The elephant in the room […]