the giant and unsinkable ship....
It seems like so long ago that the aid and development blogosphere was up in arms about Jason Sadler’s One Million Shirts initiative. Unfortunately the 60-year-old aid and development giant, World Vision USA, is engaged in a similar effort – the donation of 100,000 NFL t-shirts to 4 countries. This is something World Vision USA has been doing for the past 15 years, even though the benefits of this type of program are very questionable in terms of whether they actually contribute effectively to World Vision’s overall vision and mission. Several aid workers have called them out on this; you can see the list of posts here. Talesfromthehood has given some recommendations on what would need to happen to move things forward and stop this kind of ‘bad aid.’
A day or so after the peak of the 1 million shirts outrage last May, I wrote the post below, titled “The elephant in the room“. Most of it is still valid, so I’m re-posting it. Maybe next year, around this time, I could post something that indicates that NGOs and the aid and development community in general are moving forward on some of these items.
Though there are some pretty interesting things happening in the aid and development world (for example, the “Smart Aid” initiative) and some circles that are focusing on aid transparency and related aid practice improvements (some of the folks leading these efforts are listed in the post below), it still feels like we are in much the same place we were last year. Shifting the course of the giant aid machine is very slow work.
The elephant in the room, from May 2, 2010
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 Manenoplatform, 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?
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