Pretty shirty idea

Foreign aid and charity are often well-intentioned but just as often have no positive effects on the target population for a variety of reasons. Worse yet, aid may make people’s situation worse with one of the most clear and painful examples being food aid (if you don’t believe this statement, read up on what sending American rice to Haiti has done to its rice economy over the past several years).

The latest case of a well-intentioned but inappropriate charity idea involves a plan to send a million t-shirts to Africa. Somehow this plan caught the attention of bloggers around the world, many of whom trounced it. Happily, the guy with the idea is listening and plans to go back to the drawing board.

It sounds to me like the blogosphere has proved itself as a highly effective teaching medium. In short order, bloggers, including Professor Bill Easterly of NYU, opened the eyes of at least one member of the public, prompting him to think outside his own world and learn about people’s real needs and interests in order to come up with a culturally appropriate and more effective plan for giving.

Good work bloggers!

Image, “DSCF8068” from flickr user bigguybigcity, licensed with Creative Commons.

Steps toward rebalancing Haiti

In the late 1970s, Haiti’s rural population was 80 percent of the total population, while today it is 55 percent. This rapid shift has led to Haiti being “terribly out-of-balance” as Robert Maguire testified (PDF transcript) before the Subcommittee on International Development, Foreign Assistance, Economic Affairs and International Environmental Protection of the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on Feb. 4.

Robert Maguire is associate professor of international affairs and director of the Haiti Program at Trinity College in Washington, D.C., and Jennings Randolph senior fellow at the United States Institute of Peace. He first went to Haiti in 1974. His most recent visit ended on January 10, 2010, two days before the earthquake occurred.

In his testimony, Maguire laid out five points:

Decentralization: help people displaced from Port-au-Prince to stay in rural areas
Create a National Civic Service Corps
Strengthen state institutions through partnership
Get money into the hands of poor people
Support institutions, businesses, and leaders who work toward inclusion, less social inequality, and socially responsible investment strategies

Image: “Rural life is hard work,” a scene of rural Haiti. Creative commons licensed content by Flickr user danboarder.

Follow the aid

Despite an abundance of aid materials and the good intentions of relief agencies, relief efforts in Thailand following the December 2004 earthquake/tsunami were afflicted by skewed distribution.

Jin Sato, associate professor in the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia at the University of Tokyo, analyzes the factors that skewed relief good distribution in an article in Development in Practice. He discusses how the political and economic turmoil caused by relief efforts themselves constitute an additional risk for victims.

Sato also notes that while the social ramifications of relief efforts are substantial, yet they are often overlooked for three reasons:

most “disaster management” experts are engineers
social analysis requires time
relief organizations are poorly coordinated which prevents the generation of lessons for the future

His recommendations for more effective responses, based on lessons from the 2004-2005 tsunami relief efforts, are:

the selection of goods and distribution mechanisms are of paramount importance
aid efforts should not only supply goods but should focus on strengthening institutional resources that allow recipient communities to more effectively absorb the goods and distribute them fairly
relief agencies should co-ordinate with each other after the emergency stage to develop ways to reduce pre-existing inequalities or dominance

After reading his article, I decided to contact Professor Sato to learn more about him and his involvement in disaster response work. Here is my email interview with him:

Q: What is your background in terms of academic training?

A: My B.A. from the University of Tokyo was in anthropology, and I have a master’s degree in both international relations and public policy from the Kennedy School at Harvard University. My Ph.D. was in international studies (interdisciplinary) at the University of Tokyo, and my dissertation topic was on natural resource governance and politics in Thailand. I did a post-doc at the Agrarian Studies Program at Yale University under Jim Scott in 1998-1999.

Since my student years, I have been interested in natural resource governance and foreign aid. The article is a spin off from my interest in the latter.

Q: When you worked as a policy advisor to the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment of Thailand, what were your major responsibilities?

A: I was there to advise on the formulation (and prioritization) of the Environmental Policy 5-year plan, particularly about citizen participation and the role of international assistance (especially that of the Japanese government).

Q: Where were you when the tsunami hit, and what role if any did you play in responding to the tragedy?

A: As you might remember, the Tsunami hit on Dec. 25. I was taking a vacation in Samui Island in Thailand. Since my duty was to advise on environmental policy, I was not sure what to do, but I contacted the JICA office to offer assistance since I could speak the language. They put me on the first assistance survey team to develop livelihood assistance strategy from Japan. But Japanese assistance was too slow, and I don’t think we had any impact at all.

Q: Can you comment on the current situation in Haiti, in terms of how your findings about Thailand might relate to that context?

A: Since I have not been to the field, it is hard to comment. But judging from the news, there was more order and discipline in Thailand where people could wait in lines to receive aid goods. The tsunami hit only the coastal zone and other parts remain intact (unlike the earthquake). This is a huge difference in terms of the availability of assistance and speed of recovery. I suspect that there will be some structural concentration in either damage or assistance due to pre-existing resource inequity.

Image courtesy of Jin Sato.

What low-income Haitians want: lessons for aid-givers

In rural Haiti, before entering anyone’s yard, one calls out : “Onè! (Honor!), waiting to hear the welcome, “Respe!” (Respect) before entering. Cultural anthropologist Jennie Smith-Paríolá did long term fieldwork with “peasant” groups in Haiti’s Northeast, Central Plateau, and Grand Anse regions. She learned much about the values of honor/respect and how they infuse Haitians ideas of right and wrong and the kind of life that humans ought to be able to have.

Many countries and organizations are committed to helping Haiti recover from the devastation of the earthquake and to move ahead to build a stronger country than existed before. The shock of the earthquake’s toll in terms of mortality, loss of family and loved ones, and physical destruction is serving as a wake-up call to the Haitian government and to other countries and institutions that something, now and onwards, seriously, must be done to help the Haitian people achieve a better future.

Typically, countries and organizations tend to give the kind of aid that they tend to give…regardless of the context of the place and people in need. Among other forms of help, the US has sent in the military. In fact, as of today’s newspaper accounts, the US is in charge of the airport and the majority of planes landing carry US military. Planes bringing food and water are being held back.

Patterns of giving are entrenched and hard to change. But they must be. While the US military no doubt serves an important role in helping to retrieve bodies and maintain order in what is an increasingly desperate situation, aid efforts should not ever be dominated by “military aid.”

Smith-Paríolá worked with and learned from the poor and disempowered of rural Haiti, many of whom have formed small-scale community organizations to provide services and to organize production and trade. From them, she heard incisive critiques of outsiders’ concepts of progress, democracy, and development. She listened to their aspirations and their views of how outsiders need to change. Read her book, When the Hands Are Many: Community Organization and Social Change in Rural Haiti. It conveys the voices, aspirations, and even songs of the people.

Here is what poor Haitians define as elements of a good society:

1. relative economic parity
2. strong political leaders with a sense of service who “care for” and “stand for” the poor
3. respe (respect)
4. religious pluralism to allow room for ancestral and spiritual beliefs
5. cooperative work
6. access of citizens to basic social services
7. personal and collective security

Smith-Paríolá notes that aid organizations have contested the first two of these: the first is seen as counter-productive to economic progress and the second as counter-productive to democratic principles.

In terms of respe, David Brooks’ editorial (see Samuel Martínez’s response here) in the New York Times on January 14 is a good example of the lack thereof among many outsiders.

The fourth point, from the local people’s viewpoint, can be achieved even though many people are affiliated with Protestant or Catholic missions. They feel that religious/spiritual pluralism is viable and that different belief systems are mutually informing.
Working in groups is part of rural life. It is accompanied by laughter, songs, jokes, games, and sometimes drinking. Collective play and performance “heat up” labor. Aid agencies often look down on what they perceive as rowdy and undisciplined behavior.
The sixth point is currently beyond the reach of most rural Haitians. It includes adequate schooling (primary and secondary schools with teachers and regular hours of operation), literacy training for adults, decent transportation (just a nearby road), farming equipment (hoes, machetes, plows, fertilizers, pesticides), “Western” health care (an adequate clinic within walking distance), a fair judicial system (providing equal justice to the poor), enough land to live on (land redistribution), and a healthier environment.

As the government is increasingly unable to provide for people’s livelihoods and other forms of basic needs, unrest has also increased. Crime rates have risen steeply in Port-au-Prince and also, to some extent, in rural areas. More and more often, Haitians voice concerns about feeling safe.

The lessons are clear: major changes are required in the culture of big aid organization, in how they define need, what kinds of help they provide and how they provide it. They must form coalitions with Haitian community groups based on a practiced respe that honors differences and similarities in values. They must reframe their thinking to look at the shortcoming of the powerful and wealthy rather than of the poor. Most importantly, following the values of poor Haitians, economic inequality must be reduced to the extent that if one person is eating, everyone is eating.

How to do this? A first step is that big aid givers have to abandon their authoritative knowledge of what’s best for Haiti and listen to the Haitians. This strategy means that the typical architecture of big aid will come crumbling down just like so many buildings struck by the earthquake. A different kind of reconstruction is in order: collaborative, culturally-informed aid must replace the age-old top-down kind of aid.

The people of Haiti need help, but on their terms. Let’s start with respe and move on from there.

Image: “Map of Haiti,” from Flickr user DrGulas, licensed with Creative Commons.

Anthro in the news 1/11/10

• Tell it to the Marines
NPR aired an interview with cultural anthropologist Paula Holmes-Eber who teaches “operational culture” at Marine Corps University in Quantico, Virginia. Classes include discussion of cultural sensitivity and the cultural/social consequences of military presence and military actions, such as blowing up a bridge.

• Nacirema craziness goes global
In an article called “The Americanization of Mental Illness” in The New York Times Magazine, Ethan Watters (blog) describes how Western, especially American, globalization includes the spread of Western/American understandings of mental health and illness. He points to some of the negative consequences of this trend.

In discussing why people diagnosed with schizophrenia in developing countries fare better than those in industrialized countries, he draws on the work of medical anthropologist Juli McGruder of the University of Puget Sound. McGruder’s research in Zanzibar shows how Swahili spiritual beliefs and healing practices help the ill person by avoiding stigma and keeping social and family ties intact. Note: Nacirema is “American” spelled backwards.

• Guardians of the nameless dead
The bodies of hundreds of victims of political violence in Colombia are often disposed of by being thrown into rivers. Sometimes the bodies wash up on the river bank. WIS News describes the work of one local civil servant, Maria Ines Mejia, who spends time recovering bodies from the Cauca River and thereby helping authorities record the deaths and chronicle the killings.

Maria Victoria Uribe, an anthropologist with Colombia’s National Commission of Reconciliation and Reparation, names people like Mejia as “unknown heroes.” Michelle Hamilton, an expert in body composition who directs the Forensic Anthropology Center at Texas State University, notes that “…you can imagine trying to grab onto a water-logged body with the skin slipping off. It can come off in your hands.”

• Celebration and warning
Survival International’s “weighty coffee-table book,” We Are One: A Celebration of Tribal Peoples, is reviewed in the Ecologist. The unity and diversity of indigenous peoples around the world is celebrated in beautiful photographs and through the words of tribal and non-tribal people. Given that Survival International commissioned the book, it also expectedly contains a message of deep concern about the dangers to survival that so many indigenous/tribal cultures face.

• Who rules?
Janine Wedel is a cultural anthropologist and professor of public policy at George Mason University. Her book, The Shadow Elite: How the World’s New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market, was reviewed in the Financial Times and by Arianna Huffington of the Huffington Post. Wedel has appeared at several book launches in D.C.
Continue reading “Anthro in the news 1/11/10” →

Boomerang aid: giving to get back

According to the World Health Organization, the Asia-Pacific region is one of the highest risk areas for the emergence of new infectious diseases. Factors such as dense rural populations living in close proximity to animals and dense urban housing are found throughout the region. Existing national and regional capacity to prevent or deal with disease outbreaks is uneven, ranging from more adequate systems in Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand to countries with minimal health-care infrastructure such as the Solomon Islands, Micronesia, and Papua New Guinea.

In June 2007, the revised International Health Regulations (IHR) of the World Health Organization became official after a 12-year revision process. The new IHR emphasizes prevention of disease outbreaks and spread rather than reaction. Each member state of the WHO has five years to fulfill the seven key obligations. While richer countries will not face a serious problem in implementation, developing country members will find it difficult if not impossible to meet the obligations by the deadline. They require an advanced health-care infrastructure including well-trained medical professionals and scientists, diagnostic laboratories, surveillance systems, and health care services far beyond their economic means.

In an article in the Australian Journal of International Affairs, Adam Kamradt-Scott, Research Fellow at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, reviews the challenges to the developing countries in the region of meeting the IHR obligations. He then considers the role of Australian aid in helping developing countries. Most recent AusAID funds have supported general development goals such as improving economic infrastructure and local employment with smaller amounts of funding targeted to strengthen health care infrastructure.

Kamradt-Scott finds this pattern regrettable since more emphasis on health care investment would have two “spin-off benefits:” improving the capacity for early identification of disease outbreaks and strategic building on the investments Australia has already made in enhancing pandemic preparedness in the region. Both, in turn, will benefit Australia in protecting the health of its own people.

A final benefit the author mentions, drawn from a AusAID document, is that such aid from Australia to regional LDCs will “bolster, and potentially extend, its existing sphere of influence” and help Australia achieve “other foreign policy objectives such as promoting regional stability and governance reform.” Refreshingly direct, isn’t it.

Cultural anthropologists have defined many categories of gift-giving and exchange including the “free gift” for which there is no thought of a return of any kind at any time. A “free gift” is the logical opposite of theft in which someone takes something from someone else with no intention to ever return it to the owner. In between is reciprocity (which has subcategories such as generalized or balanced) in which two people exchange items of roughly equivalent value over time with no exact date specified for the return. Kula trading in the Trobriand Islands is a classic example of reciprocity. And then there is market exchange in which a seller seeks to make a profit through a sale in which a buyer agrees to transfer a specified payment by a specified date.

Development aid explicitly to expand influence poses a challenge to anthropological categories of giving and exchange. Unlike a pure gift, there is a sense on the part of the giver that a return is expected. Unlike reciprocity as in the kula, identifiably similar goods are not exchanged between roughly equal-status trading partners. Unlike market exchange, there is no sale involved, no buyer and seller. It’s not theft. It’s a gift given with the knowledge that its benefits will come back to the giver. It’s boomerang aid.

I don’t mean to point the finger of blame at Australia alone since many other countries, my own included, direct most of their aid to serve their own political or business interests. Readers: do you know of any recent studies that have compared bilateral aid organizations in terms of how much of their aid is self-interested and how much is more altruistic?

Photo, “long distance”, from Flickr, Creative Commons.