“Over there is like here, neither better nor worse”

For someone who is spending a fair amount of time outside his own society, and has to deal with the romanticising and/or exaggeration of difference, in my own mind and in the minds of others, Tayeb Salih, in his enigmatic novel ‘Season of Migration to the North,’ has some nice antidotes.

 

The narrator comes back from seven years in England, to his native Sudan. He’s asked about the people ‘there,’ and remarks to himself,

“...that just like us they are born and die, and in the journey from the cradle to the grave they dream dreams some of which come true and some of which are frustrated; that they fear the unknown, search for love and seek contentment in wife and child; that some are strong and some are weak; that some have been given more than they deserve by life, while others have been deprived by it, but that the differences are narrowing and most of the weak are no longer weak”.

Or,

“[o]ver there is like here, neither better nor worse.”

It’s a sentiment I sympathise with. Finally, for those who want to believe Africa is a ‘hopeless continent’ or alternatively that it is ‘rising’, Salih replies:

“[j]ust because a man has been created on the Equator some mad people regard him as a slave, others as a god. Where lies the mean?”

Colonialism, sexuality, violence, destruction, poetry, hope, hopelessness: it’s a good read.

Goodbye Spain, you're going backwards

"I suppose there is no one who spent more than a few weeks in Spain without being in some degree disillusioned." George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia

I've come to the end of my time living in Spain. Unfortunately I haven't uncovered new truths about the nature of the Spanish soul. I do have a couple of quick sources of disillusionment to share about Spain and development though.

1. Spanish cuts in development have been drastic. As my hard-Left development professor begrudgingly pointed out, while Britain with its 'gobierno conservador' has hit the magic 0.7% target, Spain has gone from 0.49% GDP to 0.17%, with an overall fall of 70% since 2008. In some areas, like Spain's contributions to the FAO, UN or WFP, the budget cut has been up to 90%, which has reduced the country to irrelevance in multilateral debates. Not a month goes by without El Pais releasing something about 'los recortes en ayuda'. At the same time a former Valencia regional deputy has just been sentenced to prison for diverting aid funds for real estate projects. Add to that the permanent crisis of migrants trying to enter Spain via its North African enclaves (whilst occasionally being shot at with rubber bullets and subsequently drowning), and you have a mess.

2. Spanish NGOs are stuck in the 80s. In terms of professionalism, my experience of Spanish NGOs can be summed up with the word 'chaos'. This almost certainly has something to do with 1. above i.e. they have no money and so no paid staff, but even so... Aside from that, and I've mentioned this before, but NGO advertising in Spain, even from big-hitters like UNICEF, manages to hit up all of the 'poverty porn' no-nos. De-contextualised view of the situation in developing countries with white people sending money as the inevitable, paternalistic solution? Check. Dehumanising pictures of unnamed brown/black children depicted without dignity or respect? Check. One dimensional view of poverty? Check. Africa = hunger, disease, death? Check. You get my point.

I say Spanish NGOs are stuck in the 80s; I meant 60s. On the left is an advert I saw on Wednesday in Madrid and on the right, an Oxfam collecting tin from the 1960s. photo credit: WhyDev

I can't say I'm too optimistic about either. Although 81% of Spanish people agree that giving aid is "a moral duty and helps to build a more just and sustainable world," it's just not a priority for most people. Meanwhile, as Emily Roenigk points out, poverty porn works, as pernicious as it is.

I just hope that the kid in the picture is getting a chunky commission for her image rights.

Replacing 'Africa' with Africa

The Guardian released a podcast the other week busting some myths about Africa. Before I get into anything though, I just want everyone to enjoy for a second the irony of the Guardian hosting an event focusing on how we should go beyond misleading images often peddled by the media in their hipster hangout café at Shoreditch Boxpark. If you're not from London, this article should give you the gist.

Anyway they hit up ‘Africa is corrupt,’ ‘Human rights don’t matter in Africa,’ ‘Africans are always in poverty,’ ‘Africa can’t do capitalism,’ ‘Aid is good for Africa,’ jaunting through the issues of colonialism, gay rights, the pernicious effects of aid, the links between poverty and corruption, to name a few. As one of the panel members commented, though, they didn’t have time to cover a number of other myths, so I’m going to give it a go here. I’m also going to replicate their format and try to fit multiple enormous issues into a hopelessly short space with inevitably inadequate consequences.

‘Africa rising’

If it's not declining...?

‘[O]ver the ten years to 2010, six of the world's ten fastest-growing economies were in sub-Saharan Africa’. Annual GDP growth was 4.8% from 2002 to 2011. Nollywood. M-Pesa. HowwemadeitinAfrica. There’s even an IMF conference in Maputo this month called ‘Africa Rising’. Is Africa rising?

Now clearly many African countries have enjoyed strong economic growth in the last 10-15 years, leading to this binary switch in Economist titles from ‘the hopeless continent’ to 'Africa rising'. Aside from any the fact that such a simple narrative must be wrong, there are also a number of concrete, interrelated problems with this. One is that economic prosperity isn’t being shared; Afrobarometer shows that there is “widespread dissatisfaction with current economic conditions despite a decade of strong growth”. Project Syndicate points out that while the richest 10% of East Africans have an average income of $2100, comparable to Central America, the bottom 40% of East Africans have to get by on $225 a year, well under $1.25, the World Bank’s pretty meagre cutoff for extreme poverty, as well as suffering from all associated problems of poor services, child mortality, inadequate sanitation etc. Much of the wealth created also goes into oiling patronage networks, or flows back out of the continent – $1.4 trillion was lost between 1980 and 2009 according to a African Development Bank/Global Financial Integrity report.

Economists also argue that African economies haven’t achieved the basic transformation required to sustain and broaden growth. Today’s rich countries got there by building big tasty factories, which hasn’t really happened in Africa, where it’s mainly been extractive industries. Nigeria’s GDP rebasing (GDP growth of 90% overnight, not too shabby) has meant oil’s share of domestic product has dropped to 14.4%, but this only means that it’s leapfrogged the industrial part to a services-oriented model, and no-one ever got rich by selling call-credit. Ha Joon Chang: “…it is a fantasy to think that developing countries can skip industrialisation and build prosperity on the basis of service industries”. So ‘Africa rising’ myth slain, and much to ponder for African governments.

I was going to move on to 'Africa is dangerous' next, because it's one of my favourites to use to snark at people (because I have ever-so-slightly more knowledge than whoever asks the question). 'Uganda? Dangerous? Jeez mum, the war in the North ended like over five years ago'. SLASH, 'the Global Disease Burden finds that road accidents account for almost as many deaths as HIV/AIDS worldwide and Uganda has one of the world's worst rates so you're actually right mum but we'll keep quiet about that especially cause I'm planning a 20-hour coach ride from Nairobi to Mbarara this summer...'

But more valuable than taking down another straw man (which is what most of these are) is to point out the underlying craziness of trying to encapsulate a continent within one narrative. The problem isn't that we need to replace the misleading myths about Africa with others; we need to rid ourselves of them altogether, and also question who 'we' are. Suffice to say that most of these myths come from non-Africans imposing their vision and thereby deliberately suppressing the (often mundane) messiness of reality. I'd argue that at least some of it springs from a semi-colonial impulse to present Africa as exciting/novel/backward/mysterious/incomprehensible/different/pick-your-adjective. But Uganda is like Colombia is like the UK, in that they are just places with coca cola and trees and jealousy even if they are very different in other respects. When people in Europe/North America speak of the Democratic Republic of Congo with the same placid (but informed) indifference that characterises responses from Britons to the question, "What do you think about Belgium?," the world will be a better place.

If you want any more information on any of this, I suggest you read the news basically (not that Western media makes it that easy for you). All myths and misconceptions about Africa are disproved every day by the real world, which is available ready-digested via the following outlets (AllAfrica.com; Think Africa Press; African Arguments; Africaisacountry; BBC Africa Today podcast; Twitter and countless other sources)

Development double-think: how to (not) get out of bed in the morning

I'm currently in a very conceptual phase of my dissertation, with phrases like 'cognitive legitimacy,' 'socially constructed' and 'discourse' flying around. I'm trying to make them stop whirring using coffee and marks on bits of paper without success. In light of that I thought I'd continue the self-torture on this blog, by taking an assorted selection of ideas, articles and videos on a topic that occupies me a lot and attempt to construct a narrative. Let's see if pixels on a screen work better than ink on paper. Not promising coherence.

The problem is the co-existence of the following two facts:

1) Day-to-day, NGO/donor agency staff show up at the office and work hard and in good faith, to fill in the logframes/answer the emails/run the 'community consultation' session etc.

2) There is a consciousness among those who work in development that what NGOs/donors do is often extremely problematic conceptually and is fundamentally not what poor countries need.

Binyavanga Wainaina in a recent interview with the Guardian notes the guilty 'eye-rolling' of the aid worker betraying the fact she 'doesn't buy the bullshit' of aid work, just as he doesn't. Aid workers 'admit the irony, but the situation persists'. Neil McCulloch talks of the increasing popularity of the “political economy” approach to development assistance, attempting "to apply a more political approach to understanding development problems and, importantly, development “solutions”. In particular, a central tenet of the approach is that many development problems are fundamentally political rather than technical and that therefore solutions to these problems are most likely to come from inside a country’s polity than from outside." He finishes by remarking "Sadly, the political economy of donor incentives means that it [this approach] will probably remain a marginal pursuit [in development cooperation]." Banks and Hulme note in their 2012 paper on the role of NGOs in development the "increasingly professional and depoliticised nature [of NGOs] and their subsequent limitations in promoting long-term structural change."

I'm going to resist the temptation to make a massive judgement on whether aid is good or evil, not least because as I've remarked before, it's not the right question to ask. What I'm interested and perturbed by is the double-think that allows an development worker to carry out their job in good faith at the same time as knowing that it's inadequate as a solution to the task of helping countries to provide a better life for their people. This is something I feel myself in the work I do.

The paradox is easily explained in one sense: as Banks and Hulme put it, “organisational imperatives" prevail over the "development vision”. Much of the work that NGOs carry out responds to their desire to help not to 'satisfy any existing constituency' in Wainaina's words. There's no logic of the market or of politics to force NGOs to do what people actually need, so the development industry is free to define the task and the appropriate solution as they wish providing they can justify the whole thing to themselves.

And that's the key: to get over the cognitive disjuncture, you create a set of intermediary concepts like 'NGO' or 'partnership' or 'empowerment' or 'development' that you can imbue themselves with positive meaning, to save you the mental anguish of actually tracing the logic of what you are doing to its results and power implications. Because the results often ain't pretty. It's circular: I want to help those who are worse off in the world so I go do 'development', and 'development' is good because it's 'development'. The only problem now is that if you recognise all that and still work in an ineffective organisation (which is a lot of them), then that is probably unacceptably cynical.

Anyway I'm sure I've mixed up concepts, and ultimately make a fairly trivial, well-recognised point. But let's finish with a kind-of-relevant section of the Wainaina interview because he's brilliant and illustrates my existential problem perfectly (yes before you ask, development IS about me - that's the premise of the blog). 

"The utter cynicism of it is the assumption that there is no politics in Africa, so you simply bypass it; so you find a really, really good boy who's the best in his class in an English institution, and has symmetrical features, and [an impeccable] past, and so you know that when you know that when you give them a budget line that they'll stay [within it]...as you have defined. And those are what I call applications of power with a capital-P"

Bono got there 200 years late...

Edward Carr, Ami Shah and Bruce Hall providing a cutting analysis on what's wrong with celebrity humanitarianism. Now while some things just speak for themselves (I actually can't get over this, here to be guided through by Brendan Rigby, or even more obviously Oxfam's Scarlett Johansson problem), much celebrity involvement seems insidiously good news: the authors above cite a figure of $150 million for the amount raised by the LiveAid concert in aid of the Ethiopian famine. More money = more food = more lives saved no? If only that clear cut....

“In part because rebel groups in Ethiopia also used the aid, it is estimated that the supply of humanitarian aid helped to extend the war by at least a year" (p. 22)

And more generally/long term, Carr and friends highlight two worrying narratives behind much of Bono's work, to take one example; a) the creation of a simple narrative of Africa as a "single, homogenous, helpless region" and b) the idea that we actually know what to do about it (witness 60 years of failure to find the 'key' to development). As they put it,

“celebrity humanitarians often reinforce stereotypes of the global poor as helpless, which reinforces and reproduces the highly unequal structures of power that characterize our world” (p. 3)

What I found more novel, however, was the idea that this is no new phenomenon. "Bono-as-wonk," they say, goes back to the celebrity activism of the 18th and 19th centuries, to those such as Samuel Ajayi Crowther and Smeathman. In fact Gomes Eanes de Zurara was already popularising the inhumane treatment of African slaves disembarking at the Portuguese port of Lagos in the 15th century apparently. So in fact, Bono got there over 500 years late.

Either way, give it a read.