So when the first critical reviews of Jeffrey Gettleman’sLove, Africa-A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival appeared, I felt sufficiently prepared for yet another turn on the memoir rollercoaster. Actually, it is not a bad contribution to the genre, but also does not take existing narratives further. Gettleman’s book has become the backdrop for much bigger debates on how journalism, foreign correspondents, the New York Times, expat living in Nairobi and globalized descriptions of African politics and conflicts have been changing-our at least should be. Maybe Gettleman’s book was written five or ten years too late, a memoir of an ‘old school’ correspondent in a quickly and fundamentally changing media landscape that demands more localization of content and a nuanced treatment beyond ‘Africa is a country’ of conflict and war.
From the frat house to the safe house - the pre-African adventures The year is 1990 and ‘we had met thousands of kids driving from Nairobi to southern Malawi on a homemade mission to bring aid to refugees’ (p.13). Gettleman’s first encounter with the African continent is one of need, aid and outside help.
I found the first three chapters underwhelming; those ‘frat boy turns into adventurous traveller in Africa’ storylines often lead straight to the nearest voluntourim outlet, back into the Silicon Valley to develop products to ‘eradicate poverty’-or in Gettleman’s case the top of Mount Kilimanjaro wearing socks as gloves during an unprepared ascent. He continues on a professional path of domestic journalism and war reporting which eventually leads to his ten-year stint as East African Bureau Chief of the New York Times.
By and large, Gettleman manages some ambivalent plotlines well: The introduction to the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad, a place for ‘four-star American generals, Arab sheikhs, tattooed contractors, bearded journalists, plump-bellied members of the Iraqi governing council, tall Sudanese prostitutes, harried aid workers’ (p.141) is nearly as Hollywood movieesque and stereotypical as it gets. But then again, the adventures around his temporary abduction are an engaging piece of writing which comes with some critical self-reflection of being a ‘bomb chaser’ in Baghdad (p.147). I may have come across ‘emergency sex’ almost ten years ago when I read a book entitled, well, Emergency Sex, but we are also dealing with a memoir written for a general audience, so those ambivalent narratives seem to be acceptable. The difficulties of maintaining relationships and making bad choices are two common themes of any aid worker or expat biography.
Another important aspect of my academic positionality is the fact that my PhD research looked at, among other things, expat communities in Kathmandu, Nepal-so I probably have a more critical understanding of the social and cultural dynamics surrounding these life- and work-styles. I was pleased when Gettleman mentioned the classic anthropological distinction of expats between Mercenary, Missionary and Misfit in the opening of chapter 9 (pp.175-176) and musings what his ‘M’ would be.
Arriving in Nairobi: Mercenary, Missionary and Misfit - What’s your M? It seems like an odd choice to start his reporting journey in Kenya with the story of the downfall of an aristocratic white British landowner. This rite of passage evokes ‘I once had a farm in Africa’ connotations-as I said, a slightly odd choice of a story to feature in the book.
Gettleman is clearly embedded in the privileges that come with expat lifestyle and being a full-time correspondent for one of the world’s leading media brands, but some of his more traditional parachuting missions into neighboring countries do have an impact beyond the story. His reporting on DRC’s leading/only gynecologist helping victims of sexual violence or covert American support for Ethiopia’s insurgency in Somalia opened up important debates at a time when the (printed) New York Times carried a much heavier weight in international affairs. He encounters some moral dilemmas and may have jeopardized sources in Somalia, but frankly these are mostly ‘normal’ professional challenges that happen in humanitarian situations all the time and aid workers, journalists and researchers have to deal with them constantly.
It wasn’t as simple as my having adrenaline junkie qualities or once-a-cop-reporter, always-a-cop-reporter, or that I was trying to bring Hemingwayesque glory to death. I felt irresponsible sinking time into a lighter story when I knew that one short plane trip away, people were being slaughtered. This was the New York Times after all, the paper of record read by diplomats, intelligence services, and decision makers around the world (p.221).
Gettleman is quite fond of Gettleman; that may not be that surprising given that he is writing his memoir, but it may also be indicative of similar Generation X narratives: His story is not a ‘rags to riches’ story, Gettleman essentially gets paid for creative work he loves and is good at and once his wife Courtenay has come to terms with the ‘emergency sex’ cheating they are starting a family and settle firmly into Nairobi. There is clearly a ‘I would do it again!’ notions about his experiences-and some parts of the European white academic male in me initial think ‘why not?!’.
What is the future of expat professioalism in Kenya and beyond? On further reflection this is the point where his narrative seems a bit outdated, maybe even out of touch with the changing realities around him and the expectations from privileged global professionals. Couldn’t Peacock, the Somalian rebel commander he ends up looking after in Nairobi after a long professional relationship be more involved in the story? Where is the local or regional talent, the Nairobi-, Kenya-, East Africa-, Africa-born journalists that could cover some of the stories (they are noticeably absent from Gettleman’s narrative), perhaps differently? And even if there may be instability in East Africa, shouldn’t there be more space for positive stories and solutions journalism?
I think this is where some of his narrative feels ‘so 2007’-most of the action happens as journalism and global media are changing (he is proud that one of Courtenay’s videos she produced for the NYT website generates 500K views which would probably lead to immediate dismissal from CNN these days…) and before tougher debates on expat professionalism hit the filter bubble.
In the final chapter Gettleman notices changes, from Macedonian waiters in upscale restaurants in Nairobi to broader socio-economic changes and changes in his mental well-being after years of high-intensity work in conflict zones. But is has been a fulfilling live so far for him and his family, even though there is an element of benefitting from other people’s misery-the ultimate paradox for all of us who work in the industry and have the privilege to write about it.
At the end of the day, Gettleman’s memoir is not an exceptional piece of writing or insight and maybe other reviewers had expected more, because he is not ‘just’ a regular humanitarian aid worker or traveling journalist. He delivers an entertaining memoir that clearly has potential for further discussions and non-expert engagement around topics of foreign correspondents and journalism from and about Africa, but ultimately falls a bit short as self-reflective, and –critical assessment of how white men, global media brands and expat bubbles create ‘our’ image of a rapidly changing continent with its 54 countries.
Gettleman, Jeffrey: Love, Africa-A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival. ISBN 978-0-06228-409-9, 325pp, 27.95 USD, New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2017.
Before I'm heading to Pretoria for a week to participate in the kick-off workshop of the new Swedish-South African University Network, I'm sharing my regular Friday link review. There may not be a new one next week due to travel-so don't read everything at once ;)!
This week's theme is definitely 'humanitarianism'-from disaster capitalism in Puerto Rico to new forms of aid and anthropological reflections as well as research ethical challenges surrounding the concept of 'doing good'...
But there are also insights into global education challenges, preventing conflicts, artificial intelligence and how students should challenge the neoliberal academy!
At the end of the day, Gettleman’s memoir is not an exceptional piece of writing or insight and maybe other reviewers had expected more, because he is not ‘just’ a regular humanitarian aid worker or traveling journalist. He delivers an entertaining memoir that clearly has potential for further discussions and non-expert engagement around topics of foreign correspondents and journalism from and about Africa, but ultimately falls a bit short as self-reflective, and –critical assessment of how white men, global media brands and expat bubbles create ‘our’ image of a rapidly changing continent with its 54 countries.
The UN's priorities in Rakhine were examined in a report commissioned by the UN in 2015 entitled "Slippery Slope: Helping Victims or Supporting Systems of Abuse". Leaked to the BBC, it is damning of the UNCT approach. "The UNCT strategy with respect to human rights focuses too heavily on the over-simplified hope that development investment itself will reduce tensions, failing to take into account that investing in a discriminatory structure run by discriminatory state actors is more likely to reinforce discrimination than change it." (...) "I think the key lesson for Myanmar from Sri Lanka is the lack of a focal point. A senior level focal point addressing the situation in Myanmar in its totality - the political, the human rights, the humanitarian and the development. It remains diffuse. And that means over the last few years there have been almost competing agendas." So might a different approach from the UN and the international community have averted the humanitarian disaster we are seeing now? It's hard to see how it might have deterred the Burmese army's massive response following the 25 August Rohingya militant attack
Jonah Fisher for BBC. As always, it is important to stress that the UN works on the invitation of and with governments; they can't simply intervene against the will of the regime. But there are obviously a few strategic options that the UN systems could have explored further...
Scaling Impact Investing The ultimate guide to investing ethically while still making a ton of cash Private Sector Accountability for Women, Children and Adolescents Companies everywhere abuse women and kids, and now it’s payback time Business Fights Poverty: Rethinking Collaboration for the SDGs How I learned to stop being greedy and love meeting anti-poverty goals
Annalisa Merelli and Max de Haldevang for Quartz with their own version of UNGA reverse 'bullshit Bingo'...
"Many of these children are not hidden or isolated from their governments and communities - they are sitting in classrooms," said Silvia Montoya, director of the Unesco Institute for Statistics. She said the report was a "wake-up call for far greater investment in the quality of education". This problem of "schooling without learning" was also highlighted by the World Bank in a report this week. It warned that millions of young people in low- and middle-income countries were receiving an inadequate education that would leave them trapped in low-paid and insecure jobs.
Sean Coughlan for BBC with reminder that focusing on building schools and featuring boys and girls in school uniforms in your organization's PR materials is actually not enough to prepare young people for a complex future...
There are also practical differences in incentives: In Jordan, a boy with mediocre test scores can still get a job after high school, maybe with the police or maybe cleaning hotel rooms. It probably will not be a great job, but it will give him some money and allow him to marry someday, which remains a mark of status in the culture. What’s more, under the law, boys can often count on inheriting twice as much as girls. Women and girls, on the other hand, have far fewer choices. They must either score high on the end-of-school exam (which only half of students typically pass) so that they can get admitted to a university and get a reputable job like a teacher or a doctor—or they must marry right away. It is considered dishonorable for a woman to work alongside men in service jobs at restaurants or hotels. “A boy doesn’t need to study hard to have a good job,” Mousa said. “But a girl needs to work hard to get a respectable job.”
Amanda Ripley for The Atlantic on gender gaps, incentives structures and the complexity of culture in the Middle East.
‘Export led growth of the sort that created the East Asian legend of the 20th century could be a thing of the past….. This includes industrialized economies that have relied on the exports of manufactures and participation in global value chains—i.e. the Malaysias, Polands, and Thailands—as well as other economies—the Pakistans, Egypts, and Honduras—that are at earlier stages of industrialization.’ So the most successful ladder of development of the last 70 years – low skill, labour intensive industrialization – looks like to be kicked away. 5 million women in Bangladesh currently working in the a garments industry that, for all its flaws, has transformed their lives (and accounts for 80% of Bangladesh’s exports), will probably be replaced by robots, located nearer the consumer markets (no need to make T shirts in Bangladesh if cheap labour is no longer necessary).
Duncan Green for fp2p summarizes a very interesting discussion about the digital future for which most of #globaldev is not ready yet.
The paradox of these Caribbean societies is that their economic challenges are often masked by an appearance of prosperity. Despite their relatively high incomes, places like Guiana, an overseas department of France, and Puerto Rico struggle with inflated prices for basic goods because of steep transportation costs from their colonial centers and restrictive legislation, such as the Jones Act, which limits their ability to engage in more favorable trade. This means many materials necessary for storm preparation — storm windows, generators, battery-powered electronics — carry price tags that are prohibitive for many. This spring, residents of Guiana sustained an 11-day mass strike to protest the economic hardship and social insecurity experienced by residents who feel ignored and abandoned by their government across the ocean.
Yarimar Bonilla for the Washington Post on Caribbean disaster capitalism and colonial pasts and presents.
The returns to prevention can basically be broken down into two parts: saved costs (the costs of reconstruction through foreign aid, the costs of peacekeeping in the recovery phase, humanitarian response, and so forth); and prevented damages (the economic value of lives lost and the cost of foregone economic growth due to conflict). Due to the huge impact that violence has on economic growth, the lost gross domestic product (GDP) plays a key role in the loss estimate. (...) This $33 Billion is net of the savings on prevention and reflects both GDP gains as well as avoiding fatalities and expenditures on peacekeeping and humanitarian response.
Gary Milante and Hannes Mueller for sipri with new evidence that prevention tops reconstruction; the full World Bank-UN report 'Pathways for Peace' is also available now.
1/ Some thoughts on We getting a $15M donation to build a "Global Learning Centre" in corktown https://t.co/GcpAiweQSx
That idea now has a name: Pathways for Prosperity, an initiative Gates announced today at a dinner held by the foundation on the sidelines of this year’s UNGA. Due to kick off in January, Pathways will likely fund research around the future of work, access to services such as finance and health care, and safety nets to protect the poor and powerless. It will also convene discussions around those topics, potentially extending into hackathons and television programs. (...) Gates said Pathways will assemble alongside them a core of 10 or 12 development experts, practitioners, technologists, and academics. The Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University is expected to be the Pathways secretariat, managing and staffing it and directing the research agenda.
Kevin Delaney for Quartz. Philanthrocapitalists, sigh...not that there is anything wrong with the agenda, but by focusing on individual leaders and involving a traditional institution like Oxford you will get more of the same...which is a shame at Gates has the power and capacity to do something differently-and look for different models and places!
There are many ways that Hollywood could do better. First, it could hire more diverse writers. Representation comes through hiring trans and nonbinary writers, black and brown writers, queer and disabled writers; it’s about engaging in the problematics of a system and not hiding from the reality that perpetuating whiteness as a norm hasn’t got us anywhere, ahem. The most damning part of the white savior complex is that Hollywood is making content for us, but without us in mind, usurping our stories with a white person’s guilt. If we want stronger storytelling, we have to be willing to invest in those who have that lived experience and nurture their voices, too. Because Hollywood is reliant upon us both to make money and to survive.
Fariha Róisín for Teen Vogue on the persistent trouble with white saviors on screen. Our digital lives
This article has made me super angry. Do you want to know what it is like trying to be a woman in a scientific space? Let me tell you. 1/ https://t.co/Dhdsk9m4JY
As it turns out, we know little about how local media engage with the increasingly common occurrence of repeated catastrophic wildfires, which might inspire a different style of reporting. As a former journalist myself, I was especially curious to know more. These questions sent us digging into a stack of 1,702 news articles published by local media in Colorado before, during and after the 2012 wildfire season – the state’s worst in history. As we analyzed these stories, an unexpected trend appeared: Articles published on wildfires’ anniversaries were more likely to bring up tough policy questions than stories published at other times of year.
Adrianne Kroepsch for Scientific American with an overview of her latest research on local media journalism and moving from event coverage to asking more political questions about wildfires.
Controlling for the interplay between education and disaster experience, we show that education raises disaster preparedness only for those households that have not been affected by a disaster in the past. Education improves abstract reasoning and anticipation skills such that the better educated undertake preventive measures without needing to first experience the harmful event and then learn later. In line with recent efforts of various UN agencies in promoting education for sustainable development, this study provides a solid empirical evidence showing positive externalities of education in disaster risk reduction.
Roman Hoffman and Raya Muttarakac with an open access article in World Development.
Everyday humanitarian practices can now take place in many different realms: in consumption, entertainment, or across social media. These are all areas that are traditionally considered outside of the humanitarian scope, not least because of their association with market-driven and celebrity-oriented activity rather than altruism and anonymity. Such practices can change – in both conservative and critical ways – how we seek to help others, and how think of ourselves when doing so.
Lisa Richey with an overview over contemporary approaches to humanitarianism for the International Political Economy of Everyday Life.
But as the experience of the BRSN shows, vernacular humanitarianism is often held hostage to the emotional and social needs of its donors, leaving aid delivery uneven and unstable in both space and time. Tightly bound to its social context, vernacular humanitarianism often leaves recipients as abstract and obscure figures abstracted from the real political and historical contexts that displaced them, and thus inadvertently reinforces the othering that characterizes anti-immigrant rhetoric (Malkki 1996). If the problem with institutional humanitarianism is that it operates through a chaotic and improvised “adhocracy” rather than the rationalized bureaucracy it claims to have (Dunn 2012), vernacular humanitarianism offers no remedy. Sadly, for all its promise, humanitarianism outside the organizational structures of the international system seems unlikely to replace its institutional counterpart.
Elizabeth Cullen Dunn for AllegraLab with an interesting reflection on new forms of humanitarianism and old problems of political and organizational limitations.
But, while local research codes and guidelines are a commendable and perhaps necessary intervention in some cases, as mentioned above, I worry that such research ethical guidelines may offer an illusion or promise of a template for an ethically unproblematic research project, erased of inevitable knowledge and power asymmetries. Do such indigenous ethics codes shift the fundamental measures of what is considered “responsible research”? Do they continue to operate within a paradigm of “reducing risks” or will they open up new possibilities of science in/with/for communities? (...) But, while local research codes and guidelines are a commendable and perhaps necessary intervention in some cases, as mentioned above, I worry that such research ethical guidelines may offer an illusion or promise of a template for an ethically unproblematic research project, erased of inevitable knowledge and power asymmetries. Do such indigenous ethics codes shift the fundamental measures of what is considered “responsible research”? Do they continue to operate within a paradigm of “reducing risks” or will they open up new possibilities of science in/with/for communities?
Angela Okune for Critical Investigations into Humanitarianism in Africa continues this section on humanitarianism with important reflections on research ethics and involving 'native people'.
There is an albeit small window of opportunity now for anthropologists to come to ethnographic grips with the rise of far- and populist right-wing formations in both Europe and the US and what their rise tell us about the changing nature of our lives, societies and politics at the moment. We could do worse than stepping up to this challenge here and now at a time when what was once on the fringe in our own societies have all of sudden and quite disturbingly turned mainstream.
Sindre Bangstad for Anthropology News. Engaging with groups and people from outside the filter bubble is a core trait of anthropology. But there are some points where I disagree with Sindre. We also need to be aware of the power of legitimizing radical, absurd, 'stupid' and fringe groups and their believes. What could an actual research agenda look like that doesn't just uncover the same stuff about 'Trump voters' that we don't know already? Why is it important to understand the super-rich or super-right/left-wing-beyond what we already know anyway?!?
Students need to be offered an environment for learning, and if that’s not forthcoming they should demand it to be so. “The more it costs, the less it’s worth,” students shouted in protest to the introduction of fees and indebtedness. Nevertheless, thinking and intellectual growth cannot be purchased “off the peg”. It makes universities into places of skills transmission, or a kind of financial transaction. The university can foster a place where we can “think together” about difficult problems and practise what Fichte called the “exercise of critical judgment”. This means not being just a consumer, and thinking for yourself with others.
Les Back for the Guardian with advice for (new) students on how to maneuver neoliberal academia.
At the end of August I started curating interesting resources that linked hurricane Harvey to broader questions of international development and humanitarian issues (Reading #Harvey through a #globaldev lens). My idea was to highlight how debates and issues the aid industry has been discussing for many years and crises are framed in the context of the so-called developed world when a disaster hits the United States of America. What I did not know then, unfortunately, was that Harvey would not be the only humanitarian disaster to affect the region-Maria followed very shortly after. This time another American territory is affected among other islands many of which still have links to European countries through various statuses as overseas territories. So new questions are emerging in the aftermath of a natural disaster of how 'them' and 'us' are linked, how humanitarian challenges are not just an issue of the 'North' helping the 'South' and how questions of development thinking and research are becoming even more important as climate change creates a truly global community of suffering, resilience and connected support.
Been in San Juan for a day and a half. Still can't wrap my mind around the daily life. Let's put this in terms people will understand. 1/x
Jackson said CDEMA’s budget planned for three crises in the year, but that September had more or less sapped the whole year’s planned expenditure. With a core team of 21 and an emergency operations budget of only about $1.5 million, new funding was needed, he said. CDEMA has played a leading role on several islands this year. Arthurs himself had been providing support in the British Virgin Islands. Overall, hundreds of civilian, police and military personnel have been deployed under CDEMA’s coordination.
The paradox of these Caribbean societies is that their economic challenges are often masked by an appearance of prosperity. Despite their relatively high incomes, places like Guiana, an overseas department of France, and Puerto Rico struggle with inflated prices for basic goods because of steep transportation costs from their colonial centers and restrictive legislation, such as the Jones Act, which limits their ability to engage in more favorable trade. This means many materials necessary for storm preparation — storm windows, generators, battery-powered electronics — carry price tags that are prohibitive for many. This spring, residents of Guiana sustained an 11-day mass strike to protest the economic hardship and social insecurity experienced by residents who feel ignored and abandoned by their government across the ocean.
Yarimar Bonilla for the Washington Post on Caribbean disaster capitalism and colonial pasts and presents.
The manner in which aid delivered to Puerto Rico has been confiscated and controlled by FEMA, along with the refusal to assist Puerto Rico in a manner similar to that offered to mainland localities affected by Hurricane Irma, for example, shapes our interpretation of this event. It subjects the inhabitants of a territory in crisis to the limits of what a federal agency is willing to do, and denies aid that may come from other countries at this critical time. Beyond the paternalism that this implies, it turns Puerto Ricans into hostages of their colonial condition.
'A collective of Puerto Rican intellectuals and their fellow supporters, mostly academics teaching in the U.S. and spearheaded by Aurea María Sotomayor (University of Pittsburgh), have put together a statement that they would like friends and associates in the U.S. media to publish, discuss, and disseminate.'
As this latest humanitarian crisis unfolds and the death toll climbs thanks to a lack of clean water, electricity, and fuel to power existing homes and hospitals, it is impossible to go back to the status quo or accept any more false "promises." To address the political and economic disaster that was there before Maria and break the very cycle of catastrophe—enduring poverty, political subjugation, mass migration—action needs to be aimed at not simply "rebuilding" the old structure, but also on rethinking the entire edifice. Otherwise, Puerto Rico will likely go back to being yet another invisible disaster set up to repeat itself.
Frances Negrón-Muntaner for the Pacific Standard on how the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act has played a powerful in (mis)governing Puerto Rico and its relationship with mainland US.
When storms threaten, such policies and practices intensify the Caribbean’s societal and ecological risks. Irma and Maria are surely not the last extreme disasters that will strike the region. To survive and flourish in this dangerous new normal, Caribbean countries would do well to look to the heart of these issues, rethinking the concept of risk and mindfully engaging with factors like poverty, gender and climate change.
Levi Gahman and Gabrielle Thongs with a piece for The Conversation that already appeared on 20 September while Maria was still causing damage and had not reached Puerto Rico yet. America never deserved Puerto Rico
Lost on them is the fact that citizenship was essentially forced on us, as the island's four-hundred year history as a territory of Spain came to an end in the Spanish-American War and the United States annexed Puerto Rico, valued at the time for its strategic location and sugar crops. Citizenship came nearly twenty years later, as a result of the Jones-Shafroth Act in 1917, which, if you'll note the year, immediately preceded the US entry into World War I, and conveniently made Puerto Ricans eligible for service in the armed forces while introducing largely empty accoutrements of self-governance. That the United States government denied the island any form of self-determination—the local government that was permitted to form in 1950 could not vote for independence or statehood, only whether to remain a colony or gain commonwealth status.
Joshua Rivera for GQ with one of what I expect many more articles that address colonial pasts and impact on the current crisis for many islands.
If this is the life you want, go for it. It’s a good life in many ways. Similarly lots of information around about what the life is like, how to get a job in the aid industry, and all of that. But for me, on this issue, the operative point is make the commitments necessary to become a full-time professional humanitarian. Don’t volunteer for two weeks. Don’t go to Mexico to build a church. Don’t start or work at an orphanage in Uganda or Cambodia. This is a full-time job, a life choice. Make the commitments or don’t make them.
J.'s post was written before this year's hurricane season but remains every bit relevant.
In the end, I managed to pull a new link review together for this week! Quite a few examples of development communication #fails, but also encouraging pieces on journalism in Nigeria and Afghanistan, female leadership in the UN system and personal & organizational well-being. Plus new publications and contributions on the digital condition of life, work & teaching!
This time another American territory is affected among other islands many of which still have links to European countries through various statuses as overseas territories. So new questions are emerging in the aftermath of a natural disaster of how 'them' and 'us' are linked, how humanitarian challenges are not just an issue of the 'North' helping the 'South' and how questions of development thinking and research are becoming even more important as climate change creates a truly global community of suffering, resilience and connected support.
Set up to prosecute warlords and dictators, perpetrators of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has been undermined by its former prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo, allege #CourtSecrets, new leaks from European Investigative Collaborations (EIC). Ocampo works with a massive network of businessmen, stars, journalists, professors, lobbyists and foundations, taking their advice and risking the confidentiality of the ICC’s investigations, the leaks claim in further revelations to be exposed in the next week. This network benefits Ocampo’s career, public profile and bank balance, but at the expense of the workings of the court, which after 15 years of existence, is still to achieve major results.
The EIC.Network is working on leaked documents in connection with the ICC and the well-known former prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo features prominently in the first piece.
The level of complacency from major companies, particularly those that trumpet their corporate social responsibility, is startling," CORE's director, Marilyn Croser, said in a statement. "Genuine transparency about the problems is needed, not just more PR."
Local health experts said most Ghanaians don’t pay attention to nutrition data. Indeed, the kind of public and political pressure that has prompted KFC to make other changes in the West has not been felt much here. The chickens are cooked in hot tubs of palm oil — a substance the company stopped using in the United States and Britain because, among other reasons, it is high in saturated fats. Customers in most of KFC’s African markets must go online to find calorie counts, which are not on menu boards like in the United States. The company says there is neither government nor consumer clamor to add them. (...) It’s a quandary faced in numerous nations, from India and Brazil to China and Egypt: how to invite economic growth and move beyond scarcity, support growing populations and urbanization, all without being overtaken by two of modernity’s chief markers, processed and fast food. So far, not a single nation has been able to reverse the growth of obesity, and only a handful have succeeded in enforcing marketing reforms to limit consumer exposure.
Dionne Searcey and Matt Ritchel for the New York Times. I bet KFC has an awesome CSR policy in place...
A group of female journalists and data experts are working to change the digital media landscape in Africa’s most populous country by bringing greater gender diversity to the media tech community and increasing the production of data-enhanced news coverage. Established in April 2017, the Naija Data Ladies work to produce and promote data-driven news stories on health and development issues across major newsrooms in Nigeria.
Irene Wangui for ijnet with an interesting project that connects local female journalism talent with global media development and newsrooms.
Now Daryabi and his staff revel in the kind of laborious journalism that unfolds, unglamorously, hunched over documents and spreadsheets. By examining dozens of ministries, embassies and consulates, Etilaat Roz recently documented how a small clique of strongmen install family members in powerful positions, debunking government claims of breaking with the country’s toxic dynastic politics.
Sune Engel Rasmussen continues his excellent reporting from Afghanistan for the Guardian.
Semi-permanent homes or thatched houses are a staple in African villages but leave dwellers open to the elements and without necessary amenities, Rwanda's model villages seeks to change that. Rwanda's Vision 2020, says at least 70 per cent of Rwandans in rural areas will be living in planned settlements by the year 2020.
Kylie Kiunguyu for This Is Africa. Something rubbed me a bit the wrong way when I read 'model villages' as there are plenty of examples throughout history and regimes that top-down development efforts like this could lead to uniform planning and social control.
The latest offender of this age-old trend of “fashion colonialism,” is high-end label Stella McCartney, who showcased items from their Summer/Spring 2018 collection yesterday during Paris Fashion Week. The brand infused ankara designs into their new collection to create dresses, jumpsuits and tops, that look a lot like what our favorite aunties wear casually around the house or to run errands. And you can be certain that their clothing is not cheap, just peep the price points on their website. Many of these items could very easily be sewn by your local tailor in, let’s say, Lagos, Dar es Salaam, Dakar or Accra for less than a quarter of the cost. To add insult to injury, they presented these designs on a group of mostly white models.
Damola Durosomo for okayafrica and the question of why new forms of globalizing culture and fashion usually come with a slightly bitter aftertaste of 'fashion colonialism', rather than joint design projects. But it can get so much worse (see below)...
Marisa Papen wanted 2 experience a new culture. She caught a plane 2 Ethiopia & spent a week living w/ Surma Tribe. https://t.co/YUR3zUGr5o
The deceptive promotion of complex derivatives, for instance, did contribute to the 2008 financial crisis. But he doesn’t distinguish his criticisms from his more general condemnation of capitalism. Market failures happen when private and social returns diverge. Cheaters profit by causing harm to others. The answer isn’t to replace the market system with social enterprises, but to target the market failures and enforce laws or regulations against deception in financial markets. Mr. Yunus’s call to scrap a system that works, however imperfectly, for a vaguely defined and unproven system that relies mainly on social entrepreneurship, is a far too risky project.
Bill Easterly reviews Muhammad Yunus' new book for the Wall Street Journal.
So far all the reactions to the @WorldBank WDR seem to be "yes, that's what we've been saying!" -- from ppl saying totally opposite things.
As Special Assistant to the Resident Coordinator, Linnea Van Wagenen coordinates the activities of the 17 different agencies that make up the United Nations Integrated Office for Sierra Leone. (...). These UN agencies are hotbeds of activity, with dozens of initiatives in various stages of progress. Van Wagenen says that, to stay resilient, “a key strategy is having many different projects on my whiteboard — and knowing what I should be working on now, versus what is in someone else’s hands.” As with seeds tossed onto rocky soil, Van Wagenen accepts that not all projects will germinate and bear fruit. She scans continuously for signs of progress and uses them to propel her team forward, what she calls “catching the small winds.” She explains, “In my coordinating role, lots of people check in with me. I keep an eye on what’s going on and do whatever I can to promote the good things that are happening.” This boosts her own and others’ sense of meaning. As an example, she described a current project to build an app for justice. “Lots of prisoners in Sierra Leone get stuck in jail for years because their case files get lost. This app will help people track their cases in the justice system. It’s a very meaningful project, so I want to spread the word about it.”
Monique Valcour for the Harvard Business Review. I am very proud that an alumna from our ComDev MA program is featured in the piece! Well done, Linnea!
I no longer believe that meditation and self-care are enough. It can certainly be a starting point. It was for me. But we can’t stop there. Otherwise it just becomes narcissist self-care. I always say that I can meditate until I’m blue in the face, but if my manager or the organizational culture is toxic, my mindfulness will help me cope for a while or help me make the decision to leave, but it is not going to transform the organization. Things have changed quite a bit since I started writing my blog back in 2010. Mindfulness is everywhere now. It has become a commodity. There are so many consultants out there giving trainings on stress management, burnout, and resilience. But I think some are missing the point. A workshop can be a helpful catalyst, but in itself it won’t necessarily change an organization’s culture and way of working. It seems to me that organizations run the risk of wasting their money on once-off trainings. Fostering a learning and caring work environment is the most effective approach to burnout prevention. The most successful organisations are the ones who try and practice within the values they hold dear vis-a-vis the community they work with.
The trend for tourists taking selfies with local creatures is fuelling a rise in animals being snatched from the wild by irresponsible tour operators, according to animal charity World Animal Protection. The charity found a 292% increase in the number of wildlife selfies posted on Instagram since 2014. It is asking the site to take action to "protect animals on their platform". Instagram said it was working with experts to address the issue.
Jane Wakefield for the BBC on how digital culture needs to new forms of exploitation...
Based on interviews with professional bloggers and members of a group that I refer to as the flexibly unemployed, I describe the characteristics and work practices of these groups, as well as their interactions. I argue that bloggers’ exploitation of the flexibly unemployed, together with their ideologies toward labor, act as barriers to collective action. I conclude by suggesting that, rather than imagining that workers from different classes will find common ground, communication systems should be developed that allow workers to network and share information in ways that are isolated from members of other classes and outside of online work platforms that commoditize social relationships and interactions.
Women are also likely to be disproportionately and negatively impacted by automation, and also less likely to be shaping decisions in the tech sector where they are under-represented. All of this has significant implications for the UK Government.
Becky Faith with a short 2-page overview paper from IDS.
It concludes that open, community-based data collection can lead to greater trust, which is sorely lacking in marginalised places. In large-scale data gathering, it is often unclear to those involved why the data is needed or what will be done with it. But the experience of Map Kibera shows that by starting from the ground up and sharing open data widely, it is possible to achieve strong sector-wide ramifications beyond the scope of the initial project, including increased resources and targeting by government and NGOs.
“Why aren’t we talking about this?”. Since joining the conversation on anthropology and sexual violence, I have come to feel this question is a real and not rhetorical one. I see the challenges of already limited resources and slow-moving institutions, now under threat of being dismantled by the state. These are issues that cut across and beyond academia. But in this short piece I want to suggest that part of the problem – and its solution – is specific to anthropology. I believe that one source of our collective reluctance is the way sexual violence raises uncomfortable questions about the fact and practice of being in the field. Confronting rape will require, if not answering them, at least posing them openly and honestly to ourselves.
Alix Johnson for AllegraLab. I think that this important piece is part of a growing discussion on how organizations, individuals and 'industries' need to address sexual violence more prominently-especially in the context of 'fieldwork'. The debates in the humanitarian sector and those in higher education complement each other in important ways!
In short, the physical absence of contingent faculty from the halls of our department helps keep online education marginalized in our curricular and policy-making discussions. And that’s too bad, because often it is our online teaching faculty who are the most pedagogically creative and most aware of the needs of nontraditional students. Despite my contingent status, I come to the campus daily because I like my work and value the formal and informal interactions I have with my faculty and staff colleagues. To be sure, technology enables me to communicate with my colleagues remotely if need be, which I do when I’m at conferences or even when I don’t want to walk down the hall to ask someone a question. But my physical presence on the campus provides me with insight into the range of issues and challenges -- many of them subtle -- that our department faces, and it means that I am available to serve when the need arises unexpectedly. I bring my identity as an online expert to the table in each and every conversation I have, whether that be in faculty meeting or when I grab coffee with a colleague in an effort to put off grading for 15 more minutes. My voice in those conversations helps chip away at an educational hierarchy that prioritizes traditional methods and campus-based students.
Penelope Adams Moon for Inside Higher Ed makes some important points about ensuring a physical presence of online teaching and teachers at the university to avoid marginalization of the topic because students and classroom activities may be less visible.
While professors do tend to follow back their peers, they feel little need to do the same in the case of PhD student followers. PhD students, instead, eagerly follow back professorial followers. Social norms on Twitter, thereby, may vary by academic position. Remarkably, PhD students do not appear to consider Twitter a helpful tool for networking among peers. The emerging academic public sphere facilitated by Twitter is largely shaped by the dynamics and hierarchies all too familiar to researchers struggling to plot their career paths in academia.
Robert Jäschke, Stephanie B. Linek & Christian P. Hoffmann for the LSE Impact Blog with findings from their research that, probably not entirely surprisingly, that academic hierarchies are replicated online rather than challenged.
I almost felt overwhelmed by the amount of interesting readings, reports and articles that made it into this week's review-there is *a lot* of interesting stuff for you to explore in my latest review! Development news: That Dove campaign; female leadership at the WHO; the power of soap opera in Rwanda; Sierra Leone's husband schools; tourists and Maasai meet in Tanzania; Mali& the complexities of contemporary aid efforts; robots& inclusive growth; new African literature going global; looking back on 18 years of accountability research; courageous conversation podcast. Our digital lives:Agile philanthropy & sweeping social movements; AI predictions; the futurist industrial complex. Publications:Social media guidelines in emergencies; UNCTAD's Information Economy Report; unfinished development projects in Ghana; cash transfers & work; gender & ICT survey toolkit; images & NGO campaigns; complexity & policy-making; labor conditions in the South African wine industry; a world of walls.
Academia:Research limitations in development; Chinese education in Tanzania; MOOCs (and their hype) are dead; Finnish celebrity saviors. Enjoy! New from aidnography (updated posts) Third World Quarterly & the colonialism debate The #globaldev #highered story that surprises with new twists and turns.
Reading #Maria through a #globaldev lens More underlying development issues and the complexities of Caribbean history are coming to light now in the aftermath of natural disasters and will continue to provide food for discussion in the #globaldev community.
I can see how the snapshots that are circulating the web have been misinterpreted, considering the fact that Dove has faced a backlash in the past for the exact same issue. There is a lack of trust here, and I feel the public was justified in their initial outrage. Having said that, I can also see that a lot has been left out. The narrative has been written without giving consumers context on which to base an informed opinion. (...) However, the experience I had with the Dove team was positive. I had an amazing time on set. All of the women in the shoot understood the concept and overarching objective – to use our differences to highlight the fact that all skin deserves gentleness. I remember all of us being excited at the idea of wearing nude T-shirts and turning into one another. We weren’t sure how the final edit was going to look, nor which of us would actually be featured in it, but everyone seemed to be in great spirits during filming, including me.
Lola Ogunyemi for the Guardian adds some interesting nuances to the unfortunate Dove ad that has been circulated this week. I still think that a creative team of a company like Dove should have spotted the problems of 'changing skin' visualizations much earlier in the process.
In the announcement, the head of the World Health Program Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus stated that “The team represents 14 countries, including all WHO regions, and is more than 60% women, reflecting my deep-held belief that we need top talent, gender equity and a geographically diverse set of perspectives to fulfill our mission to keep the world safe.” He is right to be proud. The World Health Organization is the last agency one would expect to have a gender balance problem. Equal opportunity for health across gender is one of the core missions of the WHO. It is a priority in all its programs. However, the WHO is also a large bureaucracy, hindered by the same processes and social factors that any large bureaucracy faces. It is as slow to change as any organization.
Alanna Shaikh for UN Dispatch on the new WHO leadership team and the 'wind of change' blowing through the UN system (?).
You found that both groups — those who watched New Dawn and those who watched the other soap — overwhelmingly agreed that there was mistrust in their community. But in discussion groups, those who watched New Dawn were more likely to suggest or support efforts to welcome newcomers and work together to solve local problems. We're not lemmings — we're not conformists. But we really don't want to seem wrong or odd to other people. When other people's ideas of what's right and wrong change, or their rules about how you can be change, that makes a big difference. I've been really interested in this idea: That how we behave is actually much more influenced by what other people think than by our own personal ideas. I think everybody's had the experience of doing something because they thought it was expected of them.
Maanvi Singh talks to Betsy Levy Paluck for NPR Goats and Soda. An interesting reminder about the power of soap operas in the contect of social change.
There are about 13 million Nigerian children who will never attend primary school — that is the highest number of any country in the world today. That is more than the entire population of the Republic of Benin. pic.twitter.com/suucIEpYe0
"Because I'm part of the school, the men are happier to observe the rules," said 66-year-old Moiwa Balley, a village chief in the southern district of Bo.(...) At one of the sessions, 35-year old Saidu Lamine, who used to regularly beat his wife, Fati, and deny her money for food, said the school had changed his life, and made him a 'good man'. Listening to her husband, Fati could not contain her joy. "He has changed - no more beatings," she said as Lamine held their baby boy. "He is now a good father and a good husband." While the husband schools strive to change the attitudes and behaviours of their students towards women, victims of domestic violence in Sierra Leone often lack support, and knowledge of their rights and how to seek justice, women's rights groups say.
Eromo Egbejule for Thomson Reuters Foundation with another example of incremental behavior change, this time in Sierra Leone.
My study of interaction between tourists and a Maasai community raised questions about the boundaries between research, tourism and entertainment. For one thing, the local Maasai generally classify overseas visitors, whether researchers, NGO workers, businessmen or tourists, in the same category. I also found that cross-cultural interactions don’t always help to break down stereotypes. The study was part of a year of fieldwork with Maasai engaged in a small, locally owned ecotourism project in Northern Tanzania. The project provides camel safaris for tourists. The mainly European and American tourists also visit a Maasai homestead as part of the safari. Because tourists are scarce in this area and it is difficult to provide advance notice of a visit, local people are normally caught by surprise when a group of visitors walks into their village. The tourists typically stay for 20 minutes to an hour, looking at the cattle corral and at people’s houses. My research provides a detailed description of “Maasai” and “tourist” views of each other, and how these views are influenced as a result of their encounters. It shows how and why ideas about “the other” persist even if they do not match people’s experiences.
Vanessa Wijngaarden shares her research from Tanzania at The Conversation...even if there is no 'Warrior Princess', the dynamics of interacting with 'the other' remain complicated.
European organizations have in some cases partnered with local organizations, and the EU-funded projects are often coordinated with the Malian government. But the overwhelming dominance of European agencies has contributed to a sense that Malians themselves are not benefiting from these programs. “This is European aid for Europeans,” said Ousmane Diarra, the president of the Malian Association for Deportees, a Bamako-based organization that supports Malians who have been deported from abroad. Diarra told me that his organization has repeatedly sought EU funding for an agricultural development project. “If I come partnered with a European, then maybe they will finance me. But if I come alone as an African, no,” he said. European diplomats say they are forced to partner with big development agencies because Malians lack the capacity to implement projects on the scale of those being approved through the EU Trust Fund. They also point to rampant corruption within the Malian government, which ranks in the bottom half of Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, as a reason to channel money toward European development agencies. (...) From his new home in a corner of Bamako where ambition tends to outpace opportunity, Traoré still thinks about traveling to Europe, though it feels farther away than ever. He and his roommates, a chauffeur and an electrician, share a single mattress on the floor of their one-room flat. Sweaters and trousers hang from pegs on the walls. A coral pink blanket is the only color in the otherwise drab, windowless room. The university is nearly an hour away, across a stagnant stream that doubles as a sewer and along wide, dusty streets crowded with honking scooters and yellow Mercedes-Benz taxis from the 1970s. He can’t always afford the trip, so he misses a lot of classes. If suddenly he found himself with money to spare, though, he knows he wouldn’t waste it on getting to school.
Ty McCormick and Nichole Sobecki for Foreign Policy with an interesting long-read on old development challenges and different responses to the "refugee crisis" in Mali.
Robots are not yet suitable for a range of labour-intensive industries, leaving the door open for developing countries to enter industrialisation processes along traditional lines. Developing countries should embrace the digital revolution, including by (1) creating the managerial and labour skills needed to operate new technologies and widely diffuse the benefits of their use; and (2) establishing internet links between massive data storage and the computing devices that power the increased use of robots. And all countries need appropriate regulatory frameworks to avoid a few taking most of the benefits, including when creating digitisation-based new products and new jobs. Any industrialisation strategy will benefit from stable but expansionary global economic conditions driven by sustained productive investment and supported by broad-based global income growth. Such an environment is currently absent. In this sense, the novelty of industrial robots lies not only in their greater scope and faster speed of automation alone, but also in its occurrence at a time of subdued macroeconomic dynamism. This tends to hold back the investment needed for the new technology to create new sectors and absorb displaced workers and, hence, to bring about the benefits that have characterised earlier technological breakthroughs.
Jörg Mayer for Vox with a nuanced take on how the challenge of 'robots' and automisation will effect development countries-it's complicated ;)!
A “West subsuming Africa” brand of critique works fine for scholars with no real skin in the game of literary publishing. It also denies real agency to a lot of African writers and other literary professionals. On the ground the literary field is far more forward-thinking and diverse. There is an entire new body of African writing that escapes this closed circuit of damning truisms. A wave of new or recently galvanised independent literary presses in the US and the UK are working in tandem with some of Africa’s most generative outlets. Together they are publishing and promoting work by young and adventurous African writers.
Jeanne-Marie Jackson outlines some of the changes of global publishing at The Conversation and how new literature from Africa is gaining attention.
Currently, work on corporate accountability appears to be largely absent. Yet, given the current debates on health equity, it’s vital to be discussing accountability approaches which respond to the growing entry of corporate actors into public health and the growing marketization of local level health services. In an era of increasing economic inequality and deregulation in a changing geo-political landscape, holding private actors to account, especially for delivery and stewardship of public goods and resources, is critical. All the more reason to gain insights and learn from the earlier and, it seems, largely forgotten work on citizen-led struggles for corporate accountability. While some of these questions in the accountability field have endured across the last eighteen years have endured, much has been learned.
John Gaventa for IDS reflects on more than a decade of research on accountability and new challenges ahead.
I'm really pleased to see Jenn Warren, an alumna of our ComDev program, involved in this great podcast project!
Foundation leaders coming from movement spaces can increase a funder’s literacy about the field and the community. It can also deepen racial and political analysis. At Solidaire, for example, Rosheuvel is creating a political education program for donors in the network and beyond. Especially for place-based foundations, hiring community leaders, not just funding them, can make a big difference, Lateefah Simon says. “I think foundations have to hire locally. I think that they have to be heartbeats of communities in the same way that they expect the community organizations they're funding to be,” Simon says. But beyond issues of staffing and understanding, Simon also challenges funders to push themselves to share the qualities and passions they would expect from the people they fund: "I'm watching so many folks in big spaces and small spaces just really step out into this moment of philanthropy, where they realize… the opportunity to push ourselves, to be just a little bit like the folks we're funding—brave and courageous, and graceful yet bombastic. Those values are amazing. And we have to live that way too."
Tate Williams for Inside Philanthropy with some really interesting thoughts on foundations in an agile, mobile, digital age. There needs to be a space for long-term engagement as well as more traditional models for organizations that don't have the capacity to make it on the 'this is sexy and happening right now' radar and yet do grassroots work in communities.
Mistaken predictions lead to fears of things that are not going to happen, whether it’s the wide-scale destruction of jobs, the Singularity, or the advent of AI that has values different from ours and might try to destroy us. We need to push back on these mistakes. But why are people making them? I see seven common reasons.
Rodney Brooks for Technology Review on the hype around AI.
For the average person, it doesn’t really matter if the decision to keep them in wage slavery is made by a super-intelligent AI or the not-so-intelligent Starbucks Scheduling System. The algorithms that already charge people with low FICO scores more for insurance, or send black people to prison for longer, or send more police to already over-policed neighborhoods, with facial recognition cameras at every corner—all of these look like old fashioned power to the person who is being judged. Ultimately this is all about power and influence. The worst-case scenario is not a vindictive AI or Sergey Brin not getting to celebrate his two-hundredth birthday. In the worst-case scenario, e-capitalism continues to run its course with ever-enlarging tools at its disposal and not a skeptical member of the elite in sight.
The guide is primarily written for people in humanitarian organizations who have social media as one of their responsibilities, but who are not able to draw on a whole social media team to manage a crisis. The focus is on concrete, practical advice to make their work easier. For people who want to delve deeper, I included a large number of links to the best resources I know.
Check out Timo Luege's new guide for ICRC and UN OCHA on how to use social media in humanitarian emergencies!
The enormous scope and considerable uncertainty associated with the next digital shift call for more facts, dialogue and action by all stakeholders The analysis contained in the Information Economy Report 2017: Digitalization, Trade and Development contributes to this process and proposes ways in which the international community can reduce inequality, enable the benefits of digitalization to reach all people and ensure that no one is left behind by the evolving digital economy.
Richard Heeks presents key findings from the new UNCTAD report on the information economy.
Why development projects in Ghana are often unfinished. Excellent from Martin Williams in APSR. OA version below https://t.co/CbXpcoQKwX
The toolkit contains a set of resources to help organisations and people collect this gender disaggregated data, with example ready-made quantitative and qualitative research tools they can use to understand women’s access to, and use of, mobile phones and other ICTs. The toolkit also has sections on designing methodologies, how to analyse the data, and how to group the data into themes around, for example, access, use, barriers to access and use, internet usage or mobile financial services.
Alexandra Tyers introduces Panoply Digital's new toolkit in cooperation with fhi360 and USAID.
The recommendations in the report are commendable but how many will be implemented in reality? Giving copies of the images to the contributors is relatively simple with portable printers, but it is not very practical. Who will be accountable for this? The UK office? The Country Office? The Photographer? More importantly how will the process be managed and at what cost? It would be more appropriate to provide the contributor with the image used in its final state e.g. adverts, poster, video. This is even less practical, and whilst I’d love to see this happen I’m not holding my breath. I’m really intrigued about the proposal to develop location and language specific resources to communicate image use more effectively. This is an excellent idea and something that could be developed collaboratively across the sector. I’ll be bold – is this something that DFID or DEC could facilitate?
David Girling for WhyDev with an overview of Save The Children's 'The People in the Pictures' publication.
The OECD’s New Approaches to Economic Challenges initiative invited experts from inside and outside the Organisation to discuss complexity theory as a means to better understand the interconnected nature of the trends and influences shaping our socio-economic environment. Their contributions, brought together here, examine the assumptions, strengths and shortcomings of traditional models, and propose a way to build new ones that would take into account factors such as psychology, history and culture neglected by these models.
This research reveals that farmers are systematically violating laws that were introduced to protect and advance the rights of farm workers. At the same time government does not effectively enforce existing labour legislation by taking punitive action against farmers. For the majority of farm workers, specifically women seasonal workers, working and living conditions have not improved. In many cases, their vulnerability and insecurity have increased. However, to fundamentally address the deep structural inequalities in commercial farming areas, labour rights cannot be addressed in isolation of broader process of agrarian reform. The vision of a transformed rural landscape must first be negotiated to ensure sustainable livelihoods, land tenure security, women’s access to health-care and the alleviation of poverty in rural communities.
Stephen Devereux, Glenise Levendal and Enya Yde with a report for Oxfam Germany and the German Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development. Additional research, especially on German supermarkets and their role in purchasing cheap wine from South Africa, is gaining some attention in German media and there are more documents on Oxfam's website, mostly in German.
Saddiki examines both regular and irregular cross-border activities, including the flow of people, goods, ideas, drugs, weapons, capital, and information, and explores the disparities that are reflected by barriers to such activities. He considers the consequences of the construction of physical and virtual walls, including their impact on international relations and the rise of the multi-billion dollar security market.
My greatest fear is that the framework of institutional corporatism and funding models has undermined our ability to ask questions about what causes a problem. Poverty, hunger, vulnerability (to hazards or climate change) are not just ‘characteristics’ of different groups of people. But this is how they are increasingly portrayed, as with ‘lifting people out of poverty’, or ‘building resilience’. The SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals) say nothing about what is causing problems of poverty, ill-health, hunger, poor water and sanitation and so on. But these problems are largely the result of processes of exploitation and oppression that must be understood and explained. In earlier times, that is exactly what development studies was doing. Increasingly it is difficult to seek explanations for these problems: it is more awkward, and we cannot make ‘free’ choices to research them. Development studies institutions are now almost completely reliant on funding from governments and development banks. These institutions are often beneficiaries of the processes that are causing the problems, and have little desire to investigate their origins.
IDS Research Fellow Terry Cannon for the ISS anniversary blog asking some really tough questions about development research.
Pragmatism dictates how many young Tanzanians I spoke to view a Chinese education. Despite voicing unflattering accusations about Chinese workers and Chinese products, a Chinese education was seen as a logical pathway to securing well-paying reliable employment. This is evidenced by Chinese firms employing students directly through the Confucius Institutes for a growing number of available positions in marketing, sales, architecture, quantity surveying, and law. Many more Tanzanians are returning from China after their undergraduate or postgraduate degrees and setting up businesses which directly trade with the Chinese in a number of capacities.
Paul Hicks for Africa Is A Country on how Chinese engagement in Tanzania expands to educational opportunities.
Where Udacity was trying to disrupt an existing higher ed market, their plans hinging on the phantasm of the “University of Everywhere,” adaptive software providers have a nice trough of public funds to sup from, including money specifically earmarked in the recently signed Every Student Succeeds Act. Personalized learning software will be galloping through schools as our latest teaching machine savior before we have any evidence of its effects. Strapped public school districts welcome Gates and Zuckerberg money no matter what strings are attached because they are desperate. Gates alone has put $15 billion into education initiatives since 1998. But both Gates and Zuckerberg have legacies of only failure when it comes to meddling in education. The generosity is great, but the average oligarch’s understanding of the complexities of education is near nil. Combine that with the kind of hype cycle we see with technology of just about any stripe, and we could be looking at some very bad unintended consequences.
John Warner for InsideHigherEd on the fading hype around MOOCs a emerging new hypes to 'fix' higher education through technology.
With an astonishing accuracy, the campaign video follows the pattern of celebrity humanitarianism seen in other contexts. When the white Finnish celebrities step out of the Ethiopia Airlines aircraft in the unidentified “developing country”, they are followed by a group of black men. Soon the scenes on the screen change – clean airport environment and the take away latte are replaced by shantytowns. From behind their sunglasses in the safety of the SUV-car, the two white Finnish women glance outdoors. Upon their arrival in the destination, the Finnish celebrity assumes the role of an expert. From the unnamed location, she explains to the Finnish audience the causal relationship between child marriages and child pregnancies.
Liina Mustonen for AllegraLab adds ethnographic analysis to Finnish celebrity engagement in 'Africa'.
Guillaume Lachenal’s The Lomidine Files-The Untold Story of a Medical Disaster in Colonial Africa, expertly translated by Noémi Tousignant, has been one of the most interesting books I have read so far this year. The story of Lomidine (also known as pentamidine), a ‘wonder drug’ thought to prevent sleeping sickness that was applied throughout colonial Africa in the 1940s and 1950s, is so much more than just an impeccably researched and vividly presented case study of medical anthropology. It is a historical inquiry into the very essence of how the French colonial state ‘worked’ and how a socio-political apparatus armed with a hubristic believe in the power of medical science subjugated native populations to dangerous medical interventions. Killing dozens of recipients, the mirage of a preventive wonder drug was eventually uncovered to be medically faulty and the story of Lomidine was hidden in public and corporate archives of the drug manufacturer.
My broader aim, however, is more ambitious: by selecting as a historical object this white powder, a powder injected more than ten million times in Africa during the 1950s, I am experimenting with a novel form of inquiry into the relation between medicine and colonialism. Considering this drug as a therapeutic agent, a technology of government, a commodity as well as an object of expertise, belief, storytelling, and controversy and by tracking its history as it unfolded, I seek to study medicine as a tool of colonial power and as the stage of its legitimation – and contestation. (…) From sanitary utopia to health catastrophe, the history of Lomidine lays bare the mediocre, enthusiastic, and obstinate contribution of medicine to European imperialism (2).
There are three outstanding features of the book that I will focus on in my review: First, the story is a well-crafted historical narrative. Second, the book is an exemplary case study of what ‘discourse analysis’ or ‘governmentality’ really mean from a research perspective. And third, as distant and outdated some of the practices of the 1950s now seem, the book opens up a fascinating arena for discussion of how we count, who counts and what counts in contemporary development efforts. Whether we discuss expat aid workers, communicating development or using randomized-control trials in research, Lachenal’s book is to some extent a mirror of beliefs and practices that have (and have not) changed since the end of the colonial era. Laid-back yet sophisticated French doctors fight African ignorance
During the sleeping sickness campaigns, photos on glossy paper of gaunt African children circulated for the first time – such images would have a long shelf life in the European media – while the laid-back yet sophisticated figure of the French doctor, fighting an ever-losing battle against disease, African ignorance, and Western bureaucracy, also made his first appearance (p.9).
The book takes us right into an exciting period of discovery and transformation-a post-war world filled with modernity’s promises in a context of global change where ‘development’ could go hand in hand with the aspirations of the colonies.
As therapeutic knowledge was transmitted, an international fraternity was brought into being; it was founded on a shared life “in the bush” and on conversations about the future of Africa and the backwardness of the “natives” (p.35).
The book is an important reminder that ‘our’ aid industry, ‘our’ habitus is always only one tricky corner away from practices that often carry substantial colonial weight.
The history of pentamidine thus is also a history of typists and clerks of the Institut Princesse Astrid, which, by translating, copying, and recopying articles written by members of the network simultaneously communicated, legitimated and stabilized trust in the new technique (p.56).
I think that these practices are closer to today’s ‘filter bubbles’ than we may think, but in any case, the details and vignettes of the book really make the notion of a ‘discourse’ come to live. What makes Lachenal such an excellent writer is that he does not show off his knowledge of French sociology and philosophers. The book could easily turn into a fully theoretical treatment featuring Foucault, Bordieu or Latour. But their works create an almost musical or lyrical background to the ‘actions’ of the case at hand. You basically need to read all the vignettes before an almost magical forest opens up and you can clearly see ‘biopolitics’ or ‘power-knowledge’ architecture.
My aim is to grasp the performative dimension of the act of counting: what it meant, in the course of injection campaigns, to “make numbers” both in the sense that large-scale repetitions of a tricky medical gesture entailed organizational constraints and with reference to the burden imposed on the day-to-day work of mobile teams by the very acts of counting and accounting (p.58).
These short quotes cannot do the well-crafted narrative fully justice, but they time and again hint at the core of the book: Any procedure, any elaborated form of counting, any sophisticated medical or technical intervention is a political act
Did they have ‘fail fares’ in Cameroon in the 1950s?
Being perceived merely as misunderstandings, its failures stimulated the imagination of doctors, who designed education campaigns containing a new and surprising articulation of the issue of individual responsibility. At the same time, the drug’s misses justified a series of police and military initiatives to Lomidize, by force if necessary, individuals or villages refusing injections (p.99).
At today’s events celebrating failure lives of people are usually not put at risk. Lachenal’s research is research into bêtise‘an enthusiastic and enterprising form of stupidity, a confident and calculated form of foolishness’ (p.13) that we nowadays often see in the philanthrocapitalist and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who claim to ‘eradicate poverty’.
Nurses and local chiefs hardly appeared at all. The colonial state’s representatives, featured at the heart of the action by the very form of the report, then turned themselves into detectives and sociologists (p.122).
So when things went wrong there was an enthusiastic will to figure out what went wrong, assess technical procedures and identify the culprits, usually an inattentive nurse or poorly trained local helper. But learning lessons was hard!
At best, it reveals the mediocre quality of its archival mechanics (…). Worse, what is unmasked here is the capacity of the system to forget, even, one might say, to ensure its own amnesia (p.158).
Lachenal unearths many artifacts that were filed and stored away. The author uses his vast, unique archival material just in the right dosage. After so many years of engaging with the material there must have been a temptation to present more letters, quote from more telegrams or include more medical studies. But to find the balance between the obligation to look into as many boxes as possible and selecting material for a readable book is an important task of academic writing, perhaps one that often gets a bit sidelined as funding runs out, new projects are lined up and a sense of fatigue creeps into the process of ‘getting the manuscript done’. Lachenal masters this tricky balance really very well. Among many things, the book, the final printed product, is a reminder that excellent research takes time. From first steps into the archive to the publication of the translated book we are looking at 10+ years. Allowing this to happen is one of the features when academia is truly a wonderful, privileged place to be in. Lomidine never worked-and this is important in 2017
Thus, pentamidinization had acted not by preventing new infections in healthy individuals, but rather by treating unknowingly and on a massive scale, parasite carriers who were not detected in the course of screening. (…) it became an embarrassing, almost incomprehensible, episode in the history of tropical medicine (p.173).
Although Lachenal’s story ends more or less at the end of the 1950s the book is highly relevant for contemporary discussions.
On November 12, 2014, the French National Academy of Medicine blacklisted this book. (…) The old white male French doctors who wrote the press release had obviously not read my book; they had only heard about in the press, and apparently thought there was nothing to be learned from about colonial medicine, Lomidine, or Africa. (pp.191-92).
But with my review of Karlan and Appel’s Failing in the field in mind or research on development statistics by Morten Jerven the discussion of counting better, of using approaches pioneered in medicine for development research, of legitimizing knowledge production and finding ways to generate ‘objective data’ is still at the heart of conceptualizing development theories and practices.
Maybe the economist has replaced the pith-helmeted medical doctor in some areas and their Excel sheets are less invasive and dangerous than colonial experiments, but the Lomidine Files is a book about similar desires to understand, help and ‘eradicate’ poverty in contexts of making bodies, states and (our) aspirations count. Lachenal, Guillaume: The Lomidine Files-The Untold Story of a Medical Disaster in Colonial Africa. Translated by Noémi Tousignant. ISBN 978-1-4214-2323-4, 237pp, 34.95 USD, Baltimore, MA: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017.
Hi all, Development news: The UN & the Rohingya crisis; Africa is too expensive for manufacturing; how Angelie Jolie almost had a dinner date with Joseph Kony; Hungry kids don't learn well; a critical review of the WDR; Rwanda stops second-hand clothing imports; inside the shady adoption industry; how Puerto Rico has been screwed over; an art exhibition fail in China; female development economists; art & sexual violence; lingerie from Nigeria; undergrads meet local aid worker.
Our digital lives: The Leila Janah complex; how to win the Booker prize?
The story of Lomidine (also known as pentamidine), a ‘wonder drug’ thought to prevent sleeping sickness that was applied throughout colonial Africa in the 1940s and 1950s, is so much more than just an impeccably researched and vividly presented case study of medical anthropology. It is a historical inquiry into the very essence of how the French colonial state ‘worked’ and how a socio-political apparatus armed with a hubristic believe in the power of medical science subjugated native populations to dangerous medical interventions. Killing dozens of recipients, the mirage of a preventive wonder drug was eventually uncovered to be medically faulty and the story of Lomidine was hidden in public and corporate archives of the drug manufacturer. There are three outstanding features of the book that I will focus on in my review: First, the story is a well-crafted historical narrative. Second, the book is an exemplary case study of what ‘discourse analysis’ or ‘governmentality’ really mean from a research perspective. And third, as distant and outdated some of the practices of the 1950s now seem, the book opens up a fascinating arena for discussion of how we count, who counts and what counts in contemporary development efforts. Whether we discuss expat aid workers, communicating development or using randomized-control trials in research, Lachenal’s book is to some extent a mirror of beliefs and practices that have (and have not) changed since the end of the colonial era.
Asked why the July study on Rakhine state was removed, WFP said earlier that it was withdrawn from the website “following a request by the government to conduct a joint review”. (...) WFP did not respond directly to questions about whether food aid cuts had left vulnerable people in need or whether it the agency had prioritised good relations with the government over the immediate humanitarian needs of the Rohingya.
But they faced stiff resistance from UNDP’s former executive director, Helen Clark, and the former special envoy, Vijay Nambiar, according to former U.N. officials and internal U.N. documents reviewed by FP. In private meetings, Clark and Nambiar repeatedly argued that frank criticism of Myanmar’s human rights conduct would be counterproductive and that the government was doing its best to improve, the officials said. As early as late 2015, Eliasson pressed to have Lok-Dessallien replaced with a successor with more experience in crisis zones and a willingness to press the government more forcefully on human rights. But the effort was blocked by Clark, according to two former senior U.N. official.
Oliver Holmes for the Guardian and Colum Lynch for Foreign Policy. I often respond to articles like this by pointing out that UN organizations work with and through their host governments and do not want to be kicked out of countries. But then there is a looming genocide on the horizon and you wonder why this still can happen in 2017, 20 years after Rwanda and all...
The researchers are reluctant to speculate why African manufacturing costs are so high, but it isn’t difficult to imagine what some of the challenges would be. A lack of infrastructure such as transport networks and stable electricity in many poor African countries plus low levels of education will mean factory running costs and training the African worker are going to be more expensive than they need to be. This can get exacerbated by unhelpful regulation and poor policy.
Yinka Adegoke for Quartz on some of the challenges for African industrial development.
Ocampo then makes a statement which is possibly ironic, although it is taken seriously by the NGO, and may even be sincere: “[Jolie] has the idea to invite kony for dinner and then arrest him” The plan is for her to fly to central Africa in March 2012 to see the sites affected by the Lord’s Resistance Army and meet the victims, accompanied by the cream of the American press. Ocampo adds: “She is the one. She knows, she loves to arrest kony. she is ready. probably brad [now separated-from-husband and actor Brad Pitt] will go also.” Ocampo tells Jolie she can be embedded with the special forces looking to arrest Kony, and Jolie replies that “Brad is being supportive”. Two years later, in 2014, after visiting Invisible Children’s headquarters in San Diego, the now ex-prosecutor Ocampo offers to help raise funds. This could involve Sheikha Mozah, wife of the former Emir of Qatar, who has a charity called ‘Education Above All’. Ocampo says it will be easy to ask the foundation for “money to support schools in Uganda”. He regrets that such a charity is not financing operations which could lead to Kony’s arrest. In a bizarre throwaway comment, Ocampo then adds that the Sheikha “can finance arrest operation in her own way”, the implications of which are worrying.
Stéphanie Maupas & EIC Network for The Black Sea. I am a bit surprised how the leaks around former ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo haven't received more attemtion-some very disturbing insights into how 'celebrities' think and talk about 'development'-or fooling Kony into arrest...
These twin crises of growing hunger and low learning have distinct causes, even where they overlap geographically. But a problem's solution doesn't need to be a mirror image of its cause, and school feeding may help make progress on both fronts. As with any public policy, the case for school feeding rests on its effectiveness, affordability, and—a dimension that is particularly acute in fragile states—its feasibility.
Justin Sandefur & Divyanshi Wadhwa for the Center for Global Development on why hungry kids are a key challenge when discussing improving education.
However, ‘quality’ is influenced by a host of factors, many of which may be normative, socio-political, and micro-political (i.e., informal institutions). The learning outcomes that are the subject of the WDR are produced through learning processes structured in formal schooling processes. And formal schooling processes are embedded in the overt and hidden curriculum of the schools and classrooms (i.e., values and the reproduction of those values in formal schools) that children of different backgrounds have access to, and how those children, in turn, are positioned within them. For example, research in India shows that broader societal caste-based practices continue to affect how children experience schooling even within universalising initiatives. Based on emerging analysis from my current study of roughly 1500 school-aged children in Delhi, I argue that silent exclusion reflects broader societal exclusion and will impede meaningful learning even if children are enrolled.
Prachi Srivastava for From Poverty to Power reviews the new WDR.
It also confirmed a gut feeling: that something was amiss about the story the Ohio-based adoption agency had told Jessica and her husband, Adam, about Mata's background. The agency, European Adoption Consultants, told them that Mata's father had died and that her mother neglected her and couldn't afford to feed her. The paperwork said Mata had never attended school. But in the months after she arrived in America, as Mata's command of English improved, she spoke glowingly about her mother. How they cooked together, how they went to church together and how her mother walked with her to school. The Skype conversation, on August 29, 2016, confirmed Jessica's suspicions. As she absorbed the news, Jessica realized that she didn't participate in an adoption at all but had unwittingly "participated in taking a child from a loving family." And she knew what she had to do: return Mata to her mother.
Rwanda, in particular, is seeking to curb the import of secondhand clothes, not only on the grounds of protecting a nascent local industry, but also because it says wearing hand-me-downs compromises the dignity of its people. But when countries in East Africa raised their import tariffs on used garments last year — to such a high level that they constituted a de facto ban — the backlash was significant.
Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura for the New York Times on African responses to second hand garment imports-perhaps the dignity argument is more interesting than the development aspect as protectionism is usually a double-edged sword.
Puerto Rico was an important hub, in particular, for big pharmaceutical firms like Pfizer, which have kept many of their investments on the island even after ‘936’ was gradually ended. But Puerto Rico is no longer competitive in areas where 75-80% of expenses come from payroll costs. Puerto Rico needs to move up into higher-value manufacturing and services. It has a large number of educated bilingual workers. There is potential to turn the economy into a modern hi-tech service sector. But that would require government investment and state-run firms democratically controlled by Puerto Ricans. It’s the Chinese model, if you like. Puerto Rico is a small island that was exploited by the US and foreign multi-nationals with citizens’ tax bills siphoned off to pay interest on ever increasing debt, while reducing social welfare – all at the encouragement of foreign investment banks making huge fees for doing so. Now Puerto Ricans are being asked to keep on paying for the foreseeable future after a decade of recession and cuts in living standards to meet obligations to vulture funds and US institutions. And the troops will be sent into ensure that!
Michael Roberts with some important context on the multi-faced root causes of the crises in Puerto Rico.
After receiving complaints from the African community, the museum removed the photos. African students complained to their university deans while others petitioned their embassies, according to students and professionals in these circles. (...) “It’s not shocking. Africans are not strangers to racism here in China or elsewhere. But it is sad that despite deepening economic connections and interactions between Chinese and Africans, there’s still clearly so much racism and lack of cultural understanding,” says Zahra Baitie, a Ghanaian master’s student at Tsinghua University studying global affairs.
Echo Huang and Lily Kuo for Quartz. File under: How not to communicate development...
I remember when Esther Duflo and I were just getting started and we co-wrote a paper on dams and their impact on development. A senior male World Bank economist wrote to our senior male colleagues at MIT and Yale asking that they review our work and correct our mistakes. These days, I don’t get undermined that way within the profession, but still – and this is a problem for female development economists, in general – I will meet with a policymaker in South Asia, and he will be looking over my shoulder wondering where my male superior is. For those of us who are now in positions of seniority in the profession, I think it is essential that we promote young women in both academic and policy settings and not undermine their intellectual authority in any way. I got involved in CSWEP to look at issues for women who didn’t do their undergraduate education in the US but come here for graduate school or for a job. There has been a lot of discussion on pipeline issues for women in economics PhD programs, but I continue to believe that we don’t focus enough on, first, improving the low numbers of foreign female applicants for PhD programs (relative to their male counterparts) and, second, identifying the specific hurdles for women who did not start (or complete) their education in the US and, as a result, lack access to the networks that their US-educated peers have. We know a lot now about how networks build self-confidence and pave the way to positions and promotions.
David McKenzie talks to Rohine Pande for the World Bank Development Impact blog.
Through video, music and movement, it takes the audience on an emotional journey. Directed and performed by Khundayi, alongside musician Bongile Lecoge-Zulu, it formed part of the SexActually festival in Johannesburg last month. At a post-performance discussion, one woman said the performance reminded her of abuse she had experienced herself; another said it had made her think differently about her abuser’s actions, allowing her to see his flaws.
Tiffany Kagure Mugo for Open Democracy on art, healing and social change.
Osakwe’s collection earlier this year was inspired by what she described as a “middle-class Nigerian girl going on a booty call.” In Lagos, that girl usually travels by the yellow danfo buses that career through the streets, and has practical problems to consider, like what to wear on the ride to her date and how to get to her job or school early the next morning. “What is seduction to her? It’s not a pretty journey,” Osakwe said. “How does that middle-class girl get it on? Because sex is so taboo, but we know we’re all f&%€#ing like rabbits.” The answer, Osakwe reasoned, is clothing that is erotic but protective—not a short skirt and heels but a long, strapless red dress, evoking the traditional wrapper, that can easily be dropped in the act of seduction. Though she hesitates to tell Nigerian buyers that she draws inspiration from sex workers, clients see her clothes as an illicit escape: a chance to feel more exciting, less restrained.
Alexis Okeowo for the New Yorker with a story from the 'new Africa' with Nigeria as a growing powerhouse of cultural production.
So, what was accomplished by having this local aid worker from Jordan talk to a bunch of young undergraduates from the Global North? Social change is sometimes generated by focused and dramatic historical moments, but more often than not change is caused by the accumulated impact of countless seeds cast onto the vast landscape of our world. Some of these seeds will germinate immediately, some only after much time has passed. Hala’s words and infectious smile are now part of these student’s memories, and my hope is that in time their actions will, collectively, indeed move the needle forward.
Tom Arcaro shares some reflections from a discussion his undergraduate class had with a local aid worker in Jordan. Our digital lives How to think about Leila Janah
So, to return to the title of this blogpost, how should we think about Leila Janah? The key is to think, and to resist the temptation to cast NGO leaders as saviors. It’s also crucial to remember that good intentions are not enough. So much of the reporting on Janah focuses on her big heart, and her personal story; it’s hard to resist a pitch about an attractive young Harvard graduate, out to save the world. Very little of the coverage asks whether Samasource is actually doing good, at what cost, and at what scale. If it did, Janah might not have the hubris to present her ideas as “an exciting new foreign aid model” that could overhaul the World Bank and IMF. In the end, though, this isn’t about Janah. It’s about the reporters and book publishers and conference organizers who perform little or no due diligence when it comes to nonprofits. They may think they’re helping, by shining light on a hero or heroine. In truth, they’re doing a disservice to nonprofits–especially those that go about their business, quietly and effectively.
Marc Gunther for Nonprofit Chronicles. Her book is on my reading list-and I also shared some reflections on the topic earlier this year in a slightly more academic essay...
A lot of people read one new novel a year – on holiday perhaps, or over Christmas. They read the prizewinners. And it’s sad that it appears writers working in English must still “do time” in the culturally dominant northern metropolises to be taken seriously. What the Booker ought to do is take London readers to Bengaluru or Hokitika, rather than the other way around.
Lucy Diver for the Guardian on the globalized hubs of the book industry. Academia Harassment in the Field
In an interview, the study’s lead author, Robin Nelson, an assistant professor of anthropology at Santa Clara University, said that while reports of assault made headlines in relation to the 2014 paper, the new study sheds additional light on less severe but nevertheless damaging violations of professional conduct. “There are more hidden kinds of discrimination, such as gender tests and men and women being assigned different kinds of jobs at field sites -- that kind of thing is discrimination, as well, and is quite ubiquitous,” Nelson said. “We’re trying to point out that this is a range or continuum of behaviors.”
Colleen Flaherty for Inside Higher Ed on new research on sexual harassment during academic feidl research.
The first part Making data for development is followed by detailed profiles of all the members of the organization’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC) which I am skipping for the moment.
Besides a general discussion about the value of annual ‘flagship reports’, the document is an important artifact to learn more about the consensus that an organization like the OECD presents when it comes to a topic like data for development. The report is visually appealing, chapters are well referenced with contemporary literature and most of them provide good summaries of the topic. And the overarching message that good data systems to achieve the SDGs are important and often lacking is a necessary reminder for the OECD-DAC community.
But as a researcher and teacher I am also interested in approaching such a substantial document with a critical, perhaps even discourse critical lens to understand how the highest levels of development policy-making embrace a new challenge.
Perhaps not surprisingly, data turns into a technical, almost apolitical challenge that is framed in much the same way most other new concepts have been embraced by large international organizations. So here are my four main points to start more critical discussions of the OECD report:
Data is a ‘thing’ statisticians should manage Almost right from the beginning of the report (‘The data revolution has tremendous potential to inform innovative development policies and open new doors for individuals in developing countries’, p.15) ‘data’ is presented as a fairly stable entity, something statisticians manage in a database on a computer hard drive. Data does not seem to be part of a digital ecosystem. Yes, data can be a digitized land record database, but data is also the fuel behind machine learning, algorithms, automation (a.k.a. robots), platform capitalism, social media, drones and so much more. I am certainly not arguing that OECD countries themselves have the infrastructure and regulations in place to understand everything from 3D printing to ‘the Internet of things’, but I was surprised of how isolated ‘data’ was often presented. Such an approach limits the discussions to traditional topics of capacity-building or enhanced cooperation and leaves out transformational aspects-both good and bad. Data is a buzzword (that’s a surprise…) Buzzwords appear in most ‘flagship reports’ (I wrote a short comment on the 2011 World Development Report a long time ago), but some paragraphs of the OECD report really suggested themselves to be included in a round of ‘development bullshit Bingo’:
To build inclusive data ecosystems that benefit global development and individual citizens, governments will need to transform their legal and strategic frameworks for data and statistics. Over the past two decades, developing countries have taken steps to reform their national statistical systems. Nonetheless, significant challenges remain, including the absence of legislative frameworks for statistics. The growing number of public, private, and civil society actors and institutions involved in the production and use of data make the need for clear legal, ethical, and quality standards and protocols even more urgent. These should regulate the use of traditional as well as new and non-traditional sources of data, fostering the trust that is needed for data to inform good policies and development results. (p.29)
Let’s replace ‘data’ and ‘statistics’ with some of our favorite buzzwords from the good old days, for example ‘gender’…
To build inclusive gender ecosystems that benefit global development and individual citizens, governments will need to transform their legal and strategic gender frameworks. Over the past two decades, developing countries have taken steps to reform their national gender systems. Nonetheless, significant challenges remain, including the absence of legislative frameworks for gender. The growing number of public, private, and civil society actors and institutions involved in the production and use of gender make the need for clear legal, ethical, and quality standards and protocols even more urgent. These should regulate the use of traditional as well as new and non-traditional sources of gender, fostering the trust that is needed for gender to inform good policies and development results. …or participation:
To build inclusive participatory ecosystems that benefit global development and individual citizens, governments will need to transform their legal and strategic frameworks for participation. Over the past two decades, developing countries have taken steps to reform their national participatory systems. Nonetheless, significant challenges remain, including the absence of legislative frameworks for participation. The growing number of public, private, and civil society actors and institutions involved in the production and use of participation make the need for clear legal, ethical, and quality standards and protocols even more urgent. These should regulate the use of traditional as well as new and non-traditional sources of participation, fostering the trust that is needed for participation to inform good policies and development results.
I think you get the idea…
Data then becomes part of the next toolkit and checklist, but there is also the bigger problem of how to present such a report with so many stakeholders involved in a way that every member signs off.
Maybe development communication deserves more than a small box with an important reminder that
Citizens want to hear real stories behind development. (…) Citizens want to hear from beneficiaries of aid, passionate field workers, not just politicians, diplomats or celebrities (p.104).
Governmentality: Investing in data and statistics will legitimize new powers This point is a bit more academic, but actually quite important: The actions and ideas outlined in the report legitimize knowledge and ‘stuff’ in the real world, i.e. contributing to a discourse of ‘data for development’. The Director of the UN Statistics Division outlines this well in his short ‘in my view’ commentary: He talks about ‘technical capacity building’, enabling ‘national statistical offices’ to become ‘chief data managers’; there should also be a ‘framework of knowledge solidarity (…) across the globe’ (p.61). In another contribution, the author lists high-level commitments to statistics, sharing documents and global gatherings since 2004 (p.85). So this is about trainings, office setups, global conferences discussing global guidelines, meetings, jobs, hardware, software…an apparatus, a habitus of how data and statistics become professionalized. This is literally about who counts and what counts, reimaging the state of the 21st century! If you now add global companies owning specialized software, cloud storage or other services to the picture we should be discussing the risks of digital neo-colonialism! But the report does hardly engage with any critical aspects around exclusion, censorship, privacy and what it means when a class of chief data managers informs the government…
Data is good and not very political (like the rest of development co-operation…)
(A Rohingya database) can digitally enable discrimination. Rohingya have to follow a ”code of conduct” that forces them to stay inside the camps and limits their interaction with locals. If the database of Rohingya people were to be leaked, hacked, or shared (for example, with the Myanmar government), it could make it easier to deny Rohingya access to basic services, or target them, or discriminate against them. For example, Bangladeshi mobile phone operators have been banned from selling SIM cards to Rohingya refugees. Biometric data could in theory be shared with mobile phone operators to enforce the ban.
This is from Zara Rahman’s recent commentary on the IRIN news site. Urgent humanitarian debates and many of the ambiguities and challenges behind (big) data cannot hide by sprinkling in a few words around ‘responsible’ or ‘secure’ use of data.
In the end, the OECD report assumes an intrinsic motivation for governments to embrace data and statistics for better, evidence-based decision-making. The evidence from Myanmar, North Africa, Cameroon, Turkey or Zimbabwe is that ‘data’ is already part of complicated battles and power/knowledge struggles in traditional and new public spheres.
While the OECD report certainly captures important technical aspects and macro policy challenges it fails to provide a politicized vision for digital development cooperation for the next decade and could be another case of too little, too late…
Another full round-up of great readings this week!
Development news: The WHO-Mugabe communication #fail; How cash helps in Puerto Rico; the UN's ceremonial beehives; data risks & registering Rohingya; people keep sending too much stuff to Houston; emergency sexwork; women's cooperatives; micro insurance for migrants in Thailand; UN-reform; Jamaica's anti-queer violence & its colonial roots; working with UN bloggers, NIKE likes robots; Mozambique's forgotten East German history; 'purpose has become an empty slogan'.
Our digital lives: Working with Guardian's audience engagement; will Google/Alphabet take over Toronto? Big data from the South.
Publications: Communicating vaccines; state fragility; social media in Brazil; tech & migrants.
Almost right from the beginning of the report ‘data’ is presented as a fairly stable entity, something statisticians manage in a database on a computer hard drive. Data does not seem to be part of a digital ecosystem. Yes, data can be a digitized land record database, but data is also the fuel behind machine learning, algorithms, automation (a.k.a. robots), platform capitalism, social media, drones and so much more. I am certainly not arguing that OECD countries themselves have the infrastructure and regulations in place to understand everything from 3D printing to ‘the Internet of things’, but I was surprised of how isolated ‘data’ was often presented. Such an approach limits the discussions to traditional topics of capacity-building or enhanced cooperation and leaves out transformational aspects-both good and bad.
In fact, it is impossible to know whether Tedros was a voice of moderation within his government or how much of an impact his experience as a leader of an authoritarian government shaped his thinking. Notwithstanding, his desire to honor one of the world leaders most universally at odds with the values of WHO with an ambassadorship, albeit as a diplomatic engagement tactic, raises more questions than answers.
Mohamed Keita for Quartz. No matter how you stand on some of the speculations around the appointment is was a huge communication disaster for the new director of WHO!
"Just a little something to address immediate needs," says Jill Morehead, the head of Mercy Corps' relief efforts on the island. "Cash helps give people back dignity and choice for determining their most basic needs, in addition to supporting local markets and small businesses." (...) "It's more or less the same as welfare, which the U.S. has had for a long time," says Amanda Glassman, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development. "But what makes this really interesting is that it's an NGO giving out the cash in lieu of the government." Since Mercy Corps arrived four weeks ago, it has already distributed 290 MasterCard prepaid debit cards, in $150 to $200 increments, across the island. Funding comes from private and individual donors.
Malaka Gharib for NPR was embedded with Mercy Corps in Puerto Rico and reports on their approaches to cash-based aid.
In that bizarre incident, a staff member said implementing the UN’s complex enterprise software had been so stressful that he stole ceremonial UN beehives. A disciplinary hearing report, published on 20 October, confirms the bizarre details. The Geneva staffer, who joined the UN in 1991, stole four beehives from the grounds of the historic Palais des Nations and hid them in his garage. He repainted them and threw away decorative plaques with noble inscriptions such as “peace” and “justice”. The hives were gifts of the Swiss government to the UN and produced small amounts of honey.
Samuel Oakford for IRIN. I certainly do not want to diminish some of the serious cases that are also mentioned in the report, but 'ceremonial beehive' is a pretty special term that I learned this week...
Using biometric data as proof of identity might allow aid and services to be delivered to Rohingya refugees more effectively, but it’s a double-edged sword for several reasons: Firstly, it can be used to drive repatriation (voluntary or otherwise). (...) Secondly, it can digitally enable discrimination. (...). If the database of Rohingya people were to be leaked, hacked, or shared (for example, with the Myanmar government), it could make it easier to deny Rohingya access to basic services, or target them, or discriminate against them. For example, Bangladeshi mobile phone operators have been banned from selling SIM cards to Rohingya refugees. Biometric data could in theory be shared with mobile phone operators to enforce the ban. Thirdly, errors and omissions can be harder to resolve.
Zara Rahman for IRIN with an important reminder that data & security are very political issues and should not be ignored even if there is pressure to collect data in an emergency situation.
Third, donated goods tend not to provide what communities need, when they need them. Rose City had been overwhelmed by secondhand clothing, for instance. There were piles of molding garments in church parking lots, and rack upon rack of them in warehouses and army surplus tents around the town. Local residents were grateful for other Americans’ generosity, but generally said that they did not want the used items, nor did they want to bother picking through them to find clean things that fit. “I’ll buy my own damn pants,” Richard Conner, a machinist whose home was severely water damaged, told me.
Annie Lowrey for The Atlantic with another, but well researched reminder that you should stop sending stuff after humanitarian disasters!
I have difficulty accepting – as the column suggests – that sexwork in the context of humanitarian crises must always be seen as sexual violence. To my mind, humanitarian actors should broaden their view of transactional sex beyond sexual violence and acknowledge that it is an important aspect of livelihoods.There are important reasons why the humanitarian world should be more explicitly concerned with transactional sex. Once it is recognized that transactional sex is often a livelihood strategy, this would also open the way for the provision of services and protection against some of the risks that come with the trade.
A unique advantage of a collective model for poor women, especially in resource-constrained and socially conservative environments, is the added self-confidence or self-reliance that women obtain, contributing to their overall “empowerment,” in addition to increased voice, collective strength, and bargaining power with authorities and employers. A study of SEWA members showed that the presence of and social support from a peer raised women’s work aspirations, resulting in higher business income when they were trained in business skills alongside a friend; this was especially the case for women subject to conservative social norms
Mayra Buvinic, Tanvi Jaluka, and Megan O'Donnell for the Center for Global Development provide a measured overview over female employment, entrepreneurism and 'empowerment' issues in the context of India and Bangladesh.
Among the main challenges foreseen as result of this study for the set-up and provision of this service were: a) obtaining the approval from the Thai authorities, b) dealing with the economic vulnerability of the target group, c) collecting the monthly premium fee in a rural context, d) addressing pre-existing conditions and chronic diseases, and e) financing initial set-up costs. Many of these challenges have been addressed – government support to operate the project and start-up funding have both been secured. The project formally started in Mae Sot on August 1st, 2017.
Olivier Alais for the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs shares some reflections on setting up an micro-insurance scheme in rural Thailand.
The UN’s approach to development is still stuck in the last century: there are too many offices duplicating each other, and a lot of UN work is now rendered frankly irrelevant by the rise of China as a major global funder. So Guterres has plans to slim down the UN’s development footprint worldwide, and also clarify lines of accountability back to him as the leader of the organization. He’s trying to cut through some of the bureaucracy. Secondly he is prioritising management reform. We have a situation across the UN system where we have management rules that actively stop UN officials being flexible and creative in the field. Guterres says his personal priority is cutting away a lot of the management nonsense and empowering UN officials on the ground, such as peacekeepers and humanitarian workers, to help the needy.
Richard Gowan talks to International Politics & Society about UN management and reform.
The “culture of homophobia”, as so crudely written by Vogue, is not one solely of Jamaican creation, but a legacy of British colonialism. In recent years, activists and researchers began speaking openly about Britain’s creation of a homophobic and transphobic environment through their buggery laws, influencing not only Jamaica, but Nigeria, Botswana, India, and the remainder of territories confiscated by the English crown. (...) Queer people in Jamaica are not helped by sensationalist, click-bait stories about their experiences where they face danger from day-to-day — they are exploited for viral stories, falsely propped up by white savior complexes. By uplifting queer Afro-Caribbean activists groups on the island, such as RUDEBOI Society and TransWave instead, media can divest from the colonialist perception that only societies predominately white and Western can being able to “save” queer Black people from the rabid queerphobia that they face.
Shanna Collins with a powerful piece that once again sheds light on the entrenched legacy of colonialism in the Caribbean.
authors often panic at how little space they have to discuss something, so try and cram in lots of wisdom by using broad and often pretty obvious generalizations ‘advocacy is important to improve services’; ‘we must be more innovative’. More than a couple of those in a row, and your post is dead in the water, I reckon. Try nailing them down with a quick example, either real or hypothetical. ‘In Chile, a combined campaign by social movements and academics persuaded the government to do X’.
Duncan Green for fp2p with some practical advice on how get your development blogging house in order...
For Nike, the shift to greater automation has two huge attractions. By driving down costs, it could lead to a dramatic improvement in profit margins. It would also allow the company to deliver new designs more quickly to fickle, fashion-conscious customers at a premium. A pair of Nike Roshe shoes costs $75 without Flyknit uppers, compared to as much as $130 with Flyknit. “Together, we are modernising the footwear industry,” Chris Collier, Flex chief financial officer, said earlier this year about the company’s relationship with Nike. “This is a long-term, multibillion-dollar relationship for us, and it is not measured in the scope of years but decades.”
Jennifer Bissell-Linsk for the Financial Times. Even if you may not be able to access the full article, this quote is already an important reminder of how disruptive automation/robots will likely be for low-skilled employment in the global South-and how little companies care about 'development' outside a bit of charity and CSR!
Men such as Darby, who take center stage in struggles they know nothing about, who are applauded for doing so, and who are excused for abusive behavior, don’t always turn into informants for the FBI. But the truth is that they don’t have to. To make this point, No More Heroes quotes scholar Courtney Desiree Morris’ essay “Why Misogynists Make Great Informants”: “Before or regardless of whether they are ever recruited by the state to disrupt a movement or destabilize an organization, they’ve likely become well versed in practices of disruptive behavior.”
Aura Bogado for Yes! Magazine reviews 'No More Heroes'.
Yet for the magermans, history did not end, moving frictionlessly from a failed socialist past to a prosperous capitalist present. Rather, they are stuck in it. Jose is visited every year by Birgit, his enamorada from Dresden; others have half-Mozambican sons and daughters they cannot see for the lack of a visa; and they are all united by the dwindling hope that, one day, they will receive the life-changing amount they are rightfully owed. For now, admirably and without expectation, Jose and the rest will carry on their protest to a government and country that no longer seem to care
Once equipped with the near enemy lens, I could spot these clever confusions everywhere. In the global North’s aid to Niger. In Barclays’ glorious Banking on Change. In a range of social enterprises whose big purpose, at the end of the day, is rather hollow. In all those ways we express a disguised form of pity and paternalism toward people living in cultures different to our own, on soil exploited by us. (...) We all share a yearning for purpose, a desire to know we’re leaving this world in a better state than we found it. But looking around me, purpose has become a fashionable yet hollow slogan — a catchphrase for anything that isn’t primarily about making big bucks, and applies to anything that involves rolling up your sleeves somewhere south of the Equator.
My dear friend Agnes Otzelberger with important personal reflections on her 'development' journey and a great start into her blogging career ;)! Our digital lives 13 things I learned from six years at the Guardian
Good journalism — especially good reportage — gives people something important for which there is no substitute. (So does good entertainment, of course.) Many people value it enormously and, if you’re known for providing it, they’ll come to expect it and trust you more as a result. There’s no law that says people will only read celebrity news or stuff you’ve nicked off the front page of Reddit.The vast majority of the Guardian’s most read pieces of all time are high quality journalism on serious topics.
Mary Hamilton with important lessons for anyone who is 'doing media'.
Aside from the institutional investors shopping for entire city blocks, Alphabet understands the real audience for its cities: the global rich. For them, the narratives of data-driven sustainability and algorithmically produced artisanal lifestyles – Sidewalk Labs even promises “a next-gen bazaar” replenished by local communities of makers – are just another way to justify rising values of their property portfolios. That Alphabet’s “urbanism as a service” might not appeal to the residents of Toronto does not matter. As a real estate project, its chief goal is to impress its future missing residents –above all, millions of Chinese millionaires flocking to Canada’s housing markets. Doctoroff was not equivocating when he told the Globe and Mail that Alphabet’s Canadian venture “primarily is a real-estate play”.
Evgeny Morozov for The Guardian with yet another important reminder that the future of platform capitalism will be an ever sophisticated platform running entire cities...
That said, we would like to encourage our colleagues to embrace more explicitly a political economy perspective, which can help us to take a critical look at the multiple forms of domination that reproduce and perpetuate inequality, discrimination and injustice at all levels. We also advocate for historical approaches able to trace the current unfolding of datafication back to its roots in colonial practices, when applicable (see Arora 2016). We suggest engaging with feminist critiques and ideas around the decolonization of technology. Finally, we like to think of this type of inquiry as inherently ‘engaged’: while adopting the gold standards of solid scientific research, ‘engaged research’ might take sides and, most importantly, is designed to make a difference to the communities we come close to.
Stefania Milan & Emiliano Treré outline a framework to engage with ICT4D and data differently and embrace local Southern realities much stronger.
“We are not trying to change the minds of a tiny group of entrenched anti-vaccination people,” Schmid says. “These workshops prepare public health officials to communicate with a much larger group of people – mainly parents who are hesitating about whether or when to get their children vaccinated – to show them how to process the myths and messages of fear.” “Most hesitant parents do not oppose the scientific evidence, but the appeals and messages of vaccine deniers make them feel afraid and uncertain,” says Schmid. “Public health authorities need to continuously build confidence and educate the public, so that people are better prepared to make vaccination decisions when they are faced with them”.
Tatum Anderson for the Bulletin of the World Health Organization. This discussion is not limited to vaccinations. In an age of 'fake news' many areas of society will have to engage differently with citizens to challenge myths, sideline radical opponents and remind people of facts and science.
Aid to fragile states is a major topic for international development. This article explores how unpacking fragility and studying its dimensions and forms can help to develop policy-relevant understandings of how states become more resilient and the role of aid therein. It highlights the particular challenges for donors in dealing with chronically fragile states and those with weak legitimacy, as well as how unpacking fragility can provide traction on how to take ‘local context’ into account. It draws in particular on the contributions to this special issue to provide examples from new analysis of particular fragile state transitions and cross-national perspectives.
Rachel Gisselquist's edited open access book on state fragility.
Based on 15 months of ethnographic research, this book aims to understand why low-income Brazilians have invested so much of their time and money in learning about social media. Juliano Spyer explores this question from a number of perspectives, including education, relationships, work and politics. He argues that the use of social media reflects contradictory values. Low-income Brazilians embrace social media to display literacy and upward mobility, but the same technology also strengthens traditional networks of support that conflict with individualism.
Juliano Spyer with a new open access book from the UCL series on global insights into social media use and the Why We Post project.
Donors must avoid the problem of “technology looking for a problem to solve”; knowing how refugee communities already use digital tools is the best way to avoid this. Generally, refugees themselves will have found innovative ways to meet their information needs, and donors can provide financial and technical assistance to support access to the existing technologies
Charles Martin-Shields for the German Development Institute with a short reminder of how donors can avoid some of the usual ICT4D pitfalls.
The digital economy is not weightless. In order to organise something open access, you still need material resources, especially working time for organisation, copyediting, proofreading, design, technical work, management, etc. Open access book publishing is more resource-intensive than open access journal publishing. Proofreading and copyediting books is very work-intensive. Leaving this work to the authors would result in many ugly books full of mistakes. Doing proofreading and copyediting unpaid out of political idealism is also not a feasible solution. So one needs professional knowledge workers involved in open access. Using book processing charges in order to fund that knowledge work plus profits tends to create high charges that are unaffordable for all but the richest universities and luckiest researchers who have access to large grants and private or semi-private open access funds. The outcome of such models are new inequalities. And politically this brings you back to the questions: What university do we want? What academic system do we want? What should the role of academia be in society? Public support and funding is necessary for sustainable and fair open access.
Andrew Lockett talks to Christian Fuchs for Open Access Week.
It is also Friday-so there area links, readings, tweet & more to explore! Development news: The political economy of violence in Mogadishu; aid spending according to Norway & China; technology & citizens' voices; local capacity in Puerto Rico; 'Africa Rising' based on faulty logic of growth? New challenges for GBV in Nepal; Ghana& the open-source encyclopedia of Africa; Lagos displaces citizens for art biennial; the Liberation of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde. Publications: Anthropology & the UN system; What is data justice? Journalism safety; Knowledge & trust in an overheated world.
Academia: Scholarly blogging & use of social media; decolonizing teaching; the blind spots of (journal) rankings.
Business deals aren't done in Mogadishu to finance the war, he says, nor is ideology fueling the conflict. Rather, he says, war is waged in order to ensure that business continues to boom. (...) Somalia, Mac says, is a country in which almost everything is broken, where almost everything is in short supply, a "virgin state" without security, without structures -the best preconditions for business.
Fritz Schaap & Christian Werner for Spiegel Online International with an interesting take on the political economy of instability in Somalia.
Although altruism may increase a country’s soft power, global development requires much more than generosity. As aid recipient countries become more assertive, and as the national interests of donors become even more closely tied with aid, we see a possible synthesis between the Western and Chinese intervention strategies in Africa. In recent years, Western donors have been interested in monitoring and evaluating the impact of their aid. However, measuring impact has often been a challenge as different donors pursue different goals and approaches, and may at times even compete for influence. The impact of Chinese aid is particularly difficult to measure in the absence of credible and readily available information.
Dan Banik & Nikolai Hegertun for the Washington Post's Monkey Cage blog with some thoughts on the global changes in development engagement.
The new institutional environment emerging requires new skills too. Both citizens and representatives need a new set of skills to be able to make the best of technology for democracy. These skills are not only about technology, but about civic participation and democracy at large. If these skill needs are not met, technologies can actually eclipse citizens’ voices and undermine or obstruct accountability and responsiveness.
Ismael Peña-López for ICTlogy talks to Rosie McGee about All Voices Count.
Ethics in human rights advocacy and journalism: Discuss.
Some community organisations have thus become ‘local headquarter’ for the distribution of bottom-level relief efforts and play vital roles in coordinating and delivering relief. A showcase of such a ‘local headquarter’ is the community organisation Casa Pueblo in Adjuntas in the middle of the island. ‘Casa Pueblo’ is a longstanding and exceptionally well organised community organisation. With its strong roots in the community the organisation has become a first entrance and orientation point for any assistance coming to Adjuntas. The organisation is also involved in the direct redistribution of relief to community members. Using their own radio station, Casa Pueblo is able to reach out to their community members and inform them about distribution times and goods available. Moreover, volunteer troops are sent out every morning in order to visit different areas in Adjuntas and bring water or other relief items to people’s houses. In order to guarantee fairness and accountability, it will be registered what help has been provided to whom.
Maria Klara Kuss & Miguel Rivera Quinones for IDS on the opportunities of local capacities and organizations in supporting humanitarian efforts in Puerto Rico.
A new economy founded on networks of small businesses, a post-industrial form of artisanship and integrated smallholder farming is the best chance for Africa to develop sustainably as well as to generate the decent and fulfilling jobs that millions of Africans rightfully aspire to.
Lorenzo Floramonti for The Conversation with food for thought and discussion-especially as a colleague from the same university recommends to the author to 'learn something about economic growth'...
Policy makers and gender specialists need to realise that GBV could just be the ‘tip of the iceberg’ of the existing problem. There is a need to move beyond the discourse that relies on problematic assumption that equates women with weakness and vulnerability. Furthermore, recent studies on GBV mapping and intimate partner violence as well as experiences of practitioners such as doctors and counsellors, police officers and women rights activists indicate many ‘hidden’ GBV cases that go unreported, often considered as ‘family affairs’. There are existing socio-cultural norms, expectations and the associated stigma surrounding marriage and dowry system, masculinities and son preference. Furthermore, exposure to modern communication technologies such as ‘cyber VAWG’, and incidents of GBV during disasters have added up vulnerabilities for women and girls in many ways.
Sudeep Uprety for South Asia @ LSE with an important reminder that progress along the lines of traditional development ideas and indicators needs to catch up with the complexities of the (digital) society.
Her very latest project is an attempt to decolonize the concept of an art gallery: She is calling it the Mobile Museum, which will travel to all 10 regions of Ghana, stopping in towns, asking for keepsakes, photos, jewelry, antiques, and heirlooms from locals, and then displaying them, along with their backstory, within the structure in the center of town. She hopes that, through displaying personal objects in an egalitarian fashion, she and others in the community can engage together with their own living histories in open ways. “We’re trying to upturn the idea of why we give certain objects value and not others. Your object, your letters, your stories have as much value as those of the conquerors,” she says. “We always have [in museums] this one golden object that is the most valuable. Well, who gets to say what’s valuable, if it’s valuable to this family?”
Alex Frank for Vogue features a fascinating artist and her project-not the kind of story I'd usually expect to find on the Vogue website!
Visitors to the biennial who learned what was happening on the other side of the shed were shocked. However, most were unaware of the evictions taking place. Oshun tried to stop them, but as Legacy was not charging him to use the space, he had little power. Setting up a biennial in traffic-choked, expensive Lagos has not been easy. With no funding, artists were asked to pay their own way and Oshun, an artist and curator known for his meditations on jollof rice, did not know until weeks before the launch whether he would pull it off.
Ruth Maclean for the Guardian on the complexities of bringing the global art-industrial complex to Nigeria...
Luis Cabral and Aristides Perreira, Cabral’s confidants and successors, struggle to apply theoretical insights developed in the bush to the actual task of ruling two newly independent states. Amidst a weakening Third Worldism in which institutions of global finance are deployed to bend radical regimes that refused to submit to the emerging neoliberal order, they struggle to heed the warnings Cabral put forward. Instead, both emerge as strongman, ruling their respective countries in ways unrecognizable to their depiction as hopeful revolutionaries in the text. Yet regardless of the disappointing trajectories both Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde have taken, the PAIGC struggle for liberation deserves the attention it is only now starting to receive.
Zachariah Mampilly for Africa Is A Country introduces a new edition of Basil Davidson’s No Fist Is Big Enough to Hide the Sky: The Liberation of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, 1963-74.
Our digital lives
Mind-boggling: 90% of all reported VC capital in E Africa went to startups w at least 1 foreigner… AND 75% of it went to just 3 companies 🙁
But there is another side to the U.N. that is not mired in cynicism and disillusionment, and it rarely makes headlines. Despite all of the examples we can find of the dark side of global governance, there continues to be an abiding sense of hope that often attaches to the U.N., a hint of growth in the blighted soil of its failures. The groundswells of activism that emerge from a global (and seemingly growing) sense of humanity, united by ideals of accountability, democracy, and justice, are another part of the story of the United Nations. The U.N. is a meeting place for activists and state representatives—one in which they can gather, away from the political pressures at home, and talk through their issues. Global movements of women, children, people with disabilities, Indigenous peoples, and, most recently, those who are LGBTQ would not have had nearly the kind of success they have had without access to participation in the U.N. The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, for example, was penned at the U.N. in 2006.
Ronald Niezen for Sapiens introduces a forthcoming book that looks as many aspects of UN work from an ethnographic perspective. Sounds great!
Bringing together the emerging scholarly perspectives on this topic, I propose three pillars as the basis of a notion of international data justice: (in)visibility, (dis)engagement with technology and antidiscrimination. These pillars integrate positive with negative rights and freedoms, and by doing so challenge both the basis of current data protection regulations and the growing assumption that being visible through the data we emit is part of the contemporary social contract.
Linnet Taylor with an open access article in Big Data & Society.
One of the weaknesses of these country-wide mechanisms, as also pointed out in the study, is the fact that the mechanisms are largely dependent on foreign funding to function. Also, a lack of coordination and agreed joint priorities amongst international media development organisations and amongst local media development actors in some of the countries surveyed, has in some instances weakened the overall impact of the efforts made to improve safety.
International Media Support with a new study that continues their excellent work on freedom of speech and global journalism activities!
In sum, then, by focusing on processes of change with global/transnational and local dimensions, we aim to explore the relationship between knowledge and interests, local and translocal levels of decision-making, and local responses to rapid change. The question ‘Who to trust?’ is implicit throughout, and may be supplemented by the question ‘Why should I trust them?’. Situations where information is consciously held back for strategic reasons are explored, as are direct confrontations between community-based groups and external actors, but critical discourse analysis indicating the boundaries of discursive universes is also here. While we are alerted to the fact that the knowledge claims of anthropology must, inevitably, be interrogated on a par with the other situated knowledges in question, we mainly explore contrasting/conflicting knowledge regimes and their implications, with an emphasis on the power–knowledge nexus and the situated character of knowledge amidst rapid change.
Thomas Hylland Erikssen and Elisabeth Schober with a new open access E-Book.
Nordicom Information asked some academic users in the Nordic countries about their strategies and experiences in the most popular platforms of social media. (...). It seems that core issues are how to find time to produce content, keep yourself motivated and find networks relevant to your own research.
Maarit Jaakkola for Nordicom-Information with an interesting overview over scholarly social media practices.
Secondly, blogging helps me to think more clearly. I write and compose a post as a means of turning my abstract thoughts and disparate ideas into some coherent and meaningful whole. This post for example, started life as a series of notes on my smartphone after a conversation. You might be surprised how many posts I actually discard. Those that are actually published represent my thinking more clearly, and blogging helps me to reflect upon, and crystallise those ideas.
Steve Wheeler's approach to blogging sounds very familiar to my own practice.
A decolonised curriculum would bring questions of class, caste, race, gender, ability and sexuality into dialogue with each other, instead of pretending that there is some kind of generic identity we all share. It is telling that efforts to inject some breadth and variety into teaching are being dismissed as “artificial balance”. The assumption here is precisely the problem – that the best of all that has been thought and said just happens to have been produced in the west by white upper-class people, largely men.
Priyamvada Gopal for the Guardian with an important reminder that 'decolonizing the curriculum' is not just about 'add global Southern voices and stir', but requires us to re-think how we teach and how we select knowledge for our classes.
For the reasons above, we believe that more inclusive research assessments are needed to overcome ongoing marginalisation of some peoples, languages, and disciplines in evaluation. Some efforts, such as the Dutch “new standard evaluation protocol” for the social sciences and the “Norwegian model” of research assessment that is sensitive to regional journals, have moved in this direction – trying to account for the value of various disciplines and local research. However, a creative and radical reform in research evaluation from research councils and universities is needed in many other countries that follow traditional quantitative methods. Facing the challenges posed by sustainable development requires us to transform the concept of excellence from an elitist view, defined at a distance from society, to a more community-oriented, inclusive view, which encourages engagement. Such an understanding could produce research evaluations that support socially robust knowledge and are sensitive to the relevance of many diverse types of knowledge that are currently underestimated.
Diego Chavarro & Ismael Ràfols for the LSE Impact Blog with an overview of research that highlights what academic gut instinct has already been telling us: Rankings are never just an 'objective' collection of data! Another important aspect in the 'decolonization' debate!
Not much to report-the first part of the semester is done and lost of assignments are ready for reading and grading...
Development news: Humanitarian Evidence Week; Red Cross fraud in West Africa; why development finance institutions use tax havens; failed infrastructure projects in Ghana; local aid workers in Kenya; Oxfam & the aid industry's sexual harassment problem; how to fix Afghanistan? Inside Eritrea; Thousand Currents; Bright Magazine; development economics research; using social media for development research.
Our digital lives: The social cost of digital disruption in Nigeria; sexist travel Instagram. Publications: Local aid workers in the Philippines.
Academia: Developing countries & predatory publishing; tech adoption in the classroom; open access fosters engagement.
From November 7th to 12th, you will discover, three times a day, initial evidence on the variation of terms used in humanitarian action. Based on an analysis of the geographical, sectoral and organisational diversity of actors intervening in crisis contexts, we will explore how this diversity is reflected in the way different groups of actors conceptualise humanitarianism.
The Humanitarian Encyclopedia with a range of interesting posts to mark Humanitarian Evidence Week.
The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies has reported that as much as $6 million (5 million euros) may have been lost to fraud during the 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak in West Africa.
Sertan Sanderson for DW. Yes, fraud is always terrible-but a 5% loss seems neither totally unreasonable nor different from other industries I would imagine. Quite the opposite, the Pentagon would probably be happy if only 5% of its money was used in a fraudulent way...
The lack of evidence around the tax impact of using offshore vehicles is a thorny problem. The question of whether poor countries are deprived of tax revenues cannot be answered without specifying a realistic alternative, and that requires more than data—it requires informed but subjective judgements. But if it is wrong to ask DFIs to stop using tax havens, it is right to ask them to do more to enable public scrutiny of those investments. DFIs must invest effort into defining the tax implications of the offshore structures they use, and make that information public.
Paddy Carter for the Center for Global Development with an interesting addition to the #ParadisePaper debate and the complexities behind single and simple narratives of tax avoidance. But will there ever be enough 'good evidence' on this issue or is it better to reform offshore tax rules because it leaves aid organizations vulnerable to public critique?
The political economy of public service delivery is more complex than just corruption or the who-gets-what of distributive politics. It concerns collective decision-making in governments and the institutional structures and processes that shape it. While the example of unfinished infrastructure is a highly visible outcome of these interactions, it is far from the only one. Better understanding the relationship between these political and institutional forces is a task for reformers and researchers alike.
Martin J. Williams for VoxDev presents new research on infrastructure projects in Ghana.
Commitment and sacrifice, words so often associated with aid work, have different meanings in the context of nationals who are struggling to support their families as well as fulfil personal ideals and values. In a country where swathes of the population still live below the poverty line, Kenyans do not have the same choices as many of their expatriate counterparts. This is an issue of concern to many other national aid workers in the global south. And this is reflected also, unfortunately, in the way aid organisations themselves treat their national staff. The aid sector’s increased recognition of these disparities, and commitments to change, are encouraging; but this recognition needs to trickle down to field level so that all personnel have greater understanding of, and sympathy for, the specific challenges faced by national staff.
Gemma Houldey for The Conversation on local aid workers in Kenya.
Aid workers also called for tougher sanctions on perpetrators and tougher measures put in place to prevent staff from being allowed to leave their jobs before investigations are complete, something a number of those who spoke to Devex said is widely known to happen. “I’d also like organizations to be required to document and keep records of perpetrators who resign and leave before a disciplinary process is concluded. I think there is a massive amount of this and it means there is nothing on their record about what they do,” the gender-based violence specialist told Devex. However, for Mazurana, the fact that Oxfam has pursued seven cases against country managers is a sign of progress. Her research made clear that sexual harassment and abuse happens “at the highest levels” within aid organizations, and that getting senior leadership to change will be integral to shifting the culture. “Good for [Oxfam] for taking a good look at the senior leadership … because what we see in our reports is it’s going on at the highest level and that’s exactly where you need to be looking,” she said.
Sophie Edwards for DevEx with a comprehensive update on sexual harassment in the aid industry that goes beyond singling out Oxfam.
His sardonic wit made it easy to miss, but Guggenheim had always struck me as an optimist as long as I had known him. In recent times, though, the very thing that had drawn Guggenheim to Afghanistan in the beginning—the impossibility of the project—was now thwarting him. He had good days and bad days, but overall, he seemed to be losing faith in his ideals and his ability to implement them. It wasn’t clear whether this was because the aid system was broken, which it was; or because Ghani had modeled his vision for Afghanistan after Western versions of capitalism and democracy, which were coming undone; or because of the simple fact that “he has never manned a big organization or a big project before.” Around then, the death threats that had become a regular fixture of daily life in Kabul had increased in frequency and specificity, and the posters with Guggenheim’s face on them now loomed larger in his mind.
May Jeong for Politico with a great portrait of Scott Guggenheim which doubles as fantastic long-read on contemporary developments in Afghanistan.
The ambassadors are by no means downplaying the conditions in Eritrea. They are sharply critical of human rights violations, the lack of transparency and the rule of law, and the security forces' immunity from prosecution. Nevertheless, they say, most of the people who leave the country are not politically persecuted, but leave because of their poor economic outlook and to avoid the indefinite military service. According to the EU envoys, these push factors are augmented by a pull factor: the extensive protection granted to Eritreans who have made it to Europe.
Bartholomäus Grill for Spiegel International with insights from Eritrea which actually isn't the North Korea of Africa...
You’ve mentioned “trust” quite a bit. In your opinion, what’s the role of trust in philanthropy? Trust-based philanthropy is the only way to go if we want to effect the type of social transformation we want. If we want to create a world based on equality and justice, then we have to trust the ideas and vision of people from the communities we’re working in. We have to work in relationship with our partners and know that we are in service of their work. We must trust that they know as much, if not more than, what we funders know about solving social problems. A trust-based approach allows us to achieve our goals better than without it.
Solome Lemma talks to The Whitman Institute. It's always great and inspiring to read positive stories of social change and about organizations that challenge traditional development discourses!
Fast-forward five years, and I’m ecstatic to be launching BRIGHT Magazine, which I hope will be a new home for solutions-oriented reporting on a range of social issues. From global health and education to sustainability and gender, we tell compelling, nuanced stories that inspire dialogue and impact. We cut the jargon, avoid tired tropes about international development, and bring panache, creativity, and optimism to our work. When it comes to reporting on social issues, mainstream storytelling often tends to fall into one of several narrative clichés. Many stories use issue-specific jargon, making them accessible only to a narrow audience. Others talk about faraway people and places with “otherizing” language that flattens unfamiliar issues and experiences. Some topics rely on a small cadre of privileged voices to do the storytelling, while presenting “beneficiaries” of non-profit largesse as being free of agency. And there are relatively few places online to have nuanced, sprawling, troll-free conversations.
Sarika Bansal outlines her vision for Bright Magazine. If the Development Set project is any benchmark this is going to be a great development communication project!
NEUDC is a large development economics conference, with more than 160 papers on the program, so it’s a nice way to get a sense of new research in the field. Thankfully, since NEUDC posts submitted papers, I was able to mostly catch up. I went through 147 of the papers and summarized them below, by topic.
David Evans for the World Bank Development Impact blog with an interesting overview over some surprising as well as less surprising findings from development research aka as RCTs ;) ...
The two media of our choice, Instagram and spoken storytelling, appear diametrically opposed. One is based on pictures and 15-second videos, very much a product of the 21st century. The other one is a time-honoured practice that is central to how we perceive the world and ourselves. Nevertheless, both start from the same premise: what is the story? What is the kernel of truth within pages and pages of research findings to be shared with a larger audience?
Whether its Uber and Taxify grabbing customers from traditional taxis, or the ease of an online purchase of airtime eating into Mama’s recharge card sales, the long awaited and much hyped transformation of African economies by ICT is arriving at a much higher cost than noted anywhere in media, or in research reports on mobiles for “social good.” Literate youth quick to pick up new skills have no choice but to adapt and adopt. Its the older traders, the taxi drivers, the less literate, the long established service providers in the urban informal economy who are shouldering the brunt of this disruption.
Niti Bhan with an important reminder that any 'disruption' or transformation will have short- and possibly medium-term negative social implications before the bright digital future ICT4D future will of benefit to everyone (if that day ever comes...).
"I often wonder if that’s the only formula for success on Instagram which is unfortunate, because I don’t feel that male travel influencers necessarily have to adhere to the same standards," she says. “No one is being forced to do anything but there’s a very specific aesthetic that’s one of the clear paths to success for most women in the travel space – this whole looking away from the camera, very carefully crafted photos, typically with the hat. “It’s a very deliberate thing and that potentially puts pressure on women to dress a certain way, take pictures of certain places, pose a certain way, create a certain fantasy that may not be reflective of their travel experience, or other’s travel experiences.
Ronan J O'Shea for The Independent with an interesting case study of social media, gender and contemporary tourism trends that often evolve 'exotic' people, places or animals...
More than just personal portraits, these stories attempt to create and fuel conversations around how the sector can support and empower local humanitarian workers. It is an invitation, an open space to reflect on the ways we can improve the conditions in aid work by understanding digital technologies in the humanitarian sector through their contexts of production, and through the eyes of aid workers themselves. The book recounts not only the difficult stories of working in an emergency context, but also their personal challenges, including experiencing house damage from Yolanda themselves, losing jobs and switching industries, working with expats in large global aid agencies, and piloting technological innovations never before implemented in disaster contexts. At the same time, the book highlights the professional opportunities they experienced after their pioneering work, including leading international assignments and pursuing graduate studies in prestigious universities overseas. The book features evocative photographs from renowned photojournalist Geric Cruz. Book designer and National Book Award winner Karl Castro worked on the eloquent structure and typography of the feature.
The Newton Tech4Dev Network with a really interesting and innovative way of how to communicate research and the people behind it!
Not all universities fall into predatory traps. Research indicates that over a ten-year period, research intensive universities had less than 1% of their publications in journals that showed strong evidence of being predatory. In the same period, five other universities – which are less research-intensive in focus – had more than 10% of their publications in such journals. This suggests that having a strong research culture is key. If there is a general sense that academic publication is about knowledge dissemination rather than meeting performance targets or accruing incentive funding, academics and universities become less vulnerable to these vultures.
Sioux McKenna for The Conversation with an important reminder that predatory publishing effects a lot of scholars and institutions on the global higher education periphery and that research cultures need to change over time.
More importantly, it doesn’t make sense for institutions to make institution-wide decisions for most teaching technologies, partly because of wide variations in subject discipline needs, but mainly because with constantly emerging technologies, it’s better for the grassroots instructors and students to adopt as appropriate, hence ensuring more innovation in teaching and learning. For instructors, usually technology adoption enables them to solve a teaching problem, such as not enough interaction with students, students not attending in bad weather or with long commutes, difficult concepts to teach abstractly, etc. Since the teaching problems often vary from instructor to instructor, it is best to leave such decisions to them. However, instructors can be ‘nudged’ by instructional designers/learning technology support staff, who should be constantly looking for potential new applications of technology, and for faculty who may be interested in trying them.
Tony Bates with an important reminder that I only know too well from my digital teaching practice-one size fits all models make global companies rich, but do not allow for the flexibility that teachers need to make technology work in their classroom!
A report from Springer Nature launched today shows there is a tangible benefit to publishing academic books using immediate, or ‘gold’, open access (OA) models. The research found that such books are: Downloaded seven times more: On average, there are just under 30,000 chapter downloads per OA book within the first year of publication, which is 7 times more than for the average non-OA book. Cited 50% more: Citations are on average 50% higher for OA books than for non-OA books, over a four-year period. Mentioned online ten times more: OA books receive an average of 10 times more online mentions than non-OA books, over a three-year period.
SpringerNature on the benefits of open access publishing. While I certainly do not doubt the overall findings (open access leads to more engagement!), I am also aware that Springer is keen to explore new revenue models in addition to the now widely criticized subscription model.
Sussex University recently organized a Decolonising Development Studies event. I submitted a short input for discussion, but unfortunately was unable to attend the event in person. Below is a slightly revised version of my input on how development blogging and curating innovative development-related digital content has played a small, yet important role in decolonizing my approach to teaching and communicating development studies. Blogging and curating content as strategies to diversify discussions and communicate development differently I started my development blog Aidnography in 2011 and it has since become an integral part of my teaching, research and broader engagement to communicate development issues.
The practice of regular blogging and curating content has become an opportunity to shift foci from traditional locations of where and how development is communicated – and who is in charge and part of the story. While I am aware that as a white European man I have to be particularly self-critical situating my contribution to ‘decolonization’, I believe that engagement with different, often pop-cultural topics, young authors and different sources ads much needed diversity to my academic practices at a Swedish university. Also, as a full-time lecturer in Communication for Development with a permanent contract I am aware of the many dimensions of privilege that warrant more reflections on the project of decolonizing our subject.
In the following I will highlight some of the important aspects of development blogging and curating digital content that I find useful to discuss in the context of ‘decolonizing development’. Curating
- is an easy way to feature ‘new voices’, particularly younger writers and journalists from the global South.
- helps to identify (pop-)cultural trends, for example in literature, fashion or food, particularly from Africa.
- nurtures engagement with audiences ‘at home’, including media brands with opportunities to challenge traditional narratives about ‘Africa’, for example.
- highlights persistent power imbalances and problems, for example in the context of volunteering and voluntourism.
- improves teaching materials and course reading lists. Featuring ‘new voices’ Once you have set up good feeds on Twitter, facebook and/or LinkedIn, different voices will show up. There is a growing group from fashion bloggers to journalists to critical citizens or local aid workers who live where ‘development’ happens. Our faculty connected with Eromo Egbejule, a young journalist from Nigeria, and both colleagues and students benefited from his ‘fresh’ insights into contemporary issues in Nigeria.
Technology can be a great tool in making new connections possible. My colleague Tom Arcaro recently invited a local aid worker from Jordan to speak to his undergraduate class. These are small examples of how to ‘decolonize’ and to ‘de-mainstream’ classes and discussions on development topics with small efforts and readily available technology.
Identifying (pop-)cultural trends Rice Jollof, Nollywood movies, M-Pesa, science fiction by Nnedi Okorafor and fabric designs from Tanzania. The cultural industry is booming almost everywhere-often in connection with diaspora producers in the global North. Featuring some of these trends is another way to ‘decolonize’ culture, art, innovation and everyday life. Curating content also helps to showcase positive stories, everyday lives and resources that can help students to explore topics, for example for their MA thesis, differently. Fostering engagement with audiences ‘at home’ My approach to curating interesting development content is based on how I generally interpret an important part of my role as a communication and development teacher and researcher: I enjoy facilitating discussions, being a resource person and using my (privileged) position as full-time academic to read, browse through my feeds and sift through the ‘noise’ to highlight interesting food for reading and thought. For me, ‘decolonizing’ then also means to break the routine of engaging with mainstream media news sites, policy reports, research articles and similar ritualized products that often dominate what ends up in the mailboxes of staff in aid organizations or universities.
Highlighting persistent power imbalances Like everybody else, I have topics I feature more regularly than others-after all, this is my personal blog and I do not claim any form of ‘objectivity’. Over the years, some topics have gained more attention, often starting with links I shared and then moving into more research-related, longer reflections. Volunteering and voluntourism, #allmalepanel or the false promises of philanthrocapitalism are some of the topics that I highlight in book reviews as well as regular blog posts (see links at the end of the post). These topics are discussed widely and they often include reflective essays, visual content and outputs that can be shared more easily than traditional reports, books or journal articles. They are also important entry points for discussions with colleagues and students about diversity, power imbalances and global change and stagnation-exactly those key challenges that I think hide behind a term like ‘decolonization’. Improving teaching materials and reading lists My final point is probably a more traditional benefit of ‘decolonizing’ the academy. As quick and ephemeral short-term, regular link reviews and curating often is, some texts, authors and traditional research have a longer-term impact. Especially in our New Media, ICT & Development course which is part of our online blended learning MA in Communication for Development those sources complement traditional textbooks and journal articles well and encourage students to embrace the diversity of sources in their own blogging assignments. In the end, ‘decolonizing’ also means that more sources from different margins are included. This goes beyond the global North and South dichotomy and expands diversity to academic institutions, smaller NGOs or local news media sites almost anywhere in the world. A drop in the (digital) ocean The main purpose of my short post is to highlight some practical benefits of communicating development differently through social media and digital forms of navigating new content. I am also fully aware that my practices are embedded in important debates in media and communication studies that challenge notions of diversification and decolonization on a macro level.
Like any other prosumer issues around the power of algorithms in various feeds, filter bubbles and generally how ‘the Internet’ works apply to my practices and create (new) biases and blind spots, of course.
I am also not immune to the power of global media brands. At the end of the week there is usually a variety of links to Guardian articles and I have to be selective in how I share content from one particular media brand. In the end, I can ensure some balance and diversity simply by spending time on my blogging, reading and curating activities-time that I have as a full-time academic and that others may not have.
But despite these caveats a key point is that even modest attempts of ‘decolonizing’ higher education require a different mindset. Reconsidering traditional ways of engaging with and presenting material that we use for teaching, research and public engagement.
In our crowded digital lives this means that curation and facilitation will become more important skills for those working in academia because there is already an abundance of diverse material from many sources. Strengthening connections and discussions, often with the aid of technological tools, thereby creating a global understanding of ‘development’ from social movements to debating inequalities and power/powerlessness will remain a bigger challenge than simply replacing a book on a course reading list or sharing a link with students. My years of maintaining Aidnography have always been a reminder not to become too complacent with my knowledge and practices of communicating development. Even small steps in breaking out of the ‘ivory tower’, engaging with different audiences and different digital products, are important in ‘decolonizing’ development studies. In this day and age there is no excuse for sticking to old discourses and practices of who gets heard or read in the classroom or how we communicate international development topics globally. Selected further readings: What I learned from curating thousands of #globaldev articles
It has been a loooong week-as you probably guessed by the delayed publication of this week's review. However, as always there is plenty of food for thought on everything from war crimes to labeling a 'hut', from sexual violence to empowering stories featuring women from Kenya and Bolivia, from misguided stereotypes about India to revolutionary global ecosocialism, from laptop humanitarians to civil society claqueurs, from Bono to Louise Linton!
In our crowded digital lives this means that curation and facilitation will become more important skills for those working in academia because there is already an abundance of diverse material from many sources. Strengthening connections and discussions, often with the aid of technological tools, thereby creating a global understanding of ‘development’ from social movements to debating inequalities and power/powerlessness will remain a bigger challenge than simply replacing a book on a course reading list or sharing a link with students.
The outbreak is often portrayed in the media as a random and tragic event in a war-torn country, but it is a predictable, even intended, consequence of the coalition’s campaign of collective punishment. As Murphy argued on the Senate floor, Saudi Arabia, led by its headstrong crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, is hoping to use disease and starvation to force the country to surrender to its terms, a strategy that is on its face a war crime. (...) Murphy explained exactly how U.S. support for Saudi Arabia allowed them to create the epidemic. “That bombing campaign that targeted the electricity infrastructure in Yemen could only happen with U.S. support,” Murphy said. “It is the United States that provides the targeting assistance for the Saudi planes.” The United States has been a silent partner in the war since the beginning, providing weapons, targeting intelligence, and refueling support for the Saudi Air Force. The Obama administration provided more than $100 billion worth of weapons to the Saudis, and fragments of U.S.-made weapons have been found at the scene of some of the war’s worst atrocities. President Donald Trump has vowed to continue the policy, signing a commitment for more than $110 billion in weapons during his trip to Riyadh.
Alex Emmons for The Intercept. I usually keep US news to a minimum here to not distract too much from 'development' content, but there are moment when it is important to stress that very often it's not as simple as 'the UN is failing' or the 'humanitarian system' could do better. It's supporting a regime like Saudi Arabia that creates a 'humanitarian crisis' in the first place!
For many, there was something comical about the picture of the couple, no strangers to accusations of flaunting their wealth and privilege. Mnuchin holds the sheet on both sides, a smile on his face. His wife stands behind him, her hand on the sheet’s corner. “Only way this could be worse would be if Linton and Mnuchin were lighting cigars with flaming dollar bills,” wrote the writer James Surowiecki.
Eli Rosenberg for the Washington Post with the latest story of the never-ending saga 'Louise Linton making a slightly disturbing public appearance again'...
Save the Children said it received 31 allegations of sex abuse over the last year, and referred 10 cases to authorities. "Unfortunately, there are incidents of sexual harassment in every sector and every country around the world, and the aid sector is no exception," a spokeswoman for Save The Children said in an email to the Thomson Reuters Foundation. "We welcome transparency and accountability in the international development and humanitarian sector," added the group, which employs about 25,000 people around the world. Aid groups International Committee of the Red Cross, Plan International, CARE International, Norwegian Refugee Council and Mercy Corps said in email statements that they had strict policies to tackle sexual harassment in the workplace, but most admitted it remained an under-reported issue.
Lin Taylor for Thomson Reuters Foundation continues the debate on sexual violence in the aid sector.
Chapeton said women find it hard to get financial backing to run campaigns and often face personal attacks on social media. Of El Alto's 14 deputy mayors, three are women. Chapeton said her goal was to achieve gender parity only to find that some women deputy mayors left because of intimidation. "Several of the women declined to participate afterwards because it's much easier to attack a woman," Chapeton said. "It's not easy for a woman to enter political life." Chapeton, from the indigenous Aymara group, resonates with other indigenous women who aspire to enter politics. While she speaks Spanish rather than Aymara in public and wears black stilettos and trousers instead of the traditional bowler hats and colourful, layered skirts, many indigenous women identify with her, calling her "brave".
Anastasia Moloney, also for Thomson Reuters Foundation, with an uplifting story from Bolivia.
Sweet mother of god... that Brie Larson trailer is every Indian cliche in two minutes. White saviour, people riding on train tops and spicy food. STOP THIS MADNESS. https://t.co/BmIv1w0LDA
My insider at One, who asked not to be identified for professional reasons, told me that the organization’s direction needs to be reevaluated. “It’s time to take a close look at whether or not the One model works anymore,” she said, adding that, “(Bono) catapulted himself through charity to a different social level of importance — otherwise he’d just be another aging rockstar. He’s the frontman not just for U2 but for One and … he’s a complicated guy. He’s very earnest but he does like to hear himself talk.” (...) But here’s the bottom line. Yes, Bono is a successful musician who has saved a lot of tax dollars — a smart business move. He’s raised awareness for issues in Africa by throwing galas and offering trips, while pressuring governments to do more — good for him. All the while, he is rewarded by a sycophantic media honoring his every utterance with a magazine cover or an accolade.
Paula Froelich for the NY Post with the latest critical take on one of those guys who put celebrity into celebrity humanitarianism...
One reason that aid is proving so suddenly vulnerable is that nobody ever made the argument about what modern development involves. It’s not just grain handouts and paying for teachers or nurses. Often our support goes on things which, when ripped from its context and placed in size 72 font on a tabloid headline, can look like a waste. One such project was created in Ethiopia, an innovative crackdown on an epidemic of child marriage. (...) The British model of aid and development is not perfect. It has led us to ally ourselves with dictators and avert our eyes from human rights abuses. Some of the money has, of course, been wasted—what government department doesn’t spend on projects that come to nothing? But it has undoubtedly saved lives and changed lives across the developing world. At a time when few nations have a good word to say about Britain, our aid is rightly praised. The 0.7 target is, as one aid official put it, “a symbol that we give a shit”. That matters, not just for how Britain is viewed, but as a spur for other nations to do more.
Steve Bloomfield for Prospect Magazine with a very good essay on the past, present and uncertain future of British aid.
"It helps you to position someone in the economic context. What types of materials they use, what kind of roofing," said Olayo. If someone lives in a mud hut with a thatched roof that "helps to tell you this person is in the lowest quintile." But it's important to be sensitive to the way Africa has been historically portrayed in the Western world, opined Dixon Chibanda, a psychiatrist from Zimbabwe. And too often, he said, "the word 'hut' has been associated not only with poverty, but with an inferior type of lifestyle." Others felt that just because someone lives in a hut doesn't necessarily mean that they're poor. "In my village," said Phyllis Omido, an environmental rights actvist in Kenya, "it's the culture that after a [teenaged] boy is circumcised he has to build a hut [on the family's land]. And it's always a hut. I have uncles who are doctors, and they still built a hut."
Nurith Aizenmen for NPR Goats & Soda dissects a quintessential 'development' term and masterfully outlines the complexities of 'the hut'!
Mekatilili's courage has inspired many women across Kenya and Africa to stand up for their rights and defend themselves and their communities against undue oppression. A statue has been erected in honour of her efforts at Uhuru Gardens in Nairobi, and the garden has been renamed Mekatilili wa Menza Gardens.
Munachim Amah for CNN on the 'African Queens' photo project.
Not everyone appreciates the wildly unorganized style that characterizes laptop humanitarians’ efforts. To Lynda Elliott, there seemed to be a lot of people — thousands, perhaps — who were interested in helping. Yet, she was dismayed to see that refugees’ posts were often met with simple “clucks of sympathy.” Plans to help were dropped as volunteers became wrapped up in their own lives, which is, she argued, “quite dangerous if you’re talking about people who are suicidal or self-harming.” And there were ethical concerns. It was nearly impossible to verify refugees’ stories from hundreds of miles away. For instance, Elliott was once horrified to discover that a homeless refugee she had raised money to shelter wasn’t homeless at all. She worried about the cavalier way some volunteers spread the photos and personal details of vulnerable people around the internet. Sometimes, she felt the aid offered was inappropriate. “You get people sending refugees used underwear and stilettos,” she said. “Then there’s the people telling them, ‘Sew up your lips and go on a hunger strike.’”
Elizabeth Stuart for Bright Magazine with a great long-read on the challenges of online volunteering, good intentions and the complexities of life...
Are you volunteering or working in an development or humanitarian program?
In the end, UN members states finalized the agenda behind closed doors. CSOs were once again relegated to serving as commentators and claqueurs. When push came to shove, the UN leadership thus followed its half-century-old practice of elitist international governance. Even though the UN leadership has been relentless in praising the virtues of accountability for post-2015 development cooperation, it has so far shied away from institutionalizing accountability in a way that would really make a difference: between the UN system and its powerful national agenda setters on one side, and CSOs, taxpayers, and intended beneficiaries on the other.
Daniel Esser for The Business of Society is not happy with the state of global governance...and since he is a dear friend and co-author I can give extra praise for the use of the word 'claqueur' ;)!
Critics often point out that this emphasis on economics debases and sacrifices other important values such as equality, social inclusion, democratic deliberation, and justice. Those political and social objectives obviously matter enormously, and in some contexts they matter the most. They cannot always, or even often, be achieved by means of technocratic economic policies; politics must play a central role. But neoliberals are not wrong when they argue that our most cherished ideals are more likely to be attained when our economy is vibrant, strong, and growing. Where they are wrong is in believing that there is a unique and universal recipe for improving economic performance to which they have access. The fatal flaw of neoliberalism is that it does not even get the economics right. It must be rejected on its own terms for the simple reason that it is bad economics.
Dani Rodrik for the Boston Review with an important essay to challenge 'neoliberalism' on its economic foundations.
But to achieve these things, we will need to break with “business as usual,” that is, with the current logic of capital, and introduce an entirely different logic, aimed at the creation of a fundamentally different social metabolic system of reproduction. To overcome centuries of alienation of nature and human labor, including the treatment of the global environment and most people—divided by class, gender, race, and ethnicity—as mere objects of conquest, expropriation, and exploitation, will require nothing less than a long ecological revolution, one which will necessarily entail victories and defeats and ever-renewed striving, occurring over centuries. It is a revolutionary struggle, though, that must commence now with a worldwide movement toward ecosocialism—one capable from its inception of setting limits on capital. This revolt will inevitably find its main impetus in an environmental proletariat, formed by the convergence of economic and ecological crises and the collective resistance of working communities and cultures—a new reality already emerging, particularly in the global South.
John Bellamy Foster for the Monthly Review with another thoughtful long-read with plenty of food for thought and discussion-even if you disagree with 'ecosocialism'... Our digital lives
#ICT4D workshop chat: Me: "So, what does your organisation do?" Her: "We leverage advanced mobile solutions to empower enhanced livelihood outcomes and to maximise productivity gains across the supply chain" Me: *Falls asleep at word 'leverage'*
There needs to be deep reckoning — on all issues — about what is the counter message, where is it coming from, and how do you respond to it in ethical, safe, and effective ways?This is, in part, a communications issue. And much more. It is really a mission and strategy issue and a reality check on how well we, the people running nonprofits and foundations, understand the digital environment in which we live, the way it can be used to manipulate people, and the ways in which our actions — or inaction — matter.
Much of the existing research on citizen participation technologies takes the technology as its starting point, focusing primarily on the identification and analysis of technical barriers to adoption and assessing opportunities for technical improvements. We argue that this techno-centric gaze obscures non-use and the reasons why many citizens remain excluded. Instead, this research adopts a human-centric approach, selecting specific user groups as case studies rather than specific technologies, and identifying the contextual social norms and structural power relations that explain the use and non-use of citizen participation technologies.
Tony Roberts & Kevin Hernandez for IDS with another interesting product of the Making All Voices Count project.
Information shared with governments by communities through research processes can potentially be used against them and can make the communities more vulnerable rather than empowered in certain instances. Technologies such as digital storytelling and exhibitions make invisible citizen knowledge/experience visible and visceral to government actors in a way that traditional research cannot. Technology can help make visible systemic forms of injustice. The interpretation of this data by citizens adds additional validation and specificity to such meta-analyses.
Felix Bivens for Empyrean Research is also sharing findings from the Making All Voices Count project adding great insights from South Africa! Academia
New issue of ephemera is OUT NOW. Contains highly flammable material on academic games, dead office spaces, painful births, Soviet chic, rank hypocrisies and, of course, yoga lessons for professors & much more. https://t.co/NLIEycpaXupic.twitter.com/jnOeoqVd53
And just like mega-farms for maximum profit extraction, there are mega-journals that are now profit centers for the mega-publishers. If chicken production is neoliberalism par excellence, journal comes a close second. @keanbirch@RickyPohttps://t.co/yZ4hkOOFu5
If you do Twitter right (full disclosure: I also follow Only in Russia and The Dodo) it can be an awesome space for global development debates. There are a lot of smart people in my regular feed that share interesting, important empirical insights into development research e.g. Dina Pomeranz, Alice Evans, Maya Forstater, David Evans, or Justin Sandefur.
Hey, I'm doing a podcast, discussing fascinating research from 2017 on global development, inequality, & social change Suggestions welcome!
1/ I've been avoiding Liberia education drama for a bit, but there were a few new pieces around the web this week referencing our charter school RCT results.
Right now, there is also a great debate going on where Jason Hickel and Brank Milanovic argue of (de-)growth (see below).
Let’s leave questions of ‘decolonization’ aside for a moment, because I do realize that said Twitter feed is dominated by citizens of the global North, educated at some of the best universities there and working at great organizations and universities.
It was probably Dina Pomeranz’ long thread on what she is thankful for that encouraged me to write down what I have been mulling over for a longer time: The very powerful and usually very unidirectional discussion around ‘our world is not getting worse, but better’ usually supplemented by at least one reference to how ‘millions of people have been lifted out of poverty’.
In honor of American Thanksgiving this week, here's a thread of a few global developments I am thankful for:
Both the late Hans Rosling and Max Roser’s Our World in Data did and do an excellent job about the big picture stuff in which development (i.e. money spend from aid budgets) plays a small, but significant role.
But these very large-n curves only tell one side of the story-or, to be a bit more precise, they contribute to a depolitization that usually ignores the other side of the coin: ‘More people have access to electricity than ever before’ is fantastic news for many people whose lives are made easier, potentially more fulfilling, but that story is linked to other stories e.g. about China’s increasing use of coal-to produce cheap energy for electricity. Economic growth comes with huge cost-and maybe even more importantly with lifestyle changes. It is great news that kids can read late at night at the well-illuminated kitchen table, but that same electricity is also required to run the fridge, microwave or TV and charge mobiles and laptops-and tons an tons of plastic and other resources will be used and sold ‘to lift families out of poverty’. <iframe src="https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-the-population-with-access-to-electricity?tab=chart" style="width: 100%; height: 600px; border: 0px none;"></iframe>
Everyone wants everything – how is that going to work? The promise of economic growth is that the poor can live like the rich and the rich can live like the oligarchs. But already we are bursting through the physical limits of the planet that sustains us. Climate breakdown, soil loss, the collapse of habitats and species, the sea of plastic, insectageddon: all are driven by rising consumption. The promise of private luxury for everyone cannot be met: neither the physical nor the ecological space exists.
The world listens to the science and the scientists and somehow finds a way to stay within the planetary boundaries (decarbonization, broader shift to sustainability, including shift in norms around consumption etc)
In addition ‘lifting people out of poverty’ comes with new challenges as people live longer and up to a point healthier lives:
The number of people living with Alzheimer’s is expected to skyrocket in low- and middle-income countries. This is a crisis that more people need to be talking about: https://t.co/41AFvojmnxpic.twitter.com/6KKbrF9vfk
Preparing societies and their institution, currently very busy in ‘lifting people out of poverty’ and making sure everybody has a job, for an ageing society with new social and medical challenges that cannot be fully captured by yet another curve that goes up, e.g. life expectancy.
Communicating research with neat data visualizations is an important way to engage social media audiences with reminders that things, including ‘in Africa’, are not simply getting worse. But improvements come at a cost and the cost of growth raises important questions on how to deal with it. Jason Hickel's recent discussion with Branko Milanovic (see below) is an important reminder:
Yes, one might argue that we can improve the share of growth that goes to the poorest. That would be an important first step, to be sure. But as long as the rest of the world continues to grow, increasing aggregate material throughput and emissions, we’re going to be in trouble. In fact, we’re already in trouble even at existing levels of throughput and emissions, and we can see it all around us: rapid deforestation, collapsing fish stocks, mass species extinction, soil depletion and of course climate change, with the poorest getting hit hardest by far. Milanovic believes we can reign these problems in with more “environmentally friendly” growth. But that’s a pipe dream.
As much as the ‘post-Rosling’ world likes a good data visualization, advocates in the #globaldev arena should point out the complexities more often and remind audiences that New Delhi’s toxic air, the market for skin bleaching products and Bollywood movies advocating for indoor bathrooms are all part of the same consumerist logic and politicians, corporations and other institutions do not always have the best interests in mind when those ‘lifted out of poverty’ join new markets. Here's Branko Milanovic from the debate with Jason Hickel on (de-)growth:
Capitalist societies, after several centuries of exposure to market ideology and way of life, are structured in such a way that populations have fully accepted, and reaffirm in their daily lives, the objectives that make capitalism thrive. We want more and newer “stuff” every year. The ideology of commodification and commercialization has never been stronger: it is as present in the UK and the United States as in China, Nigeria, Congo, Russia or Brazil. We are not only working for a wage, we are cheerfully renting our homes and cars for money, networking at our children’s birthdays, and having kids who beat each other to grab a new model of smart phone or shoes. In other words, we have global capitalism with a population that has internalized the objectives needed for capitalism to reproduce itself and to expand, by requiring an ever greater amount of saving, investment and output.
In a perfect world we would have safe and hygienic indoor toilets for everyone, but behavior change is far more complicated and open to manipulation. The ‘lifting people out of poverty narrative’ often overlooks that our digital now is already very complicated (Zeynep Tufekci's TED talk is a powerful reminder that so-called social networks are essentially advertising platforms). Adding new consumers will unlikely bring sustainability and happiness any time soon...
After a lot of food for the body for most who celebrate Thanksgiving, here's your weekly food for mind & soul ;)! Development news: Protracted conflict & lives in South Sudan; Radi-Aid award finalists; reparations as radical philanthropy in Africa; governance (un)reform in Nepal; innovations in bureaucracy; communicating a project evaluation from Uganda; successful community-driven activism in Malawi; pity, politeness & charity communications. Our digital lives: Better (humanitarian) news consumption; self-care beyond bath salts & chocolate; the sound & power of algorhythmic governance. Publications: An ethnography of social media in Trinidad; fixing the journalist-fixer relationship; gender equality in higher education.
Academia: De-colonising education in South Africa; the utility of blogging & blogs in #highered.
It was probably Dina Pomeranz’ long thread on what she is thankful for that encouraged me to write down what I have been mulling over for a longer time: The very powerful and usually very unidirectional discussion around ‘our world is not getting worse, but better’ usually supplemented by at least one reference to how ‘millions of people have been lifted out of poverty’. (...) The ‘lifting people out of poverty narrative’ often overlooks that our digital now is already very complicated. Adding new consumers will unlikely bring sustainability and happiness any time soon...
South Sudan's dumpsite of failed policy interventions is now so cramped that policy makers have convinced themselves they have no room to manoeuvre. One failed initiative rests on the aborted foundations of previous ones. Pride, bureaucratic inertia, and the realities of multilateral diplomacy prevent starting anew. The United States remains the leading global actor on South Sudan. But US diplomacy and leverage can only be helpfully applied if there is a larger vision for South Sudan beyond hopes that a state can be built in time for democratic elections and a nation will emerge from the rubble of ethnic cleansing. That vision should come from the South Sudanese themselves. They regularly circulate proposals for a restructured South Sudan that decentralises governance and the power structure, a similar approach applied positively in recent years in Kenya and Somalia. Others propose formally prescribing shared sovereignty through quota allotments and rotating executives. The outside world's main contribution to South Sudan’s war has been to cement the conditions for its perpetuity.
Alan Boswell for IRIN with a sobering analysis about the risks of prolonging war and conflict in South Sudan even further and the protracted situation that needs (international, American) leadership.
“If I was living in this environment, I would have given up,” Ms. Hylton said. “That was the biggest surprise — that people here hadn’t given up, there was still so much hope.” But there was also still so much sadness. It wasn’t always obvious, but it was there. As Ms. Hylton said: When you interview people, they often put on a brave face and tell you what you want to hear. But when you take out a camera and ask someone to stare into the lens, it’s different. An honesty is revealed. She especially felt this when making a portrait of Wokil, a comedian. “His posture was very cool, he was trying to be very cool,” she said. “But you could tell he lived through some of the worst stuff.” “Loss, I recognized loss,” she said. “It was in his gaze.”
Sara Hylton, Jeffrey Gettleman & Eve Lyons for the New York Times with a different side of the story of people surviving war and conflict in Juba, South Sudan.
This year’s finalists show that poverty, migration crisis and trafficking can be presented in creative and nuanced manners that contribute to engagement and enlightenment. But the worst examples – which might as well could have come straight from the 1980s – are unfortunately still out there, depicting oversimplifications, stereotypes and celebrities as spokespersons for the poor, says Beathe Øgård, President of the Norwegian Students’ and Academics’ International Assistance Fund (SAIH), who arranges the annual event. (...) According to the jury, Ed Sheeran’s video is basically about himself, and reinforces the stereotype of “the white savior”, as all the three British finalists do. Fundraising campaigns about hunger catastrophes are not easy to make, but the way DEC videos depict these issues is unnecessarily oversimplified.
Yet, paired with capitalism, liberalism can often be an extremely inconvenient set of philosophies. While Europeans may not have wanted to believe that Africans were humans, fundamentally of course they knew that they were. And so, in order to absolve themselves – and to justify the extraction – they came up with the idea of colonialism as a so-called “civilizing mission.” Europeans would be the custodians of Africa’s vast resources until Africans grew into the ability to manage them themselves. This is the root of modern-day philanthropy in Africa. In the words of Rudyard Kipling: « Take up the White Man’s burden— The savage wars of peace— Fill full the mouth of Famine— And bid the sickness cease. » What marvelous conjecture! It is as though I were to come to your house, steal your things, kick you onto the street and then proclaim to the world that I will grudgingly take up the burden of caring for your lazy, unwashed self.
Uzodinma Iweala for LeMonde on how to re-think 'philanthropy' and 'charity' when engaging with 'Africa'.
Even a cursory examination of the directives, regulations, and acts mooted by government in recent months shows how difficult it is to change a mindset oriented towards orchestrating governance and development from Kathmandu. Changing the hearts and minds of those who feel threatened, so that they accept and support constitutional provisions for shared and self-rule, is likely to be the costliest and most wasteful of efforts that can be anticipated. Chances are high that provincial and federal elections will return even fewer positive results for marginalized populations and favor those with privilege, deep pockets, and narrow self-interest.Importantly, however, constitutional provisions for local government provide reassurance that the power and resources needed to address local interests and needs are now, more than ever, within reach if opportunity is seized. It is now conceivable that newly-elected leaders in provinces and municipalities can address previously intractable development problems in a more effective manner. Each provincial and municipal government must find its own constitutionally empowered way to raise revenues and address needs. In many ways, the arena of accountability has shifted much closer to home, and those in new leadership can no longer pass the buck to Kathmandu.
George Varughese for the Nepali Times with a reminder of the never-ending saga that is 'governance reform' in Nepal...
The World Bank might be a bit more ahead of the curve here, and held a workshop earlier this month on “Innovating Bureaucracy.” I wasn’t able to attend (ahem, wasn’t invited), and so as the king of conference write-ups doesn’t seem to have gotten around to it yet, I’ve written up my notes from skimming through the slides
Lee Crawfurd curates conference papers/presentations which is slowly becoming a 'thing' in the digital #globaldev community?!?
This is the working website of the SMC North Uganda evaluation. It contains background materials, field notes, evidence and references. Notes are provided to give a sense of the conversations that took place, and to put evidence in context. They are not been edited to be a final product.
My colleague Silva Ferretti and her team prepared a great blog to accompany a more traditional evaluation project. A great way to 'communicate development'!
In February 2017, the World Bank dropped its proposal to finance the project. A representative from the United States government noted that the overall financial and safeguard risk levels were higher than previously anticipated and had become unmanageable. The representative also highlighted that the resettlement costs were higher than suggested and that the government of Malawi had expressed a reluctance to provide fair compensation. The World Bank’s decision was preceded by a move by the African Development Bank to withdraw from the project due to high risk levels in the resettlement action plan. These decisions followed months of advocacy and research by affected communities and local civil society to ensure project financiers exercise due diligence and prevent harm. Arguably, without research and advocacy from the community level, these decisions may have looked very different. The withdrawals from the project sent a powerful message to governments that the consent of those directly affected is indispensable in the pursuit of any development objective. In addition, the withdrawals drew the attention of other human rights activists, showing what is possible to achieve with concerted effort and community-level data.
John Mwebe and Preksha Kumar for Open Global Rights on how community-driven action facilitated by the International Accountability Project helped to influence policy-making.
Despite being well-delivered and impassioned, Hawkins’ talk left us with the same sense of deflated overwhelm and powerlessness that we get when we read the news in the morning. The same guilt for living cushy, privileged lives. The same plea for support ringing in our ears. Gone was the fire we’d had in us after having the very basis of our existence put into question by Kate Raworth and our minds blown by Margaret Wheatley’s wisdom on how (not) to change the world. (...) And it seems to me that charities have nurtured a vested interest in pity. They have become masterful in appealing to it. They know exactly how to present numbers, images and human stories in ways that push all the right buttons. They do so with good intent, and to some extent it has worked. It is out of pity for others that we are attracted to helping the needy and the vulnerable at the centre of Hawkins’ accounts.
Agnes Otzelberger with reflections from the Meaning Conference and how a MSF presentation framed solidarity as pity...
Our digital lives
Over the last decade, we've awoken to the fact that junk food hurts us. It's time for a similar revolution in our news consumption. Much as a nutritionist gives us tools for healthy eating, Heba Aly gives us tools to stop consuming and supporting junk news. As director of www.irinnews.org, Heba Aly strives to put quality, independent journalism at the service of the most vulnerable people on earth.
If you find yourself having to regularly indulge in consumer self-care, it’s because you are disconnected from actual self-care, which has very little to do with “treating yourself” and a whole lot do with parenting yourself and making choices for your long-term wellness. It is no longer using your hectic and unreasonable life as justification for self-sabotage in the form of liquor and procrastination. It is learning how to stop trying to “fix yourself” and start trying to take care of yourself… and maybe finding that taking care lovingly attends to a lot of the problems you were trying to fix in the first place. It means being the hero of your life, not the victim. It means rewiring what you have until your everyday life isn’t something you need therapy to recover from. It is no longer choosing a life that looks good over a life that feels good. It is giving the hell up on some goals so you can care about others. It is being honest even if that means you aren’t universally liked. It is meeting your own needs so you aren’t anxious and dependent on other people.
Brianna Wiest for the Thought Catalog. I don't often include 'self help'-type posts in my review, but in light of discussions around aid worker and academics' well-being Brianna's post nails it quite well!
Our analysis reveals: (1) how smart city technologies computationally perform rhythmanalysis and undertake rhythm-making that intervenes in space-time processes; (2) distinct forms of algorhythmic governance, varying on the basis of adaptiveness, immediacy of action, and whether humans are in-, on-, or, off-the-loop; (3) and a number of factors that shape how algorhythmic governance works in practice.
Claudio Coletta and Rob Kitchin with an open access article for Big Data & Society. Publications Social Media in Trinidad
Drawing on 15 months of ethnographic research in one of the most under-developed regions in the Caribbean island of Trinidad, this book describes the uses and consequences of social media for its residents. Jolynna Sinanan argues that this semi-urban town is a place in-between: somewhere city dwellers look down on and villagers look up to. The complex identity of the town is expressed through uses of social media, with significant results for understanding social media more generally.
Jolynna Sinanan with the latest addition to the Why We Post open access book series.
Subsequent interviews with fixers who participated in the survey indicated underlying tensions that often remain hidden in professional interactions. A fixer with more than a quarter century of experience working with one of the American news networks put it bluntly: “Unfortunately they still look at us as ‘brown’ people with funny accents, and though I have reported and done some of the most important and daring stories for (the network), it is a struggle to get a producer credit. Meanwhile, white kids – years my junior – get their names up (in the credits).” The rare time fixers do come out of the shadows is when they are arrested, kidnapped or killed. “Local journalists (working as fixers) no longer occupy the privileged position they once did,” said Courtney Radash, advocacy director for Committee to Protect Journalists. “We have seen increased killings of journalists.” This, combined with a greater reliance on fixers in conflict zones, has created a scenario in which fixers are in ever greater danger.
Peter W. Klein & Shayna Plaut with a new publication from the Global Investigative Journalism Network and emerging questions on how to 'decolonize' global journalism and foreign correspondent engagement.
EqualBITE digs into the messy reality of higher education gender issues, presenting people’s stories, experiences and frustrations and – more importantly – what can be done. University of Edinburgh students and staff share real-life experiences of gender challenges and opportunities, and their constructive responses. The book condenses current academic research into practical actions that do make a difference. EqualBITE is a pragmatic and positive response to gender issues in academia – a catalyst for creating a culture which is better for everyone.
Judy Robertson, Alison Williams, Derek Jones, Lara Isbel and Daphne Loads with a new open access book. Academia
Professor Robert van Niekerk, Professor of Social Policy at the Institute of Social and Economic Research, Rhodes University, will compare and contrast the response of students, academic staff, support workers and senior administrators ('stakeholder') at Rhodes University, an historically white academic institution in South Africa, to the Feesmustfall protests in 2015 and 2016 and the campaign to de-colonise the university from its apartheid (and post-apartheid) legacies.
Random reflections on #decolonization stemming from the awesome #asa2027 panel - a thread that I'll add to over time: 1/
Blogs on the other hand are more often trading on perspectives and opinions. I find these valuable – there are a lot of people who have opinions I’m interested in – but if they are polished essays they tend to end up in magazines or newspapers and if they are polished research contributions they tend to end up in academic journals. Some people use blogs to develop their research, or for purposes other than offering a take on something. Then there are blogs like [LSE USAPP] which trade on summarising research. These are very useful for me. Friends, current and former students, and people I have never heard of have all published things that interest me on [LSE USAPP]. But I still find that I find the most utility for me comes from allowing me to think through a problem that is bugging me and then publish something about the result. I might use these to initiate conversations or for teaching more than for research. Most generally, blogs open up a flexible venue where turnaround can be rapid while reaching a somewhat different audience.
Michael McQuarrie for the LSE Impact Blog on the value of blogs and blogging in #highered.
Development news: Humanitarian crises in 2018; an excellent long-read about the protracted crisis in and around Chad; NGOs blocked from WTO summit; humanitarian data breach; WFP & the blockchain hype; the use of untested 'innovation' vs. humanitarian law & principles; Uganda's lucrative orphanage complex; visualizing #globaldev from Barbie Savior to female war photographer; from banker to peacekeeper; the language of sexual exploitation; fiction from Nigeria; transformational change leadership; journalism from Sri Lanka & 30 things to think about.
Our digital lives: China's bike graveyard; facebook enters mentoring, learning & education; the image(s) of Mark Zuckerberg.
Academia: Banning laptops & other things from the classroom; don't fall for fake conferences!
Enjoy!
New from aidnography
Achieved my popular media engagement quota for this week thanks to @schmarsten's inclusion of my #allmalepanel tweet! Serious issue remains of how any journalism award can produce 16 white male winners in this rapidly changing world...https://t.co/gkcNG9Zidl
For each crisis the ACAPS team identified the main drivers of the current situation in order to better understand and predict the future trends. Food security, displacement, health, and protection are expected to be the most pressing humanitarian needs in 2018. Food security is likely to deteriorate into 2018 in northeast Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan, Ethiopia and Yemen, and there are risks of pockets of famine in these countries. Massive increase of IDPs recorded in CAR, Congo, DRC, Iraq, Mali, and Somalia throughout the year is likely to continue rising into 2018. Poor WASH and health facilities are likely to further exacerbate ongoing cholera crises in Congo, DRC, Nigeria, and Yemen into 2018. Number of people in need of protection assistance is likely to increase in 2018 in DRC, Iraq, Libya, Mali, South Sudan, Sudan, and among the Rohingya population.
ACAPS with their Humanitarian Overview for 2018. Important and sad reading...
In recent months, I have asked many American diplomatic and military officials to define a coherent long-term strategy for the region, but none of them have been able to articulate more than a vague wish: that by improving local governments and institutions, encouraging democratic tendencies, and facilitating development, the international community can defeat terrorism. In Chad, the security-based approach mistakes the strengthening of Déby’s regime for the stabilization of the Chadian state. The strategy is a paradox: in pursuing stability, it strengthens the autocrat, but, in strengthening the autocrat, it enables him to further abuse his position, exacerbating the conditions that lead people to take up arms. As part of international antiterror partnerships, security forces are increasingly coming into contact with communities of people who cross international borders every day. Many who fall into this category are nomadic herders; their way of life is fundamentally at odds with the enforcement of legal boundaries, and they are indifferent to the existence of nation-states. If they are denied the freedom to move with the seasons, their cattle will die. In recent years, as the Sahelian climate has worsened, many herders who had bought weapons to protect their animals have turned to jihad.
Ben Taub for The New Yorker with an excellent long-read about Chad, the Great Lakes region and the complexities of humanitarian crisis-the story that makes the map shared above become alive with meaning.
Observers from Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America had their approved accreditation withdrawn by the WTO yesterday. Groups including Global Justice Now, Friends of the Earth International and the Transnational Institute are among those affected. Senior WTO officials said that they didn’t know the reason for the decision despite frequent requests for information from Argentina’s government. Many of the organisations have participated in summits since the WTO was founded.
CRS, an NGO which manages $900 million of annual income and works in over 100 countries, confirmed the incident to IRIN, blaming an error in “password management”, but Mautinoa said it had found deeper flaws in the software. These claims Red Rose vigorously denies. The revelations could cause a “shockwave” in the aid sector, according to one analyst. Another said the implications of a bigger security breach could be “terrifying” for the safety of vulnerable refugees and other people in crisis situations.
Ben Parker for IRIN. This is one of those 'told you so' stories, unfortunately.
Nonprofits have the same hopes for blockchains as for-profit businesses: anything to make the bureaucracy run more efficiently. But what the WFP achieved here is from managing the disbursement themselves, and the “blockchain” is just being used as a database — which is what a “permissioned blockchain” really is. It’s important to note that “blockchain” doesn’t get you this for free — as chapter 11 of the book notes, a blockchain won’t replace your back-office systems without as much work, time and money as any other software replacement project. Paul Currion from Disberse, another disbursement-on-the-blockchain effort, notes that: the hard work is integrating blockchain technology into existing organizational processes — we can’t just hand people a ticket and expect them to get on the high-speed blockchain train. And … you don’t need distributed computing, simulating a competitive cryptocurrency system without the cryptocurrency or the competition, just to manage a database that’s under your organisation’s control anyway
David Gerard on the blockchain hype and how the aid industry will need to do a lot more homework to harness its 'disruptive' potential.
Framing aid projects as ‘innovative’, rather than ‘experimental’, avoids the explicit acknowledgment that these tools are untested, understating both the risks these approaches may pose, as well as sidestepping the extensive body of laws that regulate human trials. Facing enormous pressure to act and ‘do something’ in view of contemporary humanitarian crisis, a specific logic seems to have gained prominence in the humanitarian community, a logic that conflicts with the risk-taking standards that prevail under normal circumstances. The use of untested approaches in uncertain and challenging humanitarian contexts provokes risks that do not necessarily bolster humanitarian principles. In fact, they may even conflict with the otherwise widely adhered to Do No Harm principle. Failing to test these technologies, or even explicitly acknowledge that they are untested, prior to deployment raises significant questions about both the ethics and evidence requirements implicit in the unique license afforded to humanitarian responders.
Kristin Bergtora Sandvik, Katja Lindskov Jacobsen & Sean Martin McDonald for ICRC's Humanitarian Law & Policy journal on why 'innovative projects' are not just a discursive label, but a serious issue for (humanitarian) law.
Nevertheless, in Uganda the orphanage industry is booming. The number of orphans growing up in children’s homes has increased from around 1,000 in the 1990s to 50,000 today, according to international children’s charity Viva. Unlike past surges in figures in countries like Rwanda, this increase wasn’t borne of genocide or war – it’s in large part economic. The financial benefits for someone who decides to run an orphanage can be considerable. People who have worked in institutions in Rwanda and Uganda say it can cost as much as £2,800 a year to support a child in an orphanage, and the bill is often footed by well-meaning overseas donors. Therefore, the more children drawn into the orphanage, the more money in the owners’ pockets. This makes children a highly prized commodity in countries like Uganda. Some argue that the system in Uganda amounts to child slavery. “We are seeing a disturbing trend of children being drawn into orphanages and then being deployed to help raise funds for the orphanage in one way or another, whether it’s attracting sponsors and volunteers or singing and dancing for donations,” says youth studies academic Kristen Cheney, the author of Crying for Our Elders: African Orphanhood in the Age of HIV and Aids. “When orphanages are dependent on children’s labour, the kids become trapped. Once they grow too old to attract donations, however, they are cast out and forced to fend for themselves in a world they do not know,” she says.
Helen Nianias for The Guardian on the orphanage industry in Uganda that has negative impacts far beyond a misplaced volunteer selfie...
Despite their efforts, Barbie Savior and Radi-Aid have continued to observe "simplified and unnuanced photos playing on the white-savior complex, portraying Africa as a country, the faces of white Westerners among a myriad of poor African children, without giving any context at all," Ogard says. The proliferation of these posts, she suspects, is the result of social media becoming a big part of how we communicate.
Malaka Gharib for NPR Goats & Soda summarizes the current debate around responsible volunteer(ing) communication in the digital age.
It’s important for women to cover every genre of news. I hate making gendered generalizations, but on average I think that where men gravitate towards conflict and hard news, women tend to prefer the periphery of violence — in quieter contexts where they can create more intimate connections with people. That obviously isn’t always true — there are remarkable female conflict photographers and male social documentary photographers — but I think those are often the stories women are most attracted to. One of many problems with the current imbalance in our industry is that when we predominantly present news through the male gaze, we codify and reinforce that perspective. It’s important for society that we spend just as much time seeing our world through a female perspective, particularly calamity.
Daniella Zalcman for Bright Magazine on why female photographers matter for the industry-not least to add important visual nuances on how 'we' see conflict, war and development.
By the end of 2009, seriously thinking about how to professionally address “the will to make a change”, I shared those concerns with three friends: a foreign Ambassador, a professional colleague and a Human Resources Manager. All of them listened to me, but only one took the time to properly comprehend the motivations… yet instead of giving up, I felt even more motivated to follow my dream…
Carlos María de Cerón y Castro shares a 65 minute documentary about his UN peacekeeping work. I only had a quick glimpse at the video and something rubbed me the wrong way-but I need to watch and think about it a bit longer.
I have lost count of the times I have crossed out ‘transactional sex’ in track changes and replaced it with ‘sexual exploitation’. Or ‘early marriage’, and replaced it with ‘sexual exploitation’. Or ‘survival sex’, and replaced it with ‘sexual exploitation’. All those carefully neutral, unexamined terms that make invisible the reality of men’s abuse of women and girls. I have lost count of the times I have replaced ‘people’ with ‘men’; ‘people’ don’t rape girls in school, men do. ‘People’ don’t have ‘protection issues’; women and girls are under specific threat from the men around them. I have spent whole days unpicking the assumptions that men rape and abuse women and girls because they are ‘unaware’, because they need ‘sensitisation’, because they need ‘education’. These assumptions, couched in language that appears to be sensitive, thoughtful and considered are so dangerous; immediately, the damage wrought on women’s lives is disappeared. They serve to help us look away from the reality that men do this intentionally and deliberately, and that it serves a purpose for them. I have spent so much time documenting the damage to women’s bodies and souls, for case notes, for court evidence, for women’s credibility, even as it’s being downplayed and smoothed out. I have learned how to use the language of women’s hurt without flinching and without fear; it has been essential to be able to speak the words of graphic, embodied truth, without looking away.
Missing in the Mission with an anonymous reflection on sexual violence and language in the aid industry.
In the last decade or so, literary festivals, book prizes and writing workshops have sprung up around the country, and a handful of influential new publishing houses have been formed, including Cassava Republic, Farafina, Parrésia and Ouida Books, which was founded last year by the novelist Lola Shoneyin. Ms. Shoneyin, the author of “The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives,” has emerged as a prominent figure in Nigeria’s publishing scene, somewhere between an impresario and a literary fairy godmother. In addition to writing fiction and running Ouida Books, she founded the Ake Festival, a five-day literary event in Abeokuta that began in 2013, and curated the Kaduna Book and Arts Festival, which kicked off this summer in northern Nigeria, a predominantly Muslim region that has suffered attacks by the fundamentalist group Boko Haram. The Kaduna festival, which took place last month, featured a writing workshop for women that was led by the Sudanese author Leila Aboulela, and a session in Hausa, a local language, about the significance of Hausa literature in a country where English is the official language.
Alexandra Alter for the New York Times on the emerging 'political economy' of fiction writing in Nigeria.
In a world driven increasingly by the quest for ‘quick-wins’, short term indicators, sound bites and dashboards, this body of work on transformational change leadership is intended to help funders, practitioners, and students keep our eye on the long game of supporting the social, human and political capital needed to lead, advocate for and sustain better lives, communities and nations, not only for this generation but for the next one.
A new project that involves a lot of great people!
The Catamaran is a tri-lingual portal publishing work by journalists from all over Sri Lanka. Stories in English, Sinhalese and Tamil provide background and add analysis to the most interesting stories in the country. Original reporting is available for free syndication to Sri Lankan and international media, the aim being to give novice reporters exposure and help experienced local journalists reach a wider audience. Bringing journalists from different Sri Lankan communities together strengthens vital ties and increases opportunities for collaboration, as well as contributing to capacity building in the Sri Lankan media sector.
Another interesting project from the Media 4 Development field.
To celebrate ACEVO’s 30th birthday, we asked people in and around civil society for their thought-provoking insights. We hope that these will inspire debate about how to make the biggest difference over the next 30 years. We published a new piece every day throughout November 2017.
Bluegogo’s bankruptcy last week sparked questions about the future of dockless bike sharing in China, amid concerns there are too many bikes and insufficient demand. In an open letter apologising for his missteps, Bluegogo’s chief executive said he had been “filled with arrogance”.
Benjamin Haas for The Guardian on 'peak rental bike' in China.
Finally, it’s launching a new Mentorship feature through partnered non-profits starting with iMentor for education and The International Rescue Committee for crisis recovery. People over 18 in need of addiction recovery, career advancement or other personal help will be matched with vetted mentors who will guide them through an on-Facebook curriculum of education materials. Together, the features could make Facebook a more popular way to donate money, and facilitate delivering support to everyone from disaster victims to at-risk youth.
Josh Constine for TechCrunch. I remain very skeptical about the advertisement platform's intentions in term of learning, mentoring etc. It fits with Zuckerberg's ambitions and rhetoric, but doing training or mentoring well is a huge challenge.
The tech industry’s presentational exercises are quite different than the reality television shows that propelled a business magnate into the Oval Office.[18] Rather, the tech industry has its own modes of spectacular exhibition – some of which, as with fireside chats, invoke more traditional modes of political communication. Indeed, in the wake of Zuckerberg’s recent photo-ops in locales across America, some political commentators have pointed out the similarities between a national political campaign and “a corporate goodwill tour,” in that both practices center on forging relationships between high-profile figures and the general public whose interests they claim to represent.[19] Such observations, which identify Zuckerberg’s recent activities as expansive business tactics rather than as a burgeoning political campaign, perhaps allay concerns over how Facebook’s news algorithms and user analytics would drive Zuckerberg’s political fortunes, were he to instrumentalize Facebook as a tool of voter mobilization or state surveillance.
Li Cornfeld is one of the contributors to this really interesting collection on essays about the (re-)presentation of Mark Zuckerberg. Academia
Let's take a look at the original study that said that pen and paper note-takers learned more than those taking notes with a laptop. (Thread)https://t.co/sg3F8HkIFO
I am uncomfortable with “bans” because my philosophy and values bend towards a privileging of student agency and responsibility. They have the right to make bad choices which may result in poor grades or a diminished intellectual experience. That right does not extend to harming others, but this is why I frame the classroom as a community with an ethos including responsibility to others. I believe one of the purposes of education is to require students to run over as many potholes on the way to learning as possible. Some of those potholes should require them to confront their own habits and values. I don’t want to dictate those values for them. For students to learn, they cannot be passive consumers of content provided by others. They must also be creators of knowledge, some of which will be self-knowledge. In my view, achieving this requires maximal freedom. One of the most significant potholes many of us will struggle with going forward is the temptation of electronic distraction. What happens to students when there is no one to ban their behavior?
John Warner for Inside HigherEd with a more philosophical or pedagogical view on banning 'stuff' from the classroom. In 2015 I asked here on the blog:
However, there is evidence that academic conferences function to facilitate commodity transactions, be that knowledge, tools, skills, reputations, or connections, which reflects the neoliberal ethos in the modern academy (Nicolson 2017b). The predatory conference can be viewed in this light, where academia is more and more focused on generating revenue. It is at best scurrilous, and worst, criminal, for organisations to make money using such a confidence trick. Always check which conferences are organised and advertised by recognised scholarly organisations in your own discipline. If uncertain ask a more experienced academic, a senior colleague or mentor.
Donald J. Nicolson & Edwin R. van Teijlingen for the BU Research Blog. If you are a regular reader of Aidnography you are probably aware of the pitfalls of predatory publishing and conferencing, but nonetheless this is a good primer on how to spot conferences best to avoid...
Development news: #AidToo; Ed Sheeran, War Child & well-deserved radiator awards; against charity; visualizing life in the camps in Bangladesh; humanitarian data breaches as policy challenges; Women Peacemaker Program closes; the political economy of crisis responses then & now; decolonizing development studies; how can film support development work? Twiplomacy 2017; Balkans & transitional justice beyond The Hague; relationships matter for charities; warm & cuddly SDGs; wrapping up a micro-finance project.
Our digital lives: Did 'atmosphere models' show up at your tech Christmas party?
Publications: Looking at the visual stories of 'buy one, get one for free' campaigns.
Academia: How twitter & podcasts can put you on a 'pathway to impact'; 5 ways to fix statistics. Enjoy! New from aidnography Third World Quarterly & the colonialism debate The debate that keeps on giving-my updates Storify of the TWQ affair...
Development news
Great diagram by my wonderful colleague @BruceWydick on what is effective giving to poor people -- meet real needs, improve incentives, provide tools. pic.twitter.com/NaJkNViDw9
“Ed Sheeran has good intentions,” she said. “But the problem is the video is focused on Ed Sheeran as the main character. He is portrayed as the only one coming down and being able to help.” Øgård said that in the four years the organisation had run the awards, she had seen more creative appeals, often by small organisations. Among those nominated for best fundraising film, or the Golden Radiator award , is one from War Child Holland, praised by judges as “powerful and positive”.
Mr Echwalu said: "It touched him and I'm glad. He meant well, but the act of taking one child for a couple of nights in a hotel? Long term, it is nothing. It does not aid the hundreds of others who were left behind."
But what will really effect change is not charity but activism. The problem with adverts of this kind is that, by denying viewers any context as to who “the victims” are, or the structural factors that have contributed to their situation, they give the impression that the suffering is inevitable. It is not. Yemen’s humanitarian crisis, which the UN has called the worst in the world, is being exacerbated by the continuing blockade by Saudi Arabia, one of Britain’s closest allies. Lobbying the government to stop selling arms to the Saudis would have a far greater impact than charity.
Karen McVeigh for the Guardian, BBC Africa& Afua Hirsch also for the Guardian on the Rusty Radiator 'winner'; the 'golden radiator' went to War Child and their powerful video:
As a @warchild myself, this is one of the best campaign videos I've seen produced by any international aid agency. It raises the bar of humanitarian campaigns: show the plight whilst maintaining dignity and respect. Still gulping down tears on way to work. https://t.co/9vVYBGCzwJ
Regarding the function of celebrities within "a system that sees famous people as brands and thus consumer products", Wark and Raventos note that celebrity "excess" helps sustain the consumerist model by providing glorified examples of over-the-top materialism - while celebrity "beneficence" helps whitewash the brutality of institutionalised socioeconomic disparity. Meanwhile, the "awareness" that celebrities purport to raise for their respective causes is frequently devoid of the political context necessary to comprehend contemporary causes of human suffering.
Belen Fernandez for Al-Jazeera with a quasi-review of the new 'Against Charity' book.
Makeshift huts crammed onto muddy hillsides. Water wells fouled by nearby latrines. Rapidly-spreading diseases. Health experts say overcrowding, poor sanitation and limited health care in the Rohingya refugee areas of Bangladesh is a “recipe for disaster”. This is a closer look at life in the camps.
Weiyi Cai & Simon Scarr for Thomson Reuters with a multi-media story on life in the Bangladeshi Rohingya camps.
The sector’s collective failure to adequately regulate and professionalise humanitarian information activities is both morally untenable and operationally unsustainable. Continued inaction may soon undermine trust between humanitarian agencies and the people they seek to serve, eroding the meaning and value of the core humanitarian principles of humanity, impartiality, independence, and neutrality. (...) Continuing to accept this status quo is antithetical to the values of all humanitarians and shirks the duty of care incumbent upon us to address threats to the human rights and human security of affected populations. As senior humanitarian leaders prepare to convene at United Nations Headquarters in New York next week for the emergency aid coordination body OCHA’s Global Humanitarian Policy Forum, the issue of data protection and security must now top the community’s agenda.
Nathaniel A. Raymond, Daniel P. Scarnecchia & Stuart R. Campo for IRIN on the growing challenges around dealing with humanitarian data in a responsible way.
The legacy of the Pakistani authorities’ almost implausibly inept and careless disaster response just before democratic elections was a stunning East Pakistani victory, followed by a bloody civil war that liberated East Bengalis from the yoke of West Pakistani neo-colonial rule. By contrast, the careless response to Hurricane Maria has if anything underlined the subordinate position of Puerto Ricans under US imperial rule: they have no Congressional representation and cannot vote for the President, so it does not really matter what they think.
Naomi Hossain for History Workshop with another interesting commentary of how the fall-out of the hurricanes in the Carribean resonates with broader #globaldev questions; a great addition to my Reading #Maria through a #globaldev lens collection!
We increasingly find ourselves in a schizophrenic reality, where on the one hand women’s rights and gender equality activists around the world are facing strong opposition from different sides while on the other hand many in government and donor positions loudly commit to supporting women’s rights and gender equality. Yet their grantmaking increasingly fails to provide an effective financial infrastructure catering directly and sustainably for the women frontliners and feminist pioneers in global South, North, East and West. (...) Increasingly, we have also found ourselves in a constant rat race of measuring and (over)reporting, tying us to our desks. Like so many in civil society, we too often find ourselves caught up in a paralyzing bureaucratic reality, generated by a donor reality that locates accountability in paper. This is going at the expense of the real work we as activists set ourselves out to, which is about changing women’s lives, and by women’s lives, everyone’s lives on this shared planet.
The Women Peacemakers Program is closing down and their statement is important food for thought on the current status of the professionalized charity industry.
Given the decades old decolonial and post-development critiques that the international development project is ultimately a deeply colonial experience, how is it that international development studies is still a thing? As a field of research under the same name; Very much also as a highly popular pedagogical project with departments of international development studies continue to attract high number of students.
Lina proposed that there are three main reasons for using video, film, and/or immersive media (such as virtual reality or augmented reality) in humanitarian and development work: - Raising awareness about an issue or a brand and serving as an entry point or a way to frame further actions. - Community-led discussion/participatory media, where people take agency and ownership and express themselves through media. - Catalyzing movements themselves, where film, video, and other visual arts are used to feed social movements.
Linda Raftree with an overview of discussions from the latest technology salon.
It is fair to say that without social media, the work of international organisations would probably go largely unnoticed. All 97 multi-lateral international organisations and NGOs in this study are actively present on the three main social networking sites: Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. (...) Over the past year, we have witnessed a clear pivot to video content among the most successful organisations. Short videos, optimized for mobile devices, tend to garner the biggest engagement on each of the social media platforms analyzed.
Twiplomacy, a CSR project of PR giant Burson-Marsteller, with its latest annual report with lots of descriptive data that I haven't been able to digest properly yet...
This poisonous week at The Hague demonstrates that despite nearly 25 years of international transitional justice, EU integration and regional cooperation, political interpretations of the wars and the crimes remain antagonistic and mutually hostile; in fact more so than a decade ago. The tempting and easy answer would be to forget about them. In a media environment in the Balkans in which every day tabloids live off talk of the last or the next war, this might seem enticing. However, the opposite approach is needed. The nationalist narratives of denial and self-victimisation are a poison in the political discourse and life of Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, and Kosovo. They justify war crimes and thus don’t just allow for war criminals to be transformed into heroes and crimes to be orphaned without perpetrators and culprits, they also justify future crimes.
Florian Bieber for Balkan Transitional Justice with an excellent commentary on the legacy of the ICTY beyond the spectacular finish of the suicide.
The Development Assistance Committee, the OECD’s club of Western donors, promoted the creation of a Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation” (GPEDC) in 2011 at a High Level Meeting in Busan, Korea. It was widely considered at the time that the success of the venture (in terms of both inclusiveness and relevance) in large measure hinged on the last-minute decision of China, India and Brazil to join the Partnership as providers of South-South Cooperation (SSC): a modest step forward in the much broader geopolitical effort to accommodate these emerging powers in the post-war liberal order. Only a few years later, however, all three countries had left the GPEDC. This paper explores how they joined, why they left and suggests how they could return.
Gerardo Bracho with a paper for the German Development Institute may be a bit of a niche topic, but is nonetheless an interesting institutional account of how 'global governance' actually works.
The report finds that in the eyes of nonprofits, the most powerful ways that funders can strengthen their relationships with grantees are to: 1) focus on understanding grantee organizations and the context in which they work; and 2) be transparent with grantees. Less powerful, but still important to forming strong relationships, are the experiences grantees have during the selection process and how open they find funders to be to their ideas about the foundation’s strategy.
The Center for Effective Philanthropy with a new study that stresses, once again. that 'relationships matter' in aid/giving.
Warm and cuddly ambitions are simply no longer going to cut it. The UN system has to have the courage to hold its member states accountable. Otherwise, it seems as if the SDGs simply offer member states a free pass to pat themselves on the back, despite their collective failures. And the onus is also on those of us in civil society to remind citizens that the global goals are more than warm words, and that we need to hold those responsible for their delivery to account.
Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah for the Guardian asks for the impossible (?): Making the SDGs meaningful beyond a shared vision and political promises. And I am not sure whether the UN alone is to blame for lacking courage when it comes to accountability...
We scrutinized every bit of unbridled enthusiasm. We tore off our hero’s cape. We stripped away our power, position and privilege. It was all inherited. We had not earned any of it. We were not special. We were just a bunch of humans subsumed in our system of expectations, buffeted about by fear and desire. We were craving connection, community and conversation. Because, during out time together, we learned that through dialog with one another we could get a glimpse of a better version of ourselves. Not all of us got to experience these moments. They only materialize after a lengthy series of authentic interactions. They were usually reserved for our Program Directors.
Shawn Humphrey on closing down La Ceiba – their microfinance institution in El Progreso, Honduras. Our digital lives
Mingling with an unexpectedly attractive and pleasant person at your tech holiday party? It's possible they're paid to be there. Modeling agencies told me they're increasingly staffing secret "atmosphere models" for parties in an industry dominated by men.https://t.co/ifF6xYzpAF
It's just like that old saying; "Do what you love for a living and the increasingly unclear distinction between your personal and professional identity will make it extremely difficult to feel emotionally secure at basically any point in the process"
In the Buy One Give One (B1G1) business model, social enterprise companies respond to humanitarian causes by linking consumers to recipients through the commodification of a shared product experience. Ponte and Richey deem these interfaces “new imaginaries”, with consumption elevated as the mechanism for humanitarian action. Using a case comparison of two B1G1 companies, I argue that the visual story-telling of B1G1 marketing materials constructs a “humanitarian imaginary” that shapes how consumers understand engagement. Using visual analysis, I consider the opportunities and ethical limits of building solidarity through social marketing.
Alexandra Cosima Budabin with a new paper in Proceedings on the business of making 'eradicating poverty' look good... Academia
Often what passes for 'synergy' at academic conferences is a collective form of desperation, in which participants hope that what they think they've heard is like something they might have said.
From a research evaluation point of view, these results might suggest that journal activity on Twitter can affect the number of tweets and citations its papers receive. However, these results should be interpreted in term of dissemination, in which the broadcasting of research outputs has an impact on a specific audience of researchers that use that information for future studies. The more an article is spread over social networks, repositories, blogs, news sites, etc., the bigger audience it reaches, increasing the likelihood of it being cited by colleagues. This being the case, these results should be used by publishers to inform efforts to improve the discoverability of journals and not with a view to assessing quality or academic impact. The number of mentions on Twitter should be understood as a dissemination metric, not as a scholarly impact indicator.
José Luis Ortega for LSE Impact Blog on why tweeting your research paper and results matters-not simply as 'impact', but as a way to get recognition within your academic community as well.
There has never been a better or more exciting time to be podcasting and to be using podcasts not just to share research findings but to really engage with people interested in getting the hard facts about the many challenges facing the world today. But what’s more important is getting the subject matter, aims and format of your podcast right in the first place, and you do that best by thinking about and engaging with your audience from the outset. One thing I have learned in ten years of podcasting is that podcasts are more about communities engaging than being a simple a vehicle or tool for communication. Viewed that way, podcasts have the potential to put you right on that pathway to impact.
Christine Garrington also for the LSE Impact Blog on another medium to communicate research and join the 'pathway to impact'...
As debate rumbles on about how and how much poor statistics is to blame for poor reproducibility, Nature asked influential statisticians to recommend one change to improve science. The common theme? The problem is not our maths, but ourselves.
Jeff Leek, Blakeley B. McShane, Andrew Gelman, David Colquhoun, Michèle B. Nuijten & Steven N. Goodman for Nature.
This is a curated and regularly updated overview over the events that followed after the publication of Bruce Gilley's article The Case for Colonialism in the journal Third World Quarterly.
I have maintained a Storify about this topic since September 2017, but since Storify announced its end of life for May 2018 I recreated the developments in this blog post. This post will be updated if and when new articles, comments etc. appear, but my original Storify will not be updated.
The original article is no longer available on the journal's website:
This Viewpoint essay has been withdrawn at the request of the academic journal editor, and in agreement with the author of the essay. Following a number of complaints, Taylor & Francis conducted a thorough investigation into the peer review process on this article. Whilst this clearly demonstrated the essay had undergone double-blind peer review, in line with the journal's editorial policy, the journal editor has subsequently received serious and credible threats of personal violence. These threats are linked to the publication of this essay. As the publisher, we must take this seriously. Taylor & Francis has a strong and supportive duty of care to all our academic editorial teams, and this is why we are withdrawing this essay.
It’s also worth noting that neither these arguments nor Gilley’s own essay touch on the worst legacies of colonial rule: violence, discrimination and repression. One study found that only 10 percent of African countries have experienced ethnic conflicts that can be traced back to some pre-colonial origin. Authors David Leonard and Scott Straus argue that the rest of these conflicts are explicitly products of the colonial experience.
I think the gut reaction of many people will be that Gilley’s arguments are “self-evidently” absurd. But apparently this is not the case, because the Third World Quarterly chose to publish them. I don’t know why they made that decision; frankly, it’s very strange. The board of TWQ is stocked with anticolonial lefties like Vijay Prashad and Noam Chomsky, and while Prashad has said that they didn’t see the article before publication (and threatened to resign if it’s not retracted), it’s odd that the editors themselves thought an essay suggesting that the Belgians should recolonize the Congo was a useful contribution to scholarly discourse. But while TWQ’s motives remain inscrutable, I suspect I understand Gilley’s. This article does not read as if it is attempting to be taken seriously. Its tone toward critics of colonialism is polemical and mocking (these scholars have a “metropolitan flaneur culture of attitude and performance”). Gilley must intend to provoke people to rage
Arguing the case for colonialism, and continuing the author’s crusade against what he sees as a left-wing bias in academia, the article has so far prompted: a wave of incredulity and outrage on social media; a couple of petitions (both of which managed to garner several thousand signatures) calling for the article to be retracted and for the editors to apologise for its publication; a handful of online articles; a problematic response from the editor; and, subsequently, the resignation of a large bulk of its editorial board.
This response is unacceptable and was published without any consultation with the EdBoard. Official response from the board coming soon https://t.co/vwzemgrdYW
One of emerging bigger themes is how the case is viewed very differently in North America (USA) and Europe Is Retraction the New Rebuttal?
some wondering if retraction threatens to replace rebuttal as the standard academic response to unpopular research There is also the bigger picture of an increasingly metricized academia
Surely, these views are not entirely new. That they exist is not shocking. We are slowly getting used to the alt-right. However, that these ideas and strategies, distilled into academic writing, not only get published but immediately jump to the top of some of the key metrics we use to identify success, influence, and “impact” in academia – this is chilling. Because this means not only that academia can be hacked, but that it already has been. This article represents the culmination of broader trends in academia: from marketisation, to impact, to the promotion of artificially adversarial debate.
The saga continues! Many members of the editorial board resign in protest
Other members of the journal’s editorial board remain. Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor and professor of linguistics emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for example, told Inside Higher Ed that it’s “pretty clear that proper procedures were not followed in publishing the article, but I think retraction is a mistake – and also opens very dangerous doors. … Rebuttal offers a great opportunity for education, not only in this case.”
The desire to appear even-handed under pressure from faux free-speech defenders has created a damaging false equivalency model in mainstream media, where the compulsion to get “the other side” means unfounded ideas are given the same weight as sound reasoning. Despite the imperfections of academia, academically credited facts established with rigour, empirical evidence and scholarship remain a credible tool to fight climate change deniers, racism deniers, anti-vaxxers or any one floating in the universe of “alternative facts.”
To some extent the journal was also able to stand above the fray when neo-liberal ideas swept through the academies of the world, demanding that public sector development be given over to private sector growth. There was stubbornness in the journal, a desire to continue to speak for the peoples of the Third World even as its elites had taken a different direction. Shahid Qadir, who took over from Altaf Gauhar, was the captain in these difficult times.
However, the current “shift from liberal racism to explicit white supremacy” in the United States and Europe have signaled to people like Gilley that it’s ok to come out and show their true racist colors. There are many Gilley’s out there. Let them come out. Expose them and their racism, hatred, inhumanity, intellectual ineptitude, inferiority and deplorable propaganda and lies. And fight them.
The paper was rejected by peer reviewers, editorial-board members say, but it was published anyway. To them, the controversy shows how academe’s broader headwinds, like the growing importance of metrics and the need for professors and journals to stay relevant in a hypercompetitive environment, can corrupt the peer-review process. It also is a cautionary tale about what can happen when communication breaks down between a journal’s editor and its board, and transparency in peer review becomes a casualty.
Through nearly 200 years, we have not shied away from publishing what some may see as controversial material, maintaining strict editorial independence on our journals whilst ensuring the articles we publish go through a rigorous peer-review process and follow the polices we put in place as a company. This essay did undergo those processes and so, whilst its contents may make many of us uncomfortable (and indeed upset), we do not see it as our role to censor what is undoubtedly a highly controversial view.
For Prashad, the latter issue was significant. “Across the board, editorial boards have just become window dressing,” he said. “The use of editorial boards should be to provide intellectual gravity and, in this case, when there was conflictual evidence coming from outside reviewers, or when the editor realized there was some conflict, that might have been a good time to consult the editorial board.” (...) John K. Wilson, an independent scholar of academic freedom and co-editor of the American Association of University Professors’ “Academe” blog, said that, in general, “Editors make the choices, not reviewers. So it's not a question of veto power, it's editorial judgment.” At the same time, he said, “peer review exists for a good reason. If an editor is going to reject the judgment of all the reviewers, that editor ought to have a very good reason and inform the editorial board about it.” Prashad didn’t rule out ever returning to Third World Quarterly’s editorial board, but said, “Surely there are questions a person of integrity would ask, to avoid coming back merely to be window dressing again.” Among them: What procedures are in place to assess articles that have garnered split decisions from reviewers? And every two or three months, will there be a letter from the journal editor to the board letting to them know what’s coming up?
I am glad that Taylor & Francis has documented the process of peer review through which my article, “The Case for Colonialism”, was submitted and accepted for publication in the Third World Quarterly. I am also pleased that they have reaffirmed the C.O.P.E. principles of academic publishing that are designed to protect scientific research from censorship,including self‐censorship. I stand by the article in its entirety.
What is far more troubling than a non-entity seeking instant notoriety by going against the massively accumulated archival evidence of human suffering European colonialism has caused and scholarly arguments mapping out the planetary calamities of the white supremacists' conquest of the world is this bizarre bourgeois etiquette and liberal politesse that invariably rise obsequiously to meet such obscenities. Oh, he is our "colleague", the professoriate proffer. "Let us invite him for a 'dialogue'," they generously gesture. We need to respect freedom of expression - ad nauseam.
Farhana Sultana, an associate professor of geography at Syracuse University who helped organize one of the petitions for retraction, said via email she, too, has faced “considerable attacks and abuse for my involvement in this debate, so I empathize with the concerns regarding safety, and I fully condemn all threats of violence, targeted harassment and online bullying.” She added, “To reiterate, [the] aim of the petition was about upholding rigorous academic scholarly standards, integrity and ethics by the journal; it had nothing to do with curtailing the author’s right to free speech. It should also not be associated with any threats to the journal’s editor in chief or anyone else.”
Thus the Gilley affair is yet another reminder of the hollowness of the university’s leaders. Confronted with a straightforward example of academic thuggery, they stand perplexed, unwilling to draw a meaningful line anywhere between legitimate expression of ideas and mob rule.
A blacklist against scholars who sign petitions criticizing articles is a radical step toward repression. It’s even more alarming because Wood is equating a petition with a threat of violence, which is a despicable smear against people who (even if they might be misguided) merely dislike the content and the process by which this essay was published. The death threats in this incident are a crime, and must be denounced, but Wood’s approach in blaming innocent people makes things worse. Whatever one thinks of The Case for Colonialism, we should all oppose Wood’s Case for Blacklists. Former editorial board members respond to retraction of the article with their version of the story
as development economists and economic historians, we are aware of the risk of developing a neo-colonial agenda seeking to impose what we believe to be good economic policies. The risk relies exactly on imposing a policy; colonialism is a package that cannot be stripped off its violence, and its history teaches us that imposing rules in foreign territories is bound to fail. Any idea that the colonial “toolkit” would be different today because we know better forgets that the kind of violence that States exerted in colonised areas could not have happened in Europe at that time. France in the 1920s was a parliamentary democracy whose government would vote the most progressive workers’ rights in history just a decade later; and yet, an estimated 20,000 forced labourers died in the construction of the Congo-Océan railway in French Congo in the 1920s. Hundreds of thousands of people died during the independence wars in Algeria, Indochina, and Cameroon a just little bit more than 50 years ago.
The TWQ affair enters the academic conference circles: Panel discussion with former TWQ editorial board members at the American Sociological Studies conference
LT Lisa Richey re journal Third World Quarterly “debacle” of publishing “The Case for Colonialism”—a non-scholarly article justifying colonialism in Africa pic.twitter.com/uiNi7Y0TK3
Among the virtues of colonial rule, as Gilley sees them, were often the formation of coherent political communities, reliable state institutions and therefore living-spaces where individuals and their families could flourish.
Bruce Gilley was in a coffee shop with a friend, an Afghan refugee, when an email from a colleague informed him his academic paper had caused a sensation — and not in a good way. Hate mail was piling up.
In a letter to the Times editor many scholars express their frustration with the newspaper's coverage of the TWQ issue & colonialism Scholars and the debate about colonial rule
I've created an open-access form of our letter to the editor just published in The Times in case anyone else would like to add their signature post-publication. https://t.co/NlMboRtz48
"this long list of dreamers"--yeah, we're dreamers alright!...."British colonialism provided tremendous benefits for those colonialised." Nah, don't think so... pic.twitter.com/z7G5ZeCun6
Lhuzekhu’s dream was among hundreds collected from across the British empire – from the Indian subcontinent, Nigeria, Uganda, Australia, the Solomon Islands and elsewhere – on the instructions of an anthropologist at the London School of Economics (LSE) named Charles Gabriel Seligman. Seligman was a longtime adviser to colonial governments, which funded his research and helped to train colonial officials at the LSE. Seligman made his career as a physical anthropologist at the height of racialist science. That meant defining human groups on the basis of physiognomy and locating them in evolutionary hierarchies. Seligman was, in short, an imperialist and a classifier par excellence. So what did he hope to accomplish by amassing dreams such as Lhuzekhu’s? (...) In the end, it is perhaps the British government’s decades-long support for research into unconscious minds that is most revealing. Lacking the mechanisms that register public opinion in democratic societies – elections, protests, press criticism – and confronting immense cultural differences to boot, British imperial rulers fretted over what Africans, Asians and West Indians were thinking. The British sensed their ignorance, and they felt vulnerable, a position that made the tools of psychoanalysis irresistible. The trouble was not that these tools failed on their own terms, but that they failed to tell imperial rulers what they wanted to hear.
It's an interesting mix this week featuring public lectures, (visual) communication of development & #MeToo reflections in academia.
Development news: Rise in global arms sales; private companies spying on activists; Jeremy Corbyn speaks at the UN on global governance; UNHCR's Melissa Fleming speaks about home & refugees; how to 'empower women'? How to engage cynical audiences in #globaldev? How to ensure ethical photography? How to write better about social issues; new podcast series from India.
Publications: Local aid workers & digital marginalization; doing development differently.
Academia: #MeToo; what is the purpose of societies & associations?
This is a curated and regularly updated overview over the events that followed after the publication of Bruce Gilley's article The Case for Colonialism in the journal Third World Quarterly. I have maintained a Storify about this topic since September 2017, but since Storify announced its end of life for May 2018 I recreated the developments in this blog post.
Sales of arms and military services by the world’s largest arms-producing and military services companies—the SIPRI Top 100—totalled $374.8 billion in 2016, according to new international arms industry data released today by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). The total for the SIPRI Top 100 in 2016 is 1.9 per cent higher compared with 2015 and represents an increase of 38 per cent since 2002 (when SIPRI began reporting corporate arms sales). This is the first year of growth in SIPRI Top 100 arms sales after five consecutive years of decline.
SIPRI's latest annual report-always a powerful reminder when cynical Daily Mail readers (see below) complain about 'wasting taxpayers money' on a workshop in Africa...
The leaked documents suggest the use of secretive corporate security firms to gather intelligence about political campaigners has been widespread. However, police chiefs have in the past raised a “massive concern” that the activities of the corporate firms are barely regulated and completely uncontrolled. The police have claimed that commercial firms have had more spies embedded in political groups than there were undercover police officers. The revelations are based on hundreds of pages of leaked documents from two corporate intelligence firms, seen by the Guardian and the Bureau for Investigative Journalism, that reveal the inner workings of a normally subterranean industry over several years in the 2000s. The cache shows how one of the firms, C2i International, used two infiltrators to acquire advance warning of demonstrations that were being mounted against firms and to feed this information to those firms.
Rob Evans & Meirion Jones for the Guardian with an important reminder about 'tech for bad', corporate power and the privatization of security.
We need to redouble our efforts to create a global rules based system that applies to all and works for the many, not the few. No more bomb first and think and talk later. No more double standards in foreign policy. No more scapegoating of global institutions for the sake of scoring political points at home. Instead: solidarity, calm leadership and cooperation. Together we can: Build a new social and economic system with human rights and justice at its core. Deliver climate justice and a better way to live together on this planet. Recognise the humanity of refugees and offer them a place of safety. Work for peace, security and understanding. The survival of our common humanity requires nothing less. We need to recognise and pay tribute to human rights defenders the world over, putting their lives on the line for others - our voice must be their voice.
When did those political leaders currently in power stopped delivering speeches similar to Jeremy Corbyn's? I am aware that is a broad speech at the UN by an opposition politician, and yet it's great to read those sentences and be reminded of how most of conservative politicians have really lost any vision for state, society and people.
But today, only a small minority of refugees live in camps. The classic image of endless rows of white tents applies to only 10 per cent of them. Most live in towns and cities, while many more live in rural environments. Some live in settlements; others in back streets. Some have identity documents and can work, go to school, see a doctor; others have to duck and dive, not permitted a job or an apprenticeship, a place in the classroom — barred from exactly the kind of endeavour that would give them a measure of self-sufficiency and a way to carve out something more like a home, however temporary it might be, or they might want it to be.
Melissa Fleming for UNHCR with a transcript of a keynote lecture she delivered recently. A great example of how the UN can engage with the public and her speech provides excellent food for thought and discussion in the classroom, for example.
Many women’s empowerment projects the world over focus on hairdressing, tailoring or cooking. This is in part because the barrier to entry is low, so these programmes are accessible to women who may not have had much formal education, and in part due to constraints on women – most of these jobs can be done in female-only environments or at home. There are different trends in different parts of the world, but most conform to this pattern: hair and beauty training in the Middle East, producing local handicrafts in Latin America and south Asia, giving women chickens to tend in rural India and Africa. Undoubtedly, for some women, simply learning a new skill can be hugely valuable and confidence-boosting. But there is little hard evidence that these schemes actually help women to earn a living, or empower them in any meaningful sense. “Are they empowering women? Not really,” says Mayssoun Sukarieh, lecturer in Middle Eastern studies at King’s College London. “First of all, many of these projects reproduce gender relations, so it’s not about empowering women in the sense of making them equal. Secondly, this can work for a bit, but how much money is going to be generated by these tiny projects? Particularly when, at the same time, huge corporations are doing the same products at a very low price.”
Samira Shackle for the Guardian on the quest for projects that can 'empower women' and that may end up producing capitalist agents on the bottom rung of the consumerist ladder...
.@savethechildren are heavily using these powerful pics of a young homeless Bangladeshi boy taken by CJ Clarke to fund-raise. How does a 10 year old homeless child give meaningful consent to be the face of their campaign? And what has been done to help the child? They don't say. pic.twitter.com/2dzi45t63s
Delving deeper, what emerged is a real sense of distance from charities, especially big well-known names. Charities are increasingly seen as part of “the establishment” and our Daily Mail reader feels increasingly isolated from them. At a time when shared values and individual connections are becoming ever more important for trust, the world of charity feels ever more remote and elite. (...) This reframes the job to be done for charities: rather than worry about how to communicate everything they do, the key is to evoke shared values that can draw an audience in. This mirrors what we see in the research we do for charities on a regular basis: heart trumps head every time – and even more so for this most cynical of audiences.
To this end, I propose a structural solution to this structural problem: the establishment of an international aid sector advertisement regulatory agency. This will be an independent body that includes members of the Global North and South, and with representatives from key aid and media actors, and that sets out an agreed criteria for all NGO advertisements and marketing campaigns. The goal will be to finally eliminate the negative – and harmful – portrayal of affected populations, and to enforce a policy of positive imagery among aid organisations.
Arbie Baguios shares his ideas on how the aid industry can enhance positive public engagement.
Now, I have a mental checklist to ensure I’m collaborating in ethical storytelling with my clients. I confirm that the people I’m being sent to photograph or film are beneficiaries of the organization. If the organization doesn’t have a written statement of values or a code of conduct, I ask them about it. I’m looking for a commitment to treating people with dignity, clear policies on informed consent for photos and videos, and zero tolerance for exploitation and abuse, especially when it comes to children and people living with HIV and AIDS, which still carry stigma in many parts of the world.
Laura Elizabeth Pohl for Re-Picture on how the aid industry needs to discuss ethical issues around the visualizations around their work.
The study concluded both ideologically driven news sources as well as traditional newspapers and broadcasts furthered false narratives about black families, helping to shape public assumptions that they are “uniquely and irrevocably pathological and undeserving,” Dixon said. (...) The report makes several recommendations for the news industry, including setting stronger standards for sourcing information and experts, providing greater social and historical context, and including people of color in setting editorial standards.
Tracy Jan for Washington Post presents an interesting new study that should be of relevance for the aid industry and how they communicate.
Invoking your personal expertise can often give your story more credibility. But there are limits to self-declared expertise, exemplified by this — real, I promise — pitch: “My short stint working on a Kibbutz a few years prior gave me the expertise to go from Brooklyn, New York, to a small village in [insert developing country] to [help run an agriculture project].” How does a self-described “short stint” make you an expert on a topic as vast as agriculture? This passage also has a hint of the dreaded white savior industrial complex that plagues a lot of journalism about marginalized communities of color.
Sarika Bansal for Bright Magazine on how to become a better writer and storyteller.
‘In The Field’ is a show that attempts to capture India’s development story, as it happens, through a feature-style podcast that combines interviews, commentary, and debate.
An interesting podcast project from India I will definitely explore further!
Famines tend not to occur in democracies, and none of the catastrophic life-taking famines documented in history have occurred in the context of functioning democratic institutions.
The hardest thing to communicate about development is that (1) development is a spontaneous order, (2) nobody needs to be in charge to make (1) happen, and (3) there are large payoffs to understanding (1) and (2) and they do not imply fatalistic passivity.
Moving beyond the usual figure of the cosmopolitan and adventure-seeking Western humanitarian acting on distant suffering, this paper draws attention to local aid workers’ aspirations for personal and professional mobility as they seize novel opportunities opened up by the digital humanitarian agenda. It outlines how the digital humanitarian project’s ambition to facilitate the inclusion of disaster-affected communities is fundamentally undermined by labor arrangements that doubly marginalize local aid workers.
Jonathan Ong & Pamela Combinido with a new open access article in Central Asian Studies.
The contributions that INGOs can make to the DDD movement stem from their positioning within the development sector. Their programmatic experiences and in-house expertise differ from those of academics, think tanks, donor agencies, contractors, and national or local NGOs and community organizations. INGOs’ contributions to the conversation fall into three major themes: Localizing power and ownership in DDD practice, Funding and accountability for adaptation, Institutionalizing DDD across large agencies
Duncan Green for FP2P summarizes Dave Algoso's recent report on DDD.
Academia
In academic seminars, 'Men are > 2.5 times more likely to pose questions to the speakers.This male skew was observable only in those seminars in which a man asked first question. When a woman did so, gender split disappeared'. CHAIRS PLEASE NOTE FIRST Q TO A WOMAN - EVERY TIME. pic.twitter.com/mCUai2cIgA
We need to start holding prominent individuals accountable for how their inappropriate behavior negatively impacts the careers of their junior colleagues. I’m saying this publicly because whenever I have shared these stories privately with my colleagues, both men and women, they are appalled. It is time for us to be publicly and openly appalled, not just attempting to tactfully deflect inappropriate advances and privately warning other women. We need to remove the power of the “open secret” that these people use to take advantage of their respected positions in our field. We know who these people are, and we should stop tolerating this culture of harassment, or else we become complicit in it.
Kristian Lum shares some of her #MeToo experiences from academic statistic conferences.
The issue came up at an internal evaluation as well, so I was curious and collected some data. Baseline: I would hardly trust in Journal IF as a predictor for citations of individual articles. #ImpactFactor#AcademicPublishingpic.twitter.com/UGvPFQ9KZf
It is not so much that social media decentralises communicative capacity, dispersing it throughout the discipline, as much as it allows the proliferation of other actors who can perform these internal and external functions. There are new intermediaries who can connect the discipline internally and represent it externally. This raises the obvious question: what is the point of the learned society in an age of social media? Is it to perform the internal and external communications function but to do it more effectively than the new intermediaries? Is it to leverage this function towards certain purposes (e.g. establishing ethics guidelines) which other actors lack the normative legitimacy to pursue? Is it simply as a scholarly publisher and a conference organiser? Or do they need to find a new purpose in order to avoid a slow slide into irrelevance?
Mark Carrigan asks important questions about the future of large disciplinary associations and societies whose main task it seems to organize large-scale conferences in global chain hotel complexes and charge a lot of money for this privilege...
In my first annual reflection on my development blogging engagement in 2011 I stated quite plainly:
Development blogging has become part of narrative writing for those who work in, study or care about international aid.
A year later, in 2012, Radi-Aid, One Laptop Per Child and musings about development being stuck ‘indoors’ appeared in my post; aid satire, techno-solutionism and challenges around conferences and meetings are still very much on today’s critical agenda as well. In 2013 I was quite enthusiastic about starting my communication for development position in Sweden as social media were anchored in my academic research and outreach. Issues of 2014, including poor NGO communication (Tony Blair winning a humanitarian award), voluntourism (Nick Kristof traveling abroad) and how new forms of philanthrocapitalism are influencing #globaldev almost seem like timeless classics now… In 2015 I was excited about new forms of humanitarian journalism (IRIN!), the fact that aid worker well-being showed up on the global agenda and I also celebrated 150 weekly link reviews! My 2016 post included references to Louise Linton, social media ‘back-writing’ and the challenges of #allmalepanel-again, topics that have somehow ‘stuck’ with the aid community. So how does 2017 fit into these old, new and re-emerging debates and topics?
Are Twitter threads the new blog posts? Dina Pomeranz’ and Alice Evans’ engagement on Twitter are great examples of how this platform, despite the general critique about the medium, remains a premier avenue for communicating development debates, research, journalism and more. Twitter is responding to this trend with enhanced thread functions and a strong network will be the basis for spotting emerging trends, new research and cool things to read, watch and listen to. But I am missing a little bit the impact of the reflective space that blogs have been providing throughout the years. Maybe the re-designed MSF-CRASH site, the Bliss blog of the International Institute of Social Studies’ or Missing in the Mission can provide fresh reflections in the coming years?
Journalism and development – it remains complicated It is great to see that IRIN, NPR’s Goats & Soda and bigger brands such as DevEx, the Guardian’s development network or Washington Post’s Monkey Cage are doing well. This Week in Africa offers a great newsletter and the recently launched Bright Magazine also features great stories. But the end of Humanosphere is a reminder of how difficult it is to find a sustainable model for this kind of reporting-maybe there is not really one and it will remain a niche that relies on external support. On the other hand, the brand behind one of the most successful news sites on the Internet continues to attack development with exaggerated and fake news that cynical audiences consume. If nothing else, these are reminders that ‘development’ debates are a reflection of (media) culture, politics and digital dynamics just as pretty much any other social issue these days. Aid work as good, professional and localized work I mentioned aid worker well-being before and local aid workers seem to be the next hot topic-in a good way. Jonathan Ong’s research on Filipino aid workers is a good example of how the topic has gained traction and how it can be approached both traditionally through research, but also through innovative forms of communicating development. The #AidToo response from the aid industry was another example of how the sector responds to broader debates that affect health and well-being of professionals. Decolonizing development (studies) The initial debates around decolonizing academia and academic curricula in (South) Africa reached (Northern) development studies. The event organized by Olivia Rutazibwa and Andrea Cornwall brought together a great group of colleagues and questions of who should teach what kind of development studies will not disappear quickly. These questions touch upon powerful questions ranging from lucrative Anglo-Saxon MA education, to new forms of (digital) colonialism, the future of higher education in the global South, migration, …
Curation and the 500-page academic journal issue I wrote about curation in connection with the decolonizing development event. Even though Storify announced its end for 2018, curating debates is an important topic and one I have been dedicating quite a bit of blogging space to this year, including for hurricane coverage and the Third World Quarterly affair (which is maybe not coincidentally also about ‘colonialism’). Providing overviews, or annotated lists and saving content for future research or teaching has become more important.
Between January and December 2017 the journal World Development, among the most renowned in development research, published 4550 pages of articles. This is one journal in one year. The August 2017 issue comprised 598 pages alone. HAU, an open-access journal on ethnographic theory recently published a new issue with 575 pages. These are just two journals, not book monographs, edited volumes or any other type of written contribution. The most common response is that one is not supposed to read or skim all of this content and rather focus on one’s own niche and let search engines (or maybe Twitter) do the work for you of selecting relevant content. Perhaps. But the ‘write-only’ culture in academia has become a real issue that goes beyond open access models, length of chapters or writing a piece for ‘popular’ media. Last but not least Blockchain emerged as the latest buzzword of techno-solutionism.
Dataprivacy, protection and management emerged as hot topics in the ICT4D and humanitarian community.
How will the growing spread and recognition of African/ ‘Southern’ (science) fiction change development communication in the future?
We have come full-circle. Despite the fact that no petition was signed, no Internet ‘shitstorm’ emerged and no real public outrage took place, Daily Mail front page journalism and the willing Conservative executioners of cutting the foreign aid budget work hand in hand. This is a powerful reminder that post-factual journalism is not just a ‘thing’, but has real consequences for public spending-usually affecting those who do not have access to the powerful lobbying arsenal of the establishment.
As more and more young, well-qualified Nepali professionals enter the development sector they should be able to work in an environment of constructive debates-not one of mistrust and jealously. The development sector is an important aspect of Nepal’s economy and it deserves local professionals who can build a career in the industry, rather than looking for well-paid employment elsewhere-including outside the country. As more digital communication and data challenges emerge, journalists, activists and traditional aid actors, including the government, need to have constructive dialogues, build capacity and treat overheads as an investment in more accountable organizations and motivated, well-paid professionals-ideally the next generation of local experts.
For media, communication and journalism students and researchers it provides ample food for thought how the past of public broadcasting relates to our messy contemporary times. And for the (communication for) development audience it offers valuable insights into institutional transformation under the neoliberal condition and the chances and limitations of communicating social change.
Conferences need to offer wide-ranging digital access The jokes about missing or expensive Wi-Fi are only one aspect. Meetings rooms need to be accessible so virtual participants can Skype-, Google Hangout- etc. in. Let participants run their own facebook live streams and give them the opportunity to explore other platforms and technologies outside platform capitalism.
I can highly recommend the book-particularly as additional reading on course reading lists on African decolonization, history of the UN or how ‘global governance’ has (not) been working ‘on the ground’. The fact that Susan Williams’ account is such a readable historical discovery that probably teaches readers more about ‘African history’ than most academic textbooks, underlines the unique position that Hurst and its team have in publishing great books about development history.
The debates in development around (unpaid) internships, volunteering (whether it takes place in the context of ‘service-learning’ or the large-scale schemes the EU is rolling out often center around ‘white saviors’ and sometimes the ‘precariat’. But promises of intersectionality, multi-culturalism or empowerment will largely remain unfulfilled-or at best individualized as the development industry will embrace new subjects and objects. Will there be a different volunteering culture as middle-class Indians venture into remote villages? Or will Chinese volunteers arrive in Africa in a second wave of cultural expansion of its influence-not dissimilar to traditional Western notions of ‘development’?
As a social science researcher I can confirm that this is a very sad case study of “how not to present survey results” and clearly not worthy of the UN system, its staff and the important issues that are raised in the report.
If Donald Nicolson’s book can achieve one thing, then hopefully more discussions on the purpose of academic conferences across disciplines, privileges and inequalities!
Failing in the field is a great primer for students and non-academic researchers who are embarking on the exciting journey of data collection and fieldwork. But while getting research design and implementation right, we should remember not to leave ‘the field’ to the political scientists and economists alone ;)!
Create a simple landing page for your articles and academic work! Usually a simple blog post with the abstract of the article, but also key findings, is a great start. Blog posts I can read and share! The blog post also contains a LINK to the pre-print platform of your choice (Academia, ResearchGate etc.) or the option to download the pre-print directly from your website. THEN there is also a LINK to the journal’s homepage where I can download the full paper.
So just to be clear: There are many things you can and should be critical about when it comes to Saudi-Arabia – but electing them as a member to the Commission on the Status of Women is actually the right thing to do within the context of UN diplomacy. Other members should put pressure on Saudi-Arabia-especially behind the scenes, but the UN is not the right scapegoat for messy international relations and hypocritical relationships that include money, oil and weapons…
This is a great open-access collection that goes far beyond journalism safety and highlights many important issues in communicating development and social change topics in our mediatized world!
I thoroughly enjoyed Revolution and Authoritarianism in North Africa. It provides plenty of food for thought and discussion and will certainly make a very good introductory text for students before they start discussing the countries, societies and revolutionary dynamics in more detail. Volpi’s book also makes a very important contribution to the emerging debate on how ‘we’, particularly in academia, need to continue with nuanced and careful analysis as mediatized events gain momentum and sound bites replace complex reflections. Especially the political science and international relations community also needs to admit how limited their power of prediction really is when contested spaces are re-negotiated.
From my point of view the book was certainly an unexpected gem for my collection. A traditional biography which opens up some interesting reflections on how our (research, development, policy) world used to work, a glimpse into the life of a big man with big ideas and big impact-yet a subject to dominant discourses and existing power relations. A father who had little time for his children and maintained an impressive global network in the pre-digital age.
To cut a long story short: I would be a bit more careful in predicting a future of the humanitarian sector based on data-driven cash programs where NGOs mimic global capitalistic platforms.
No matter how many times they try or who bankrolls their efforts, an American guy shooting at people in a far-away land will not be the solution to end war and conflict…
Radio Okapi Kindu is definitely among my favorite aid worker memoirs now and a great addition to this emerging genre that continues to surprise me with fresh voices and approaches to communicating development in engaging and different ways!
As diverse as ‘our’ community may be and as much as we suffer collectively through the one or two annual populist essays of ‘but does aid really work? You know, corrupt African dictators and all…!?!’, the digital, virtual water cooler may be just that: A relatively safe space for venting frustrations, finding support and maintain a community of like-minded people (which is not simply the same as a ‘filter bubble’…).
The toughest question in terms of career building is the question of the slowly changing ethical framework of international development: How can I justify my engagement? Duncan writes: ‘I loved writing; I was (broadly) on the left; I wanted to understand social and political change and if possible contribute to it.’ Is this still enough to build a career given our global Northern/ Western, male etc. privileges? Since social change usually happens slower than we anticipate my tentative answer is ‘yes, to some extent’-but the more important questions for which I have no good answer at this stage is, to put it more provocatively, who should have a career in international development in the future and at what cost will they happen in a globally accelerating labor market?
Looking back to journalistic practice and professionalism 75 years ago offers some really interesting insights into today’s discourses around war reporting. What Woods describes as ‘inevitable preference for stories of European evacuees’ (p.126) rings very true with today’s discussions around the ‘value’ of Northern victims and ‘heroes’ in journalism or development communication.
There are also new, relevant articles that have started to link Harvey to broader questions of international development and humanitarian aid and that are interesting food for thought in 'our' industry.
At the end of the day, Gettleman’s memoir is not an exceptional piece of writing or insight and maybe other reviewers had expected more, because he is not ‘just’ a regular humanitarian aid worker or traveling journalist. He delivers an entertaining memoir that clearly has potential for further discussions and non-expert engagement around topics of foreign correspondents and journalism from and about Africa, but ultimately falls a bit short as self-reflective, and –critical assessment of how white men, global media brands and expat bubbles create ‘our’ image of a rapidly changing continent with its 54 countries.
This time another American territory is affected among other islands many of which still have links to European countries through various statuses as overseas territories. So new questions are emerging in the aftermath of a natural disaster of how 'them' and 'us' are linked, how humanitarian challenges are not just an issue of the 'North' helping the 'South' and how questions of development thinking and research are becoming even more important as climate change creates a truly global community of suffering, resilience and connected support.
Maybe the economist has replaced the pith-helmeted medical doctor in some areas and their Excel sheets are less invasive and dangerous than colonial experiments, but the Lomidine Files is a book about similar desires to understand, help and ‘eradicate’ poverty in contexts of making bodies, states and (our) aspirations count.
Perhaps not surprisingly, data turns into a technical, almost apolitical challenge that is framed in much the same way most other new concepts have been embraced by large international organizations.
In the end, ‘decolonizing’ also means that more sources from different margins are included. This goes beyond the global North and South dichotomy and expands diversity to academic institutions, smaller NGOs or local news media sites almost anywhere in the world.
Economic growth comes with huge cost-and maybe even more importantly with lifestyle changes. It is great news that kids can read late at night at the well-illuminated kitchen table, but that same electricity is also required to run the fridge, microwave or TV and charge mobiles and laptops-and tons an tons of plastic and other resources will be used and sold ‘to lift families out of poverty’.
This is a curated and regularly updated overview over the events that followed after the publication of Bruce Gilley's article The Case for Colonialism in the journal Third World Quarterly.
