After all they get things wrong all the time and you are generally happy enough if the general thrust of the piece was accurate and in defense of most journalists you have to say that  they normally don’t have the time or resources to research a complex subject, nor the column-space or air time to explain it properly. That might explain why listening to ”Haiti and the truth about NGOs” for 45 minutes annoyed me so much!

Clearly the BBC’s Edward Stourton has had all the time and resources in the world to produce this piece. And he was given 45 minutes! An eternity! And he still manages to deliver a one-sided and biased anti-aid piece that seems to come down to this central message: NGOs have lots of money and know what needs to be done, but they have lost their souls and that is why they squander it all.

Hogwash!

I’m not saying that the problems that he mentions don’t exist. They do and they shouldn’t. And I agree that the Haiti response hasn’t been as good as it should have been. But producing a 45 minute piece that is basically saying that it’s all because the NGOs are sinisterly hoarding the money is just a waste of airtime. I’m not going to go through it minute by minute, but here are a few things that I found particularly annoying (quotes are not verbatim):

In a big disaster everybody expects the UN to take the lead.

Wrong! The government has the lead! The UN and NGOs have no legitimacy to, well,  ”govern”.

The UN is unable to keep incompetent NGOs out of the country.

True. But again: that is not the UN’s role. It’s the government’s. Can you imagine what would happen if the UN would suddenly start kicking NGOs out of the country.  And you know what? People who be justifiably pissed off, because the UN is not a democratically legitimized institution of the host country. The UN is a service provider to the government.

What I find telling is that Stourton actually didn’t talk to anyone from the government for his piece.

The first thing that’s back up and running are the generators so that aidworkers can power their DVD players (Linda Polman).

Cheap jibe. The first things that these generators power are laptops and lights so that aidworkers can work deep into the night, as well as telecommunication infrastructure so that the people on the ground can tell their headquarters what is needed. And I’m sure Linda Polman knows that.

The UN is asking beneficiaries for their opinion.

It’s hard to believe, but he actually makes that sound like a bad thing!

There is no way to know what NGOs are doing with the money

Saying it’s impossible to know how the money is spent simply isn’t true. Every major organization has to report back to donors. Those reports are public. In addition, most project proposals or appeals include detailed financials as well. Nowhere in this piece did I hear him ask for any financial reports. Of course reading those and making sense of them is actually quite hard and tedious work.

I could go on to the police-scene and how he suddenly introduces some drama when driving past a couple of burning tires. Oh, the excitement! But I’ll stop here. Please go ahead and listen to it and let me know what you think. The piece will still be available online on the BBC website until January 18.

What annoys me most is that this is just lazy on the part of Stoughton: If you want to talk about the failings of aid, then also talk about the complexities of aid. If you talk about lack of programming, then also talk about whether pledges have actually turned into real money. If the money hasn’t been spent then ask the project people why. And if you really think that NGOs haven’t done any good in Haiti, then also mention what has been delivered over the last 12 months.

And why is there no mention, discussion or interview with the Haiti Interim Recovery Commission, the major body for assigning money and moving project forward, headed jointly by former US President Clinton and the Haitian Prime Minister Bellerive? I mean, how can you discuss the successes and failings in Haiti without looking at the commission that is supposedly in charge of the majority of the money pledged for reconstruction of the country?

Has enough progress been made in Haiti over the last 12 months? Absolutely not. Could things have been done better: Of course!

But if you are given 45 minutes of airtime and generous travel budget, then please spend you time to address concrete issues and then ask the people on the ground why these things are that way – instead of “aid experts” back in Europe!

Here are a few blog entries and articles I would like to  recommend:

• Foreign Policy: Five lessons from Haiti’s disaster
• Aidwatch: Aid is not just complicated, it’s complex
• Tales from the Hood: Looking back on Haiti – Failure or Success?
• Tales from the Hood: Cost
• Engaging internationally: Haiti one year later: what have we learned?
• Wired: Organizing Armageddon: What we learned from the Haiti earthquake (from April 2010)
• New York Times: In Haiti the displaced are clinging to the edge (from July 2010)

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Check it out: http://goodintents.org/blog

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You’re an aid worker with 10+ years experience under your belt. You earn a pittance but it works for you because you are non-resident at home so you don’t pay tax, you are catered for on assignment so you don’t pay rent,and your mortgage is covered by the people renting your place because you are never there. You can’t hold down a relationship for more than 3 months and you secretly know that despite what you tell him/her it’s really not because you’re only ever there for 3 months… it’s because you can’t live without the independence.

UN convoy in Chad; UN Photo/Olivia Grey Pritchard

Things are ok now but you’re approaching 40. What should you do? What does the future hold? Are you one of the new world order of aid worker gypsies?

Welcome to your future – these are your life options:

Option 1. You go back to a headquarters job. Instead of doing what you want to do, you now advise people who are doing what you used to do. You earn the same more or less as you did before, but your costs of living shoot skywards because you’re now paying tax, rent/mortgage and utilities…

You consider sharing accommodation and, bingo, you’re a student again and like a student can’t afford to do 1% of the things you think you would like to do.

Option 2. You go work for the UN. Keep the job you love and the lifestyle that goes with it. Your salary jumps to levels that used to get you all riled up after a few drinks back when you used to work for “honest”  down-to-earth INGOs. Now you’re cynical about them all and aggressively defend your need to raise a nest egg to plough the way for the family/dog/cottage/brats you’re planning. You’ve done your bit after all. You do this for a while before you realize you sacrificed every dream you ever had in this work and can no longer look yourself in the mirror.

Option 3. You find something suitable in the commercial sector and live happily ever after. This only happens to 1/10,000 aid workers and if you’re a logistician, forget it.

Option 4. You retrain and change course. You take a massive pay cut. Your skills and experience in aid work go unused and unappreciated. You marry someone who will never fully understand where you are coming from and why you are quiet for long periods of time. If you haven’t left it too late to have kids, just remember – dysfunctional.

Option 5. You write your memoirs and someone makes a movie out of it starring Leonardo De Caprio / Angelina Jolie. You become an even more arrogant git, lose all your friends, and make a lot of cash. This only  happens to 1/100,000 aid workers and will definitely not happen to you!

Option 6. You become that lonely, jaded expat sat at the bar in some third world piss pot letching over young locals and making snide remarks.

Option 7. You decide to set up home but not in your own country. Forget moving back to London, Paris, New York, Munich but head for the Balkan Adriatic or one of the emerging Eastern European States before the property developers get there, and develop a serious liver problem.

Option 8. You hit the road along with thousands of your cohorts with visions of huge bands of ex-aid worker families roaming the European countryside in caravans, plastered with “No guns on board” stickers and of course pulled by white Toyota Land Cruiser hardtops and pickups, scratching out a life by erecting latrines and living under plastic sheeting. You take stock count of everything you come across….. and from time-to-time you seek charity.

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Opium Season is about Hafvenstein’s time in Afghanistan in 2005, when he was working for a USAID funded cash-for-work project that was supposed to supplement the income of people who were due to lose money because of a poppy-eradication campaign.

The problem with donor driven programmes

What makes this book such a good  read is not only that it is well written, but also that it gives excellent examples for what’s wrong with donor-driven aid programmes.

From the very beginning, the project was not driven by the needs of the population, but by the donor’s requirement to create 2.5 million days of work in a Helmland province within a year. Hafvenstein writes: “Everything else – the amount of money we spent, the total number of people we hired, the nature of the jobs we created was flexible.”

In other words: whether the work made sense or was even counter-productive hardly mattered, as the project managers were struggling to meet the expectations of USAID. The worry that was constantly on their – and their bosses – minds was that if they failed, they wouldn’t get the next, bigger project. A poignant reminder that today, aid is a frequently seen as business first and something that can help people second.

Having money is not the same as having resources

Joel Hafvenstein writes about this with great honesty and explains very well how he reflected on these issues more and more the longer he worked in Afghanistan. The book also illustrates the lack of resources and the frustrations that a lot of aid managers have to deal with on a daily basis, even if the project is well funded. His efforts to get from one day to the next without screwing up on a monumental scale will feel familiar to many people who work in the non-profit sector.

Last but not least. I like “Opium Season” because it contains a lot of background information on the history of  the region and helped me to appreciate that hardly anything is clear-cut in Afghanistan.

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