Pri's opinion on child sponsorship - what is the real question?
The Aid Workers Network recently had a posting (see http://www.aidworkers.net/?q=node/2027 if you are interested) with a quote from an American who had worked in the developing world for many years, and who resigned as a field leader in a large American based child sponsorship organisation because his "conscience could no longer handle an increasing organisational focus on what was good for the organisation than what is best for the child and community”. He highlights the sophisticated marketing programme that tries to alleviate the donors’ guilt (“we have so much and they have so little”) and the imbeddedness in the America Knows Best scenario (also Britain, Europe, Australia etc knows best) that continues to be played out around the world and asks aren’t there better ways. Of course there are.
What I find distasteful about the child sponsorship organizations is the parading of images of liquid-eyed poor children to elicit sympathy and raise funds. This is no different to beggars on the streets of developing country capitals (or even in the London Underground) who grab a child to go begging with, because it attracts attention, and generates more coins. But there are other development agencies as guilty of this kind of ‘guilt raising’ imagery as child sponsorship organisations, developing agencies from the UN downards who are using images of poor children, women, elderly persons etc in promotional material. I have discussed this on the Aid Workers Network forum (see http://www.aidworkers.net/?q=node/970) as well as elsewhere.
The simple comment to the Aidworker's post is that there are some sponsorship organizations that use their sponsorship money more responsibly than others.
But the real questions are more fundamental than that and go to the heart of the aid business itself and to the process of raising funds for development from the Northern public. The blogger is right, most public fund raising in the North (read Europe, North America, Australia and other developed countries), and not just child sponsorship, is based on as the “America knows best” scenario. I’ve worked for an organisation that for a very long time marketed the superiority of northern technological capabilities even whilst sprouting the appropriate technology and peoples’ knowledge philosophy. See Emma Crewe and Elizabeth Harrison (1998) Whose development? An enthography of aid Zed Books for an interesting exposé of these issues. The northern organisations need to survive. Changing the paradigm is not necessarily in their interest, despite the rhetoric. Exploiting the northern publics’ cognitive dissonance and allowing them to justify and rationalise their behaviour by giving is consistent with and less disruptive of the status quo.
The other way is to challenge the fundamentals. The poor are running to keep up (and they ARE running, with or without aid agency help) , and are being pushed several steps back when the rich and the powerful act irresponsibly. We need to make sure that this irresponsibility doesn't continue - that the financial institutions of the world don't gamble with our money, that global conglomerates use our natural resources to provide food AND energy security to the world, that the automobile industry doesn't condone the construction of unsustainable transport infrastructure merely so they can sell their cars, in the same way that the big and small arms industries must curb marketing their weapons to the conflict areas of the world if peace is to be achieved.
Somehow I don't hear a loud call for this type of change, do you?
What I find distasteful about the child sponsorship organizations is the parading of images of liquid-eyed poor children to elicit sympathy and raise funds. This is no different to beggars on the streets of developing country capitals (or even in the London Underground) who grab a child to go begging with, because it attracts attention, and generates more coins. But there are other development agencies as guilty of this kind of ‘guilt raising’ imagery as child sponsorship organisations, developing agencies from the UN downards who are using images of poor children, women, elderly persons etc in promotional material. I have discussed this on the Aid Workers Network forum (see http://www.aidworkers.net/?q=node/970) as well as elsewhere.
The simple comment to the Aidworker's post is that there are some sponsorship organizations that use their sponsorship money more responsibly than others.
But the real questions are more fundamental than that and go to the heart of the aid business itself and to the process of raising funds for development from the Northern public. The blogger is right, most public fund raising in the North (read Europe, North America, Australia and other developed countries), and not just child sponsorship, is based on as the “America knows best” scenario. I’ve worked for an organisation that for a very long time marketed the superiority of northern technological capabilities even whilst sprouting the appropriate technology and peoples’ knowledge philosophy. See Emma Crewe and Elizabeth Harrison (1998) Whose development? An enthography of aid Zed Books for an interesting exposé of these issues. The northern organisations need to survive. Changing the paradigm is not necessarily in their interest, despite the rhetoric. Exploiting the northern publics’ cognitive dissonance and allowing them to justify and rationalise their behaviour by giving is consistent with and less disruptive of the status quo.
The other way is to challenge the fundamentals. The poor are running to keep up (and they ARE running, with or without aid agency help) , and are being pushed several steps back when the rich and the powerful act irresponsibly. We need to make sure that this irresponsibility doesn't continue - that the financial institutions of the world don't gamble with our money, that global conglomerates use our natural resources to provide food AND energy security to the world, that the automobile industry doesn't condone the construction of unsustainable transport infrastructure merely so they can sell their cars, in the same way that the big and small arms industries must curb marketing their weapons to the conflict areas of the world if peace is to be achieved.
Somehow I don't hear a loud call for this type of change, do you?
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