What follows are my personal reflections on recent times.

The last three years have been incredibly challenging for Global Focus. The world changed around us and the Government changed too. The strategic policy framework articulated between the NGOs and the previous government became increasingly invisible until it was pretty much acknowledged that it no longer carried any weight.  (Although at the time this post was published that document was still on the NZ Aid programmes website).

Global Focus experienced increasing intrusion from the main funding body as rightly or wrongly the approach changed from the agreed core-funding model to a ‘contract for services’ model. Our funders felt growing ownership over our activities which therefore included the associated risks, both political and financial. It is my belief that eventually those perceived risks outweighed the perceived benefits and triggered the total withdrawal of all financial support.  This coupled with the realisation that we didn’t have a powerful constituency supporting us, meant we were considered expendable.

But perhaps somewhat obviously, I disagree with that assessment. In fact I believe a voice which helps people understand their lives in the context of contemporary global issues is more important now than ever. We have been accused of being too radical and not neutral enough but I now think that perhaps we didn’t go far enough.

In a world were the global media is dominated by a few key groups with specific self-centred interests, we have a duty to present a differing view points. In a world where famines are still occurring we have a duty to get people thinking about why that might be. In a world were peaceful protesters are being arrested while financial criminals aren’t held accountable because they happen to be in positions of privilege, we have a duty to keep talking about global injustice. We have a duty to remind people in Aotearoa New Zealand about the injustices that exist here, in our own backyards, lest we get lulled into a sense of false security that bad things only happen anywhere but here.

As we sift through our collections of publications we looked at one from 20 years ago. It was talking about the same issues that we discuss today; poverty, aid, food. Depressingly, not much seems to have changed. That publication barring minor edits is probably still just as relevant today as it was when it was published.

Does that mean we failed, that Global Focus didn’t change the minds of enough people to make a big enough difference? I don’t think so. I just think it means the size of the problem is bigger than we could manage on our own. Once lessons pass from living memory they are often forgotten and we are doomed to repeat them. (Three year election cycles don’t help) Resolving this requires more resources not less.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” – George Santayana

I hope the larger development sector (which includes all organisations involved in international, social and youth development work and education) will continue to recognise the value of global education and will resource the work of teaching knowledge, skills and the values in ways that go beyond communications and marketing strategies.

Maybe there won’t be an office of Global Focus staff who are producing regular documents for you to read, helping you to formulate your opinions or for you to use in your classrooms. But you can still continue the work of our organisation on our behalf. You can challenge harmful assumptions, you can take meaningful action. You can start with your own actions in your own communities.

Our publications are still available on our website and will be for the foreseeable future. Please put them to good use.

Good luck

Technology is making rich-country NGOs an unnecessary ‘middleman’. Why not have donors directly fund poor country organisations?

Philosophically, and economically, it makes no sense to have NGOs based in rich countries, while proclaiming their accountability to people in poor countries. If aid recipients are really the ones calling the shots, shouldn’t international development NGOs be established and operated by the poor themselves? Rather than rich-country NGOs setting up offices in poor countries to disburse funds to local partners, will we see poor-country NGOs setting up fundraising branches in rich countries? Or will web-based promotion and fund-raising activities make a physical presence in rich countries entirely unnecessary?

Currently, the need for rich-country NGOs stems from their ability to add trust to the process. Many donors do not trust poor-country NGOs as they do the familiar (white) faces and accents of Oxfam, World Vision, Save the Children, et al.

But perhaps this is changing. Small MONGO (My Own NGO) agencies, often little more than fundraising operations reliant on personal contacts to deliver aid, and close relationships with donors, may be more able to build a more trusting relationship with donors than multi-national operations. Possibly, development NGOs will become polarised with a large number of MONGOs, working largely autonomously, and a small number of big professional agencies with close relations with government and business donors.

MONGOs, rightly or wrongly, see little purpose in putting energy into forming relationships with the ‘development sector’. They are happy to focus on their small practical projects, ignore larger debates and campaigns, and have little vision beyond their practical projects, while large NGOs are increasingly focused on political positioning, referred to as ‘aid effectiveness’ or ‘development effectiveness’.

The debate over ‘development effectiveness has happened before – in the industrialised and industrialising countries of the late 19th and 20th century. It’s often forgotten that the great ideological debates between variations of capitalism and socialism were largely about ‘development effectiveness’. Ideological differences weren’t mere academic arguments, but were about what you thought would drive development fastest, and towards the most desirable social goals.

In those days it was recognised that holding differences of opinions about the aims and methods of the development process was valid. Today, the hegemony of the west’s mash-up of neo-liberalism and social democracy is regarded as the only game in town (despite all the cracks appearing in the model), and a fake ‘global consensus’ is proposed. A lot of people won’t be included in this ‘consensus’ – the groups that are challenging both the methodologies and assumed monopoly on the formation of ideas of western governments, academics and organisations. The development theories of Hugo Chavez, the Andean movements, the Zapatistas and many of the world’s indigenous peoples won’t get a look in.

There’s a certain hubris about this project. Every now and then in political activism circles, I run across a naive, evangelical or power-seeking individual or group talking about ‘uniting everyone’. Their projects always fail as there are real differences between political players that can’t be erased by positive thinking or convenience. To try and carry out the same kind of project on a global scale is even more naive, or just plain cynical.

But probably it won’t matter much. Just like previous ‘global consensuses’ the result will be a vague mish-mash of a document that the ‘development sector’ merely pays lip-service to in after dinner speeches at international conferences.

Rather than producing documents of dubious merit, Large NGOs could be turning their attention to the development work that needs doing in rich countries (and when it comes to domestic development, the suggestion of being locked-in to a global consensus is fiercely opposed). The possibilities of so-called ‘South-North’ cooperation – bringing expertise from poor countries to help people in rich countries tackle their social and development problems – is another activity that NGOs could facilitate.

There’s also a need for greater efforts in educating people about international issues (particularly as this organisation closes down). As globalisation increases, global awareness, at least in rich countries, appears to be falling. Too many televisions, too much tourism; not enough talking and thinking.

The past few weeks has seen a flurry of activity in the NCD community as we prepare for the special high level summit in New York next week. NCDs – non-communicable diseases – will be top of the agenda on 19-20 September as world leaders attempt to chart a way forward in addressing this number one global killer.

Each year, NCDs – primarily cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, cancers, and chronic respiratory diseases – are responsible for some 63 million deaths worldwide. And although traditionally thought of as a curse of the wealthy, the poorest people on the planet are those worst affected. Some 80 per cent of the deaths caused by NCDs occur in low and middle income settings, and evidence suggests that if current trends continue, they will account for almost half of all deaths in Africa by 2030.

“The consequences [of NCDs] for societies and economies are devastating everywhere, but most especially so in poor, vulnerable and disadvantaged populations,” says WHO DG Margaret Chan in the foreword to the 2010 Global Status Report on Non-Communicable Diseases. “NCDs deliver a two-punch blow to development. They cause billions of dollars in losses of national income, and they push millions of people below the poverty line, each and every year,” she adds.

AfGH has worked extensively on the removal of user fees, and with an estimated 100 million plunged into poverty every year because they have to pay out-of-pocket health care costs, the burden of NCDs is a strain often too great to bear for many household budgets.

This needn’t be the case, however. The estimated annual cost of delivering essential NCD interventions is just US$1-3 per person. Compare this to the costs of treating NCDs, often at an advanced stage requiring complex medical care, and it’s clear that population wide interventions are the sensible, low-cost solution.

But world leaders need to act fast, and forcefully.

The timing of this summit is crucial. As we head towards the finishing straight on the millennium development goals (MDGs), much of the attention in the international development landscape rightly focuses on making progress towards meeting this clearly defined set of targets. And while it is crucial we intensify efforts to improve child and maternal health, combat HIV/Aids, malaria and other diseases, it is not the end game as far as health is concerned.

Although NCDs do not feature in the MDG framework, there is clear evidence that the socioeconomic impacts of NDCs are hindering progress towards the MDGs. And there is a vicious cyclical relationship between NCDs and poverty, according to the WHO’s Global Status Report. “Poverty exposes people to behavioural risk factors for NCDs and, in turn, the resulting NCDs may become an important driver to the downward spiral that leads families towards poverty,” the report reads.

But in spite of this, efforts to tackle the rising epidemic are seriously under-resourced and paid very little attention in efforts to strengthen health systems. Evidence shows that health interventions are more sustainable and have greater impact when they are owned and led by developing countries and local stakeholders, and when they are implemented as part of greater health systems strengthening efforts.

NCDs must therefore be addressed through an integrated approach that takes into account broader health and development objectives of individual countries. By so doing, health systems would be able to respond more effectively to the needs of those with chronic diseases.

If the high-level summit fails to deliver an outcome document which sets out clear, measurable and time bound targets to tackle NCDs, we will never meet our MDG targets. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon sees the summit as “our chance to broker an international commitment that puts non-communicable diseases high on the development agenda”. To quote Margaret Chan once more, “we dare not fail”.

Violaine Gagnet is Action for Global Health Advocacy Officer for Médecins du Monde France

Meredith Burgmann, president of the Australian NGO umbrella group ACFID has pointed out that the Pacific has the lowest number of female politicians in the world; fewer than three percent of elected representatives are women.

“Women’s representation is especially important given that 60 per cent of the countries in the Pacific do not have laws on domestic violence. Women in the Pacific face similar challenges when it comes to accessing health services, education and family planning,” she said.

A report from Amnesty International highlights sexual violence against women living in informal settlements in the Solomon Islands, where women’s vulnerability is increased by poor water and sanitation, making it necessary for women to walk long distances to collect water or use toilets.

But women in the Solomon Islands are at risk at home as well. A 2009 survey revealed that 64 per cent of women and girls between the ages of 15 and 49 had experienced physical and/or sexual violence from their partners and other family members.

Which suggests RAMSI, the international intervention force in the Solomon Islands, hasn’t been very effective given its mandate includes the aims ‘Ensure the safety and security of Solomon Islands’ and ‘Build strong and peaceful communities’.

Edwina Kotosuv of the Fiji Women’s Rights Movement said a high rate of violence against women demonstrated the need for women’s issues to be addressed by women themselves.

“A lot of issues discussed about the violence on women did not actually come to the fore until women rights organisations in the Pacific started talking about the issue, and advocating bringing it to life,”

At the same time, UN head honcho Ban Ki-moon has justified the continued use of Fijian soldiers on peacekeeping missions – despite peacekeeping providing a source of income for the military that has enabled it to exist as one of the largest militaries in the Pacific, and given it the clout to maintain military rule. Ki-moon says there is no alternative to use Fijian soldiers as the UN needs security.

So, if violence in the Solomon Islands justified international military intervention in the form of RAMSI and the UN’s need for security justifies the use of members of an armed criminal group, what response is justified by the lack of security, and on-going violence against, Pacific women?

Sending in troops? Arming women?

Will politicians demand immediate action to deal with this wide-spread breakdown of law and order? Or will politicians continue to take a hands-off, ‘not our problem’ approach to this particular type of violence, while playing hardball over ethnic and political violence?

ACFID press release Amnesty International report Ban Ki-moon comments RAMSI Comment from Pacific women

Much of the action takes place in the Middle East and Ethiopia. Robin’s long lost mum is a doctor (slim, blonde and looks slightly younger than her son) working in refugee camps. About the only positive thing you can say about the writers’ caricatures of Africans – as thugs, soldiers or starving refugees – is that they aren’t as negative as the caricatures of Arabs and Iranians.

An improvement is Unknown Soldier by US writer Joshua Dysart with later episodes drawn by Congolese artist Patrice Masioni Makamba. Set in northern Uganda in the late 1990s during fighting between the government and the Lord’s Resistance Army, there’s a lot of comment on aid politics and calls for African self-sufficiency. The downside is the plot, which is pretty standard US violent revenge fantasy stuff, lots of fights and things that go bang.

There’s a lot more like this going on in the world of African comics, unfortunately, little of it gets out of the Francophone world. I’m adding Senegal’s Goorgoorlou by T T Fons to the list of my favourite comics I haven’t read. The main character, Goor, lost his job after Senegal’s first structural adjustment plan and spends his days living on his wits – though in the spin-off TV series he’s eventually hired as a ‘Goorism’ consultant by the World Bank.

Would getting more of this work into English help change the western public’s conception of Africa either as a basket case or source of exotica? If you want to introduce people to a different face of the continent, it sure beats another pretty calendar or cook book.

Blog post on African comics Goorgoorlou

Later on I did some reading and discovered it wasn’t particularly confusing; it was just journalists and academics being either lazy, or happy to paint foreign countries as mysterious and incomprehensible places, that stopped them telling the story clearly.

I’m finding Somalia is getting the same treatment. In a recent, fairly lengthy, news story (‘Somalia famine aid stolen, UN investigating’) we were told the World Food Programme regarded the country as a “dangerous, lawless, and conflict-ridden environment” and the history was covered by a couple of references to the US military intervention nearly 20 years ago, referred to by the name of the Hollywood movie loosely based on an event that occurred at the time. There’s a few mentions of ‘the government’, without pointing out that it controls only a fraction of the country, and no mention of the fact that much of the country isn’t “conflict-ridden” and substantial parts of it are under stable administrations – just not the one that Western countries insist constitutes “the government”.

References to the US intervention suggest it was a response to misappropriation of aid, but it’s hard to deny that Somalia’s turbulent history is in no small part a due to foreign intervention, which keeps blowing fresh oxygen on the dying embers of previous conflicts.

The UN intervention in the 1990s gave a nationalist justification to the power struggles of the warlords, which the population was getting very fed up with.

In 2006, the south of the country was briefly stabilised under the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), only to be subject to airstrikes by the US, fearful of Islamic fundamentalism, and an Ethiopian invasion in support of a ‘government’ – a group of politicians that had acquired UN and Western support. Corrupt and distracted by internal power struggles, this ‘Transitional Federal Government’ failed to attract much support until it pledged support for sharia law and appointed the former chairman of the ICU as its president, having previously overthrown his administration.

Kenya and Eritrea have also meddled in Somali politics, choosing and supplying their favourites. Left to themselves, Somalis in the north of the country have created functioning administrations, and while drought has brought shortages of food, there’s no famine in these areas.

Somalia isn’t simple, and it isn’t incomprehensible either (and we’ve got a ‘One-Pager’ introduction to the country on the front page of our website, just in case somebody wants to know what’s going on).

The Politics of Somalia one-pager [230KB PDF]

Three decades on since Ethiopian famines spawned the likes of Live Aid and little has changed, the causes are slightly different, the reactions somewhat more clichéd and the public and media more jaded.

The reaction seems depressingly familiar – calls for more money, complaints that the response should have started earlier and the usual reports of malnourished babies and parents having to abandon their children. Politicians, such as Aussie foreign minister Kevin Rudd and British international development secretary Andrew Mitchell, use the crisis for smug point-scoring and opposing “restrictive trade policies”. Their piece is titled “It is obscene that we should leave any child to starve”, but apparently not obscene enough to prevent both governments preferring to spend multiple billions on new fighter aircraft.

Rudd and Mitchell piece

The only sign of this being the 21^st century rather than the 20^th is that this time there’s a ‘war on terror’ angle, with blame heaped on “Al-Qaeda linked insurgent group al-Shabaab” who are blocking the delivery of aid.

Actually, it’s probably more accurate to describe the western-recognised Transitional Federal Government (TFG) as an ‘insurgent group’ having been formed in exile before seizing territory from the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) which previously controlled much of the country. Al-Shabaab was formed from remnants of ICU hardliners after the movement split, following defeats at the hands of the TFG’s Ethiopian and African Union troops.

It should also be noted that while al-Shabaab deserves condemnation for hindering the delivery of aid, the US government has also prevented delivery of aid within the area controlled by al-Shabaab as part of its policy of placing sanctions on groups it considers ‘terrorist’.

US sanctions prevent aid delivery

The best commentary on Somalia I’ve seen comes from the International Crisis Group (ICG). The ICG suggests that much of the internal displacement in Somalia stems from aggressive military campaigns of the TFG and also points out that the crisis is much less serious in the autonomous regions of Somaliland and Puntland, which have stable, but unrecognised administrations. Western support for the TFG seems to be much more about pursuing the ‘war on terror’ than creating a Somalia in which people get to eat.

ICG commentary

NGOs are in the middle of a complex chain of accountability – being accountable in various ways to donors, staff, aid recipients, the governments of the countries in which they are based and in which they work, to other organisations they have relationships with, and sometimes to government bodies which provide them with funds. At times, these interests may converge, with all the players making the same demands on the organisation, but at other times they are divergent.

NGOs may also make themselves accountable to some form of constitution – a statement of ‘aims and principles’. In theory this acts as a proxy agreement between the NGO and its donors, it being assumed that donors give money on the assumption that the NGO will act in accordance with the document. In practice accountability to a document is seldom audited and there are few sanctions for failing to follow it. Donors and documents do not always match and an NGO may end up having to make a hard choice between sticking to its aims and principles, and following the political whims of donors.

In practice, private donors have the considerable power in the relationship, being easily able to sanction NGOs for poor performance at no cost to themselves by withdrawing funding. However, they are usually poorly informed, having little access to independent assessment of aid effectiveness.

Government donors are even more powerful, being largely able to set the terms of relationships with both NGOs and aid recipients with little cost to the government should the relationship fail.

Aid recipients, on the other hand, are well-informed, seeing the effectiveness of aid, or the opposite, at first hand. However, they lack effective sanctions – any attempt to call an NGO to account is highly risky for them.

NGOs then, risk sanction by government or private donors if they are judged to be ineffective, but face very little risk by being judged ineffective by recipients, the very people who should hold the most power in the relationship.

So how can accountability to recipients be increased? Possibly the solution is not to change the way NGOs do things, but to largely remove rich-country NGOs from the equation.

Increasingly, communications technology makes it possible for donors to engage directly with communities of aid recipients. Trust is the sole ‘comparative advantage’ of rich-country NGOs, and a lack of it has prevented poor-country communities and NGOs receiving money from donors directly.

Donors have preferred to give money to organisations that they identify with – that reflect their own culture, speak their language, are staffed by people with educational qualifications they recognise and are subject to the laws of governments they are familiar with. They are hesitant to deal with people they know little about, in parts of the world they don’t understand, or just distrust people with different coloured skins.

Hopefully this is breaking down. There’s always been a smattering of small NGOs following a ‘solidarity’ model who do little more than raise funds to pass on to a trusted poor-country organisation. And more recently small NGOs based on personal contacts between people in rich and poor countries are emerging. Poor-county organisations are increasingly developing the public relations skills needed to placate the fears of rich-country donors and build the necessary trust.

This also requires rich-country NGOs to get out of the way or be willing to limit their role to ‘trust brokers’ representing and vouching for the integrity of recipient organisations.

And because they’ve been naughty, and President Obama is a very moral fellow, the government of Pakistan is only getting around 1.2 billion dollars from the United States this year (the other $800 million or so will be held over or might even be cancelled), whereas the millions of people in Somalia threatened by famine will get $43 million from the US this year.

US military aid to Pakistan deferred US response to famine in Somalia

Before I get accused of being ‘anti-American’, I should note that other countries which have recently supplied Pakistan with weapons include Britain, France, China, Belgium, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine, Russia, Turkey and Italy.

So given the Pakistani government’s record (which, by government standards, isn’t especially abominable), is this morally different to me, instead of giving money to the next worthy street collector I pass,  heading around to the local gang headquarters to drop off a load of sawn-off shotguns? (Because I’m a moral fellow, and they’ve been naughty, I won’t be handing over any grenade launchers this year.)

And unless somebody can point out a difference  (other than the local gang having no nuclear ambitions) the next time Obama or the leader of Britain or France or China or Belgium or Sweden et al stands up and speaks nice-sounding words about peace, development and prosperity, will the whole audience please roll on the ground shaking with uncontrollable laughter?

And if not, why not?

Making support for small farmers a priority is increasingly part of the development agenda, particularly in the light of the on-going food crisis. Oxfam’s Grow campaign follows the work of the Slow Food movement in valuing small farmers. Peasants have gone from being metaphors for poverty and backwardness to being praised as role models. Government aid has been slower to get on board, with NGO ONE International issuing a highly critical report saying governments haven’t followed-up on promised support to majority-world farmers.

Grow Campaign Slow Food One International report

Rather than the traditional development pattern of increasiing industrialisation, should a world largely comprised of small farmers be the major development goal?

For most of those able to make a free choice, small farming has been the most popular career choice for centuries. Haitians, freed from slavery, rejected plantation work and headed for the hills to live lives unencumbered by formal employment, taxation and the threat of conscription by the state. Christian anarchist Leo Tolstoy saw the peasant lifestyle as a model for his utopian society. Tolstoy’s often accused of idealising poverty, but the land-owning peasants were the ‘middle-class’ of Tsarist Russia, often living quite comfortable lives, unlike the landless serfs.

Many Pakeha colonists, hoped for a place where they could regain the freedom of their forbears, leaving industrialised of Britain to become yeomen in New Zealand, albeit at the expense of Maori. In Mexico the original Zapatistas of the 1910-20 revolution chose to reject the methods of the modern world and rebuild the cooperative farming systems of their ancestors.

Yale academic James C Scott, in The Art of Not Being Governed, suggests that the ‘hill tribes’ of South East Asia, rather than remnant cultures yet to be fully incorporated into organised states, are refugees from the burdens of citizenship. In all these cases, participation in an industrialising, developing nation was available, but was refused. For many, development on the usual model is still something to be feared and avoided.

The Art of Not Being Governed

The future of the small farmer isn’t all rosy, in Japan, a country built on small farms, farmers are increasingly elderly and many work their farms part-time. The reluctance of young people to take up farming worries many, who see farming as part of the soul of Japanese people (as expressed in the anime film Only Yesterday about a city worker who chooses to head to the countryside to work on an organic farm). But even here farming is celebrated – some people even pay money to take part in traditional rice harvests.

Economist article on Japanese rice farming Only Yesterday

Is proposing a model in which small farmers are predominate just rural romanticism? Or, given the increasing evidence of the ecological unsustainability of highly industrialised economies, should this be an aspiration for developed, as well as developing, countries? Rather than trying to make developing countries resemble ours, perhaps we should be meeting in the middle?