What to do about those who are
disliked,hated and excluded?

My work over the last four decades with international aid agencies has consisted mostly in trying to live up to the expectation that their programmes would fulfil their stated goal of reducing suffering and reaching the neediest. I have great ambivalence about this work. On the one hand I eventually found a way to do the work honestly and with good results.

However this was against the continued background of the failure of both government and aid agencies to get even near to their goals. My journey through thought, documenting how I found both failure and success, is found in the 'Travels through Work and Thought' page on this site. You will also be able to download that article if you want to use it for your own reflections about your experiences of being compassionate or working with aid agencies.

In general, although that article is very broad, the problem I have struggled with has always been how to adapt services to those who suffer disproportionately.

Selective compassion

An essential problem with providing or supporting aid for others is what to do about those who are disliked or hated and excluded. When I say ‘disliked’, I don’t just mean those temporarily disliked, due to an argument or misunderstanding but those against whom there is deep prejudice so much that they are refused all support and compassion. Such people could be members of your family, of your community, of your colour, race, creed, or profession. They could include wider groups or types of people: robbers, insurgents, government supporters, or those with a certain sexuality, gender, colour or creed.

Two levels of the problem

There are two levels to this problem: that of the local people who exclude others directly, and that of the people who provide or support aid in the name of the suffering of others.

In all cases it will be clear that when you have compassion, when you want to support people (for example by doing so personally or through an agency that proclaims your own compassions) you will be doing so selectively, especially when you know you have the backing of others in your society, family, group or agency.

Naturally people have every right to be selective in this way. After all people can’t help everyone who would like support. Aid agencies feed on this selective compassion, and are peopled by those who also have, in varying degrees, the same pre-dispositions to support particular types of person. Some will proclaim support for individuals (save this named child, save this tiger, save this disabled person). Some will make wider claims, such as ‘we support the poorest’, ‘we support women’s rights’, ‘we support the disabled’.

When they make these wider claims, they (and those who support them) are led into what amounts to a smudging of the truth, or even some hypocrisy.

What aid agencies ignore

The question that no aid agency would like to answer, and never raises, is whether all those in the wider categories need support. Any probe will show that indeed not all in the group supposedly supported requires this support. When agencies are probed about this, they will make the defence that those who don’t require support in such and such a group will be in a minority and that the overall benefit of their support is more important.

Unfortunately this is not necessarily the case, even amongst what could be considered to be the poorest communities.

I have served nearly 40 years working for a variety of aid agencies (non-governmental, governmental, bilateral, and UN) and most of that time has been working with, for and in communities that most people would include under the category of ‘the poorest’, ‘the most under-supported’. Right from the start I was impressed about the fact that it is only some individuals or families within such communities who have the greatest burden of ill health (mental and physical), death, or the capacity to survive and protect themselves. Many, even the majority will lead fulfilling lives, even though they may chafe at political or wealth inequalities.

There are, of course, those who benefit from aid, from increased services such as health centres, agricultural inputs and social activity. Such efforts are useful and should continue. However, the beneficiaries tend be those who are already most supported by families or their communities. There always remains a small hub that never seems to benefit.

Does this matter?

Does this matter, when it appears on the surface that the majority benefit from the support?

Well, yes. It matters greatly. Whenever I have carried out surveys amongst groups of villages with the same characteristics of wealth, religion and culture, I have found that a minority (around 9-15% of women) suffer the great majority of child deaths while a majority continue to have no child deaths. The reason for the skew is that those women suffering the majority of deaths have multiple child deaths, thus exaggerating the difference. It is this minority that fails to attend or benefit from provided services. This is a well-known phenomenon found in many demographic surveys in all types of population throughout the world over the last 150 years.

When I have studied this phenomenon further, I have found that those individuals suffering the majority of child deaths are also those who have the least voice in a community or in their family. They are not only under-supported and neglected by others, they are actively discouraged or prevented from interaction with others, including the services provided. It is these people who also self-isolate and suffer the mental health problems that lead to further self-neglect.

I have dozens of examples of this phenomenon. One of the first I came across was in my first year in Tanzania, in 1980. I was at a village on the slopes of Kilimanjaro when I came across a woman with an ill child. 

Everyone already knows this truth

Everyone who has any knowledge of human interactions will already know this phenomenon. It is, after all, well described in stories, songs, films, plays, and novels. It has been described for thousands of years by a variety of poets, writers and artists.

In the poorest societies (those with the least resources and support from outside) the discrepancy between those who are supported and those who are not results from the way in which support is provided. When you have the least resources or support as a community, individuals depend highly on obeying and promoting the social norms. This is a form of the ‘moral economy’ where benefits depend on the correct fulfilment of obligations to others. When these obligations are unfulfilled, the individuals who fail are denied the benefits of support from others. The reason for the failure can be as trivial as a family dispute over inheritance, a personality trait, or it can be more severe (as in theft, fraud or greed). Whatever the reason, those people suffer.

This should come as no surprise. We all know, even from personal experience, that this happens. And yet it is a problem that has yet to be acknowledged by the aid industry. I have spent decades writing papers, giving speeches at major conferences, providing evidence from surveys about the continuing problem of this skew of difficulties that remains. Yet no agency has yet taken up the challenge of responding to it.

This is why I said at the beginning “An essential problem with providing or supporting aid for others is what to do about those who are disliked or hated”.

A different approach is required

To deal with the problem would require a totally different approach by aid agencies whether governmental or non-governmental. It would require close cooperation with other agencies, more time in looking at supportive environments, better supervision and training of those employed by services and agencies. Existing programmes need to be modified to include such a focus

These changes are unlikely to occur given the way in which aid is financed, with tightly controlled budgets and the needs of agencies to advertise their own individual successes, which are confirmed by thoroughly biased evaluations.

A good example of the avoidance of any poor evaluations that come their way is my own experience just a few years ago of an evaluation I was called to do in the north of Bangladesh. It was a project supposedly for the promotion of girl’s rights. I was told to do my worst. So accordingly I carried out a set of surveys over a number of the villages targeted and compared with other villages. It soon emerged that the only girls benefiting were from well-supported households and who were already supported by their families to be independent-minded. The girls who did not attend the groups and meetings promoted by the project either were held back by their families or thought ‘those meetings are not for the like of us’. I duly reported this clearcut finding, and it was promptly suppressed on the grounds that it could not be shown to the funding agency which expected an evaluation that showed a good impact.

I write this as I continue to plead for acknowledgement of the issue, to keep the awareness alive in case some future agency or aid worker would like to continue to explore the potential answers, and to beg for the promotion of really analytical evaluations.

It is about this that I have compiled the essays and papers on this website ‘The Poor-Poor Divide’, which I hope can be appreciated in this context.

Tony Klouda

29th April 2021