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Amongst the many drivers of aid and charity work is compassion. Perhaps most people would regard this as a force for the good. Many might regard compassion as a defining feature of humanity. Compassion implies a certain amount of empathy with other human beings -- it allows people to understand both the achievement of happiness and the torments of suffering. It is, after all, natural for most people to know that they have helped others achieve happiness or to alleviate suffering. Indeed some have even based entire philosophies around compassion as being of central importance.
This is not the place to explore the variety of factors that lead to compassion, nor perhaps the desire for self-congratulation or self-interest that might go with expressions of compassion. Confucius exhausted that line of thought thousands of years ago. Nor is there much need to analyse individual acts of compassion that occur daily in families, workplaces and communities around the world.
However, reflection on what happens when someone acts out of compassion can reveal a lot about the hypocrisies that arise when we use agencies act on our wish to be compassionate.
If you think about the times you have acted out of compassion, it might help to think why you selected that particular person or group for your attention rather than another with a similar plight. You might also want to think about the extent to which people followed suggestions you made or advice you provided. To what extent have you made decisions about those who are worthy of your compassion and those who are not?
If you follow this line of question and thought you may quickly come to realise that acts of compassion are rarely if ever straightforward. People are selected for compassion on the basis of your feelings about their worthiness. You will often want to ensure that whatever you have provided is followed or used. You might even want some expression of gratitude.
These acts of selection and control are quite often manageable when they are carried out directly by you. They become far more problematic when agencies act on your behalf.
Aid agencies are based on and actively feed compassion. No bad thing in itself, maybe. However it is easy to understand that the selection of objects of compassion (individuals, categories of people, those with particular illnesses) leads automatically to the exclusion of others, and to the requirement that these selected objects respond in the appropriate and defined way.
Assessment of such programmes therefore brings with it the necessity to demonstrate the response of these objects of compassion, and the more you can show they have done so, the more your work will be supported, and the more the donors will feel they have done the right thing.
It is therefore unsurprising that aid agencies go for the easy option -- find those who are most compliant and able to follow the requirements of the programme and measure their success in doing so. It is even better for the agency if it can merely advocate for change rather than do something about it since this distances it from the responsibility of achievement and therefore absolves it from blame if the changes do not come to pass.
These are some of the varieties of the manipulation of compassion and the need to feed compassion that drives much aid and charity work.
What has this to do with the Poor-Poor Divide?
In short, everything. It is far easier for agencies to feed the simplistic story of a rich-poor divide than for it to explore the enormous complexities of the day-to-day local human forces that shape people's lives with great immediacy and impact. To look at these forces requires an acknowledgement that money is not always the answer; that provision of technologies or services can play only a supportive role; and that exploitation, greed, competition, lust and other various dark forces have strong roles at every level of society. It requires deep understanding of local societies and their interactions at every level. It requires acknowledgement that no single agency can by itself resolve the myriad and intertwined complex human problems that lead to suffering and ill health.
Agencies themselves are trapped by the need to feed their supporters and donors with the idea that their particular agency can achieve all that is wanted. Without such claims their funding would dry up. And so they have to keep on finding new images of success together with vague evaluations that give the appearance of success. The major donors are complicit in this as they themselves want to give the appearance that they have the power to change things and to fund success. The result is an aid industry that makes grandiose claims for extremely short term projects (5 years or so) which are supposed to find innovative solutions to problems it already knows are unlikely to go away.
How can you act in the face of such cynical thinking?
In fact the answer is easy for those who are funded in such projects. It all depends on how you use the time allotted. Nobody will stop you from doing your own local explorations. You can always review the complexities you find with your supporters and donors. Above all, you can spend time finding out about those who do not benefit from your work and why. You can encourage all the workers of the project to explore this with you. Apart from anything else it will make them more interested in the work, give them greater responsibility and make them feel they are being listened to. Then think about the extent to which you can modify the programme so that it becomes just a little bit more relevant to those who do not benefit.
The steps required may be as simple as orienting community-based workers to the situations of the under-supported (a term more fully explored in the page about the Poor-Poor Divide in Northern Nigeria). These workers may then work with them to assess their home situations and ways of integration with other community support systems. It may also require orienting local service providers to the problems faced by those who are frightened or shy of their services (something that is explored more fully in the page on 'Do Health Workers really need training in Communication?').
It will also require evaluation and monitoring systems that include a full appraisal of the situations of those who do not benefit from aid programmes or services that are provided.
There is nothing hard or complex about doing this. The steps required do not take much more effort or cost.
The only thing needed is the will to do it.
Tony Klouda