AidSlut
23 Mar
You know what? Weeks like this one really make me feel dirty.
You wanna know why? Well, in a word, Japan.
Okay, it takes more than one word. I have nothing against Japan per se. Here’s my issue: The Japan Earthquake-and-subsequent-tsunami emergency response fundraising CF.
I don’t know a single actual aid worker who is in favor of mounting an international disaster response effort in Japan. And I’m not just saying that – we do talk to each other, across agency lines, about this kind of thing. But I know scores of marketers and fundraisers and donor reps who have spent the past week + with humanitarian blue-ball syndrome over the revenue potential of this spectacularly dramatic high-visibility disaster.
Not that aid workers know everything. But just so that we’re all clear:
Those who actually make their livings designing, implementing, monitoring, and evaluating humanitarian aid interventions say that a relief effort in Japan is somewhere between unnecessary and a bad idea. But…
We’re all still fundraising. “Our donors expect us to respond…” says the marketing department. Right – so this is all about the donors, then, is it?
Japan itself has said – repeatedly – that it wants only very specific kinds of support (search and rescue dog teams, for example, in the initial days), and in very limited quantities. This is one of the wealthiest, most technologically savvy, and generally most well-organized countries on the planet. Japan is a major contributor to disaster response in other countries through institutional donors like JICA and a full array of locally based HRI-affiliates. Japanese NGOs have valiantly tried to resist to onslaught of Western good will, but against all rational logic, we’ve insisted on “helping.”
Humanitarian aid is not broken so much as it has been prostituted. Despite the good that truly does get accomplished, accomplishing good is increasingly a back room function, a by-product of the industry’s core purpose which increasingly appears to be revenue-generation.
Japan is only the most recent example, but it’s a poignant one. I’m not even up-to-date on the statistics (too busy ranting), but last I read it was something like half a million people fleeing Abijan, but no one knows or seems to care. The poorest country on the Arabian peninsula – Yemen – is about to totally melt down, and when it does there will be massive and widespread humanitarian need. Don’t even get me started on eastern DR Congo and it’s unfathomably high average of something like 10,000 women raped per year since 2001. Or my old favorite – Afghanistan and the seeming impossibility of scraping together a few measly tens of thousands of USD for disaster risk reduction. Real humanitarian need, for all practical purposes being ignored. “We can’t raise money for conflicts”, say the marketing departments.
And yet the good-hearted people of America have become convinced that the country which gives us Toyota, Nikon, Playstation III, that came very close to kicking our asses in WWII, and that almost owns us economically as it is, is somehow in dire need of our $10 donations (and apparently socks).
Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.
I swear. Some days we’re such AidSluts.
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Tags: accountability, Japan, ranting, WTF?
- Comments 10 Comments
- Categories It's not about us, Rants, WTF?
- Author J.
