After being a secondary school teacher in East and West Africa for 11 years, and completing my Masters in Edinburgh University, in 1981 I applied for a British Council job in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and, as an afterthought, for another in Juba, Southern Sudan.
Arbitrarily, it seemed to me, simply because I had no school-age dependents and another candidate did, I was offered the job in Juba, which was a non-family duty station, and he was offered Dar es Salaam. This arbitrary decision dropped me for the first time, for good or for ill, into the front-line of the Aid World.
On paper, my task in Juba was to teach English in a new secondary school, while at the same time training English teachers in the University of Juba, using the school for teaching practice.
I did all that, but also found myself, with my indefatigable colleague George, developing the school from scratch. Since, when we arrived, the school had six small rooms and seven hundred designated pupils, with a head teacher who boasted he would get the numbers up to 3000, one of our first tasks was to expel students Followed shortly by having to request the bull-dozing of squatters’ housing nearby which was preventing the school from expanding.
I was also exposed for the first time to UN agencies, Non Governmental Organisations, to corruption and the vocabulary of Aid like ‘empowerment’, ‘sustainability’ and ‘community-based’. Not all of these words appeared at the same time of course; regular seminars were needed to freshen up the latest vocabulary
I gained friends and colleagues who did not work in the relatively predictable milieu of a school and who had a different perspective on the people, the society and the economy from any I had been exposed to before, one that characterised ‘the people I worked for’, such as the students I taught, as ‘Direct Beneficiaries’, the whole of the rest of the population being indirect beneficiaries in some mysterious way.
The people who were involved in the work were ‘stake-holders’. Aid workers seemed to navigate easily among donors, project managers and proposal writers – or play each of the roles at one time or another, and who, often at a remarkably early age, were handling large sums of money that a teacher could only dream of.
I met consultants who reported and validated multi-million dollar projects after a visit of just three hours, I came across people who rationalised this (which I had thought was just because Juba was a pretty unpleasant place to stay) with terms like ‘Rapid Appraisal’.
I had my first experience of corruption, of refugees and displaced people and of careerists focussing on getting it right in their agency but not necessarily getting it right for the people.
I was plunged into what I now call Acronymia – the incredible use of acronyms; interestingly, though, looking back, it seems we were spared one of the current curses of Aid, the endless seminars and workshops which have spawned their own protocols and language and even the delightful word ‘seminarista’ for someone who spends most of his time in seminars.
A refugee specialist attacked me in a book for applying to refugees the same admission standards as to the long-suffering ordinary people of South Sudan (and daring to disbelieve the refugees’ claims to have lost their documents, which would have shown how brilliant they were). When she then later proceeded to espouse a doctrine that it was acceptable for refugees to lie to get what they want, I started developing some of my own views on the subject. I began, maybe later than others, but perhaps with more perspective, to start to form and inform opinion, and eventually become one of those advisers and consultants I had been so dubious about.
I started asking some questions. I wondered why a cartoon book produced at huge expense promoting Life Skills choices for teenage girls was never stolen and sold in the market. Could it be that no one actually liked it or wanted it? After all dictionaries and science textbooks are stolen all the time from school libraries.
Why a hugely expensive AIDS campaign couldn’t change their roadside billboards even once in three years.
Why no one understood (it seemed to me) that everyone in an HIV/AIDS seminar will agree at three o’clock in the afternoon that behaviour change is desirable, but everyone knows that at midnight after a couple of beers things will be different.
I wondered why half a meeting could be taken up with detailed reporting on how many pencils an NGO had delivered to schools (and where one missing pencil had gone) but no one looked at the outcome of education, that is whether the children were learning anything.
When a consultant told me that my little refugee support set-up was biased towards boys I went into denial, until she pointed out that my staff were always telling people to ‘come back tomorrow’, something, in the rough life led by refugees in the city, a boy found much easier to do than a girl, since no one questioned his movements, and he had all day to kill.
Close contact through teaching practice supervision led me to understand that young men often drop out of teaching (having consoled themselves for a time with the school girls) because they are sent to – and left in - village schools, so that the teaching wives of civil servants can have the town jobs. They never get promoted and have no chance of making a bit of extra money by private tuition, in the village. No one, it seemed, had noticed this very powerful reality before.
When, for the umpteenth time, I was involved in training untrained volunteers to teach in IDP camps I wondered why there were never any teachers among the refugees, and I finally understood that people with salaries flee towards the salary, that is to the towns in their own country. It is only the poorest who flee to another country.
Then, in 2002, I myself had to flee on foot with the population from the volcano’s lava in Goma, and realised that the population looked after itself and families without external organisation or contingency plans; that indeed these might have made things worse. Further that the aid we gave after the volcano was not at all what the people wanted or needed at the time.
In this book I try to answer some of the questions that a new aid worker asks, in order to explain or put into perspective the vocabulary and practices of what has come to be known as the aid industry.
These are questions like:
If you give money to street children, do you get more street children?
If we respect people’s cultures, and their culture doesn’t want girls to go to school, where do we get the right to insist that girls should go to school from?
Is NGO and UN language necessary?
Where are the Togolese projects in Japan?
I AM A TEACHER
The main work I have done in Africa has been in education, but I have in more recent years done several managerial jobs, mainly in places regarded as fairly difficult, recently in South Sudan, Somalia and the East of D R Congo. Many of my examples will come, therefore, from education which hovers uneasily between emergency relief, rehabilitation and development.
Education is a problem for many agencies. If only we could simply inject children with mathematics as we do with various vaccines. Then we could have a national Mathematics Injection Weekend (MIW) and by Monday deal with a few resisting cases, then wash our hands of it until the SIW (Science Injection Weekend).
Hardly any agency can cope with projects which need to last more than a year. The field is littered with one year projects rarely followed up if ever. In Uganda, in the mid-nineties, there was an excellent effort to introduce HIV/AIDS into the primary school syllabuses. Books were printed and distributed and teachers given some training. Now ten years later these books have never been updated or reprinted but nothing else has really replaced them. Why, I asked, did UNICEF go into publishing in this case? A publisher would have had every interest in keeping the books up to date. UNESCO-PEER did a very good job in re-launching school textbook supply in Somalia, but did nothing to encourage local publishing.
I have spent the last three years working in the Congo for UN agencies. The greatly misnamed ‘Democratic Republic is a vast territory with a difficult past and a complicated present.
I worked in the East in areas held by rebels or under the control of militias, though usually just after the worst of the physical violence, in the ambiguous time called nowadays, post-conflict, which as others have pointed out, may actually be a worse time for ordinary people; the violence may well be continuing at local level, with a settling of scores, or ‘creating geographical facts’ even though a deal has been signed somewhere. The perpetrators of the violence and chaos are pursuing their own goals in big hotels in some faraway city while the victims have to live with, or die from, the lack of hospitals, drugs, simple security or good transport.
The deal which brought some kind of peace to Congo in 200X saw an unelected president (the son of another unelected president) remain in office surrounded by 4 vice-presidents, two of whom were rebel leaders with blood on their hands and a bloated cabinet made up of unelected representatives of most of the armed factions with some civil society representatives [redo].