the Africa they Never show You

by Sarah Mukasa

Philanthropy in Africa has become an area of increasing interest in the past 10 or more years. A key focus for interrogation is the manifestation of philanthropy in the African context – its areas of strength and weakness. Another is how to build on the traditions of philanthropy in Africa to attain stronger institutional processes that scale up localized forms of giving and ground these in principles of social justice, equality, peace and sustainable development. Africans are challenging the notion that Africa is purely a ‘donor recipient’ continent and instead are pointing to the rich traditions of giving and philanthropic practice in Africa – which in many instances have been the mainstay of entire communities.

Whilst it is known that philanthropy is an age-old practice in Africa, there is little recognition of the contributions it has made in developing and sustaining communities.  In Africa today, much of the giving takes place in familial and informal community networks responding often to immediate/ welfare concerns. Burial societies, individual support to the payment of school fees and, building of community facilities are examples of philanthropy that can be found in many variations on the continent. Religious organizing has also formed a critical avenue for much of the more formal and institutionalised mechanisms for philanthropy, with programmes driven by local actors providing a range of services including education, health services and feeding programmes.

More recently, a number of African philanthropic actors and organisations seeking to address social, economic and political inequalities and disparities have emerged. In addition there has been an increase in the number of high net worth individuals in Africa establishing their own, more formalised philanthropic initiatives and organizations. At the same time, the private and corporate sectors in Africa are increasingly developing corporate responsibility programmes. These developments have raised the visibility of philanthropy in Africa, highlighting its critical role in our societies and communities. Initiatives such as the African Grantmakers Network- a network developed by African grant makers to promote and strengthen philanthropy in Africa- are testament to the shifts in thinking and organisation on the continent. Increasingly Africans on the continent and elsewhere are seeking to make a difference as collaborative and organised donors to the kinds of change they wish to see.

This is both evident and urgent within the feminist movement. The role of women within the growing field of philanthropy in Africa- their contributions, successes and challenges – remain largely undocumented and unrecognised. Yet the establishment of organizations such as the African Women’s Development Fund and Urgent Action Fund –Africa amongst others, has concretised the central nature of African women’s participation and influence in philanthropy, especially social justice philanthropy.

Within the feminist movement, there is a growing body of thought on the need for us as women to fund our own movements. This partly reflects an increasing unease with external donor practice in support of short term, project based approaches- which do initiate some change, but which are in the long term difficult to sustain, since often they can only address symptoms, and not root causes. Mounting pressure  to demonstrate immediate results or face the risk of losing funding has driven many to develop projects that are all SMART but have little in the way of substance and relevance.  

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(Source: awdf.org)

By John Vidal

A massive drought, as if out of nowhere, has settled over the Horn of Africa and the people fleeing to the camps are said to be ‘climate’, ‘drought’ or ‘environmental’ refugees. The land, we are told by the international agencies rushing relief to the region, can no longer support its people.

Fifty or so years ago, the region had regular 10-year climatic cycles which were mostly followed by a major drought, and now the droughts are coming more frequently and are lasting longer.

In the 1970s, say the pastoralists — the nomadic herders who move their cattle ceaselessly across the region in search of pasture — they started having droughts every seven years; in the 1980s they came about every five years and in the 1990s every two or three. Since 2000 there have been three major droughts and several dry spells, this one being not the worst, just the latest.

There is also no doubt that climate change will make these areas of Africa harder to live in future. But to pin this crisis on drought or climate change is wrong. This is an entirely predictable, traditional, man-made disaster, with little new about it except the numbers of people on the move and perhaps the numbers of children dying near the cameras. The 10 million people who the governments warn are at risk of famine this year are the same 10 million who have clung on in the region through the last four droughts and were mostly being kept alive by feeding programmes.

The fleeing Somalis are the same people the UN warned about in 2008 when it said that one in six were at risk of starvation. Josette Sheeran, head of the UN’s world food programme, appealed for $300 million (Dh1.1 billion) emergency aid last week — just as she did in 2008 when she told of “a silent tsunami [of hunger] gathering”. And the same governments who were slow to respond to the emergency then are the ones who have been unwilling to help now.

Nor was the crisis unexpected. The rains failed early this year in Kenya and Ethiopia, and there has been next to none for two years now in Somalia. Aid agencies and governments have known for almost a year that food would run out by now. But it is only now, when the children begin to die and the cattle have been sold or died that the global humanitarian machine has moved in, with its TV shows, appeals and celebrities.

Insidious war

Just as in 2008, the war in Somalia is primarily responsible for the worst that is happening. As Simon Levine of the Overseas Development Institute says: “Wars don’t kill many people directly but can kill millions through the way they render them totally vulnerable to the kinds of problems they should be able to cope with.” In this case, he says, people have lost all their assets and can’t access grazing grounds they need. But remember too, that Somalia has been made a war zone by the US-led ‘war on terror’. It’s our fault as much as anyone’s.

But another, more insidious war has also been taking place across the region. This one is being waged by governments and businesses against the pastoralists. Over the years, they have been steadily marginalised and discriminated against by Ugandan, Kenyan and Ethiopian governments, and now they are further jeopardised by large-scale farming, the expansion of national parks and game reserves and conservation.

For the politicians in Lusaka, Nairobi or Addis Ababa, the lifestyle of these people seems archaic and outmoded. They are said to be outside mainstream national development, and to be pursuing a way of life that is in crisis and decline. So the politicians think little of taking away their dry season grazing grounds or blocking their traditional routes to pasture land. However, as seen in major international studies, the pastoralists produce more and better quality meat and generate more cash per hectare than ‘modern’ Australian and US ranches.

Instead of starving the region’s people of funds and then picking up the pieces in the bad years, Britain, the EU, the US and Japan must help people adapt to the hotter, drier conditions they face. With better pumps and boreholes, better vaccination of cattle, help with education, food storage and transport, people can live well again.

This emergency will cost the West around $400 million. If this money was put into long-term development instead of emergency aid and feeding programmes that keep people just above starvation, this tragedy could have been avoided.

by Koert Lindijer

 Messages are flowing through screechy walkie talkies at Kenya’s Dadaab refugee camp. “Would you mind showing the Dutch minister’s contingent around?” one United Nations aid worker asks another. “Sorry, I’m busy with CNN and then have to help a group from the BBC,” comes the shrill-sounding reply.

It’s a busy time for the aid workers at Dadaab, as dignitaries and journalists have started flocking to the area to follow events in what the UN has described as “the largest refugee camp in the world and the worst drought in half a century in the Horn of Africa.” The World Food Programme and the UN have officially declared a famine in the affected region of Somalia and credited it with emergency status.

Malnourished children

For months now, Kenyan media have been highlighting the food crisis, malnourished children and desperate nomadic tribes. Dadaab camp, set on semi-arid plains, was built in 1991 at the outbreak of civil war in Somalia. When the fighting intensified, hundreds of thousands of people fled to the camp, returning home when the conflict died down. It was meant to house 90,000 people, but it’s expected to hold some 400,000 refugees soon.

Dadaab is like a gigantic village. At the market, camels are sold at high prices; in shops on the dusty main street, credit is offered for mobile phones; and the mild drug miraa - a plant whose fresh leaves and soft twigs are chewed to release a juice containing cathine, which affects the user’s mood - is widely available. Many refugees live in a kind of tropical igloo, round huts for nomads, just like they do in the bush.

A worthy cause

Humanitarian workers have managed to galvanise the press into highlighting the full scale of the catastrophe. Ministers feel they have to join in to help the cause. “There’s a humanitarian disaster going on right here,” said Minister Knapen while in Dadaab.

“One in eight children is undernourished, a real emergency situation. That message has to get through to Dutch people. And the UN and other aid organisations need more capacity, because lots more Somali refugees will continue to arrive in Dadaab.”

‘Famine pornography’

There’s a certain cynicism in some circles regarding the lack of respect shown by the media and politicians towards victims of disasters. The term “famine pornography” has been dropped as the media binge on pictures of the dying.

But the aid industry’s panicked calls for help are also understandable, especially when so many of the victims live in remote areas, further isolated by war. The militant group al-Shabaab, which controls many southern and central areas of Somalia, only lifted its ban on humanitarian agencies last week.

Songabo Mohamed is one of the more than one thousand Somali refugees arriving in Kenya each day. “Somalia is your motherland and that’s where you’ll die,” she was told by members of al-Shabaab when she tried to flee south Somalia.

Fatten the terrorists

Will the Netherlands donate money to areas under the control of al-Shabaab? “That’s out of the question,” exclaims Minister Knapen, “we cannot subsidise terrorists.” But the UN made its first aid delivery to Baidoa last weekend, an area controlled by al-Shabaab.

“Foreign aid groups will have to monitor the deliveries - we have to reach the poorest and the worst affected, not fatten the terrorists.”

“Just dreadful”

In Dadaab, a weakened woman carrying a pile of mats and jerry cans on her head collapses. Women with emaciated and exhausted babies stand in long queues at a food distribution point. For Minister Knapen, the statistics are real people.

“Did you see that haggard old woman there? What’s happening here is just dreadful.”

Minister Knapen says he is determined to continue passing on his message, even after his visit to this tragic refugee camp.

If I was to ever teach a course in humanitarian principles and action, it would go something like this:

Lesson #1. Aid cannot and will not fix anything.

One of the most important lessons that we’ve never really learned is that, in fact, aid does not fix anything. This is most likely a difficult one for you to wrap your head around. It certainly was for me, and I only managed it after of several years in the humanitarian aid world. Aid cannot and will not fix anything.

You wouldn’t know this from reading NGO promotional material. Actually, I would say that in general it is probably not a good idea to try to learn about or understand humanitarian work by reading stuff published by NGOs, because NGOs, for a long list of complicated reasons that I won’t go into right now, have very little (basically zero) motivation for telling anyone this particular truth. This particular truth being, specifically, that they cannot fix poverty. NGOs cannot eradicate hunger. NGOs cannot stop human trafficking. NGOs cannot and will not transform communities, empower the marginalized, stop climate change, or educate the global illiterate…

It is important to understand that this is true whether we’re talking about socially conscious grad students starting causes on Facebook, a small new-kid-on-the-aid-block NGO whose marketing shtick is that they “cut through the red tape and get it done”, or a huge global household charity with a gazillion dollars in annual revenue, massive programs and a long list of impressively titled publications. Aid cannot and will not fix anything.

We (inside the industry) have allowed ourselves believe and then sold to our constituents (our donors, those outside the industry…) a fiction about what we can actually do. Although we rarely say it directly in so many words, the implication is clear: To hear us tell it, you would think that we can fix anything.  And we’ve sold this fiction so well that now when we fail to fix things, it comes back to bite us. The media gets mad. Ordinary citizens get mad. We get cynical and disillusioned.

We’ve drunk our own Kool-Aid, we believe our own propaganda, and then when the harsh reality sets in and it’s disconcerting. We’ve allowed ourselves to believe that our structures and our systems, our warehouses and our team houses, our fleets of white SUVs and our armies of volunteers will “fix” Tsunamiland or post-Katrina Louisiana or Port-au-Prince. We look at our own annual reports and those numbers look really big. Our annual budget number, the numbers of “beneficiaries”, the numbers of NFI kits distributed or MT of food handed out, the number of mothers who give birth with the help of a trained midwife or the number of pairs of shoes sent overseas feel really… well,significant. We begin to feel as if we can do more than we actually can, and we believe that we have done more than we actually have.

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