Right from the start, assistance programs identify and categorize a “target group” – refugees, internally displaced people (IDPs), rural poor, pregnant and lactating women (PLWs), unemployed urban youth, people without iPhones (PWIs) – a process which inadvertently strips them of their dignity and personhood. From the standpoint of NGOs and development agencies, becoming an aid recipient transforms people into infant-like beings in need of total re-socialisation. And we are instructed to measure their progress towards supposed markers of civilization.
The “innovation” of cash assistance is one of the best examples of how operating within an international development framework suspends common sense. The aid world has deemed it “revolutionary” and lauded the success of cash transfer programs, which essentially give poor people (ie people who have little or no money) money. To the astonishment of development practitioners and economists alike, aid recipients could figure out how to use the money to feed their families, send their children to school, buy household items and medicine.
The real revolution was not that cash transfers worked since most people – even in the poorest countries and most dire settings – have interacted with cash before. The real shift was that letting out the tight leash of restrictive, in-kind, conditional assistance restored some agency back to our “target beneficiaries”. It was a rare moment when we, as aid workers and development professionals, were forced to come face-to-face with the fact that the vulnerable and disadvantaged groups we work with are regular people. Yet I cannot emphasize how often we forget and unconsciously blame poor people rather than circumstances for their poverty.
It’s a dangerous path, which allows us to rationalize that anything – even ineffective, paternalistic assistance – is better than nothing. We forget that a belief that all people are entitled to certain standards of dignity and rights is what drew us to this sector in the first place.
We have become so myopically focused on toggling arbitrary indicators, framing our projects around the buzzwords of tomorrow and proving impact to donors, that we have lost our sense of reference.
We celebrate signs of progress when people are living on $2 a day rather than $1 a day, and when people build slum houses with metal rather than thatched rooftops.
Have the lofty ideals of development to reduce global inequality and give all people a decent quality of life been abandoned in pursuit of making the very, very poor only very poor? The bar for success has been lowered so far, I’m afraid all of us in the aid sector just walk right over it. And in doing so, we have side-stepped our humanitarian calling.
Reference:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/hope-life-secret-aid-worker-ashraful-muku?trk=v-feed&lipi=urn%3Ali%3Apage%3Ad_flagship3_feed%3Bt6zjUyF%2Fod8ScjLFtgPPQg%3D%3D
