An overview of my previous blogposts and reflections on the blogging experience

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Phots: neONBRAND/Unsplash

During these last six weeks I have, together with four my fellow students, been posting weekly blogposts. It has been a part of an assignment in our studies in communication for development. It was a very different assignment from what I am used to, and it has been both challenging and a learning experience. With this blog we wanted to create a platform for a younger audience with an interest in, but none or very little experience of, the aid industry and volunteering. Our hope was to be a positive influence for young people who are thinking of embarking on the volunteering path.

In this, my fifth and final blog post, I will elaborate  on my prior blogposts and discuss how they relate to theme of the blog and to how they relate to current and academic debates. This will be a good way to say goodbye to the readers and to summarize my blogging experience.

The white gaze in development

My first blog post, Thinking of Taking a Gap Year Abroad- Read this first was the first individual blogpost to start of the blog. It felt appropriate to start with a post so clearly directed to our imagined audience of younger people ready to embark on the volunteering journey.  With this post I wanted to make the reader question their own intentions of going abroad to volunteer and challenge the way they perceive development and developing countries but also encourage the reader to do proper research before. By pointing out that volunteering and development work is not something that only can be done in the Global South by people from the Global North I drew parallels to the concept of the White Gaze in development work. The White Gaze is not a completely new term in development studies. Recently, the Liberian scholar Robtel Neajai Pailey has pointed out that the way in most of us, including institutions and development organizations, understand development (in which Western whiteness and the standards of the Global North is held as the epiphany of progress and expertise) is deeply rooted in a history of slavery, colonialism and imperialism. This history has created a notion of whiteness and Western ideals as the height of advancement and as the end goal of development work, a notion that she argues has been internalized by the Global South to a large extent. She makes the argument that the “colorblindness”  and the deliberate absence of race in development theory and scholarly discourse is dangerous and prevents Western  development practitioners from being held accountable for the power, privilege and inequality that comes from “whiteness” (Pailey 2019, pp.730). With the concept of the White Gaze in mind the White Savior Complex, that my first blog post also touched upon becomes much easier to understand. The term White Savior describes white people who acts to help non-white people in a thoughtless and self-serving manner. Their actions often stem from an honest wish to do good, but the execution is simply reproducing colonial and racist discourses on the superiority of whiteness and Western ideals and the helplessness of the non-white Global South (nomorewhitesaviors.org). One of the many ways White Saviorism can express itself is through voluntourism, that is the occurence of individuals from the Global North travelling to the Global South to volunteer, often performing tasks that they are not qualified to do, combining a vacation or a summer holiday abroad with participation in a development project. Sometimes feeding in to the dark side of the volunteer industry in which scrupulous organizations take advantage of the naivety of volunteers to make a profit, trafficking people into misery to create money making volunteer projects (Cole 2012).

ICT for development

The second blog post, Menstruation – Fighting the Taboo described how grassroots in India are using ICT to provoke change in the traditional and deeply misogynist beliefs surrounding menstruation in the country. The subject of the post felt relevant both relating to the theme of the blog and to the course as it addresses the communication of development and the use of ICT for development and female emancipation. The examples I used was Menstrupedia, #Happytoblead and Men4Menstruation. It was important for me to highlight local forces to show, and reference back to the first blogpost, that development work can (and most often is) be local, without the influence of the White Gaze and “experts” from the Global North. The three examples also illustrate some of the different forms  that development communication can take, and how ICT can be used as a driver for change. Menstrupedia is an online platform dedicated to sharing information about menstruation to young girls,  an encyclopedia on menstruation if you will. They provide teaching material on the subject for schools as well as private individuals. #Happytoblead is an example, that actually predates #metoo as it was launched in 2015, of how private individuals can take to social media to create awareness and hopefully change with a simple hashtag. The Men4Menstruation is an example of how the use of social media can be one of several components in a multi-channel development campaign.

The use of ICT to promote gender equality and drive female empowerment is frequently discussed both in academia and in popular culture. In 2018 the academic journal Gender and Development published a whole issue dedicated to the topic (2018 volume 26) in which they covered topics as diverse as women’s empowerment in Afghanistan, fighting gender based violence in Bolivia and changing gendered online relationships in India, all with the common denominator ICT for development. The main conclusion that the above mentioned articles have in common is that they stress the importance of ICT as a vital tool to promote gender equality and fight gender based violence (O’Donnel & Sweetman, 2018)

The actual impact of ICT for development have been questioned as it cannot easily be conceptualized into a neat “cause and effect chain” or quantified in a simple way using economic targets. To understand and measure the impact of ICT for development we should, Kleine argues in her article ICT4WHAT?, move away from an understanding of development as an exclusively economic process and put more focus to the expansion of personal freedom and the capability to make individual choices. Measuring these outcomes will according to Kleine give a better understanding of the actual impact of ICT in development (Kleine, 2010, 687ff). With this more holistic definition of development it is hard to deny the importance of ICT in the development process and the difference it is making for women around the world.

Sexual abuse in the aid industry and what to do about it

My third blog post, Can ICT tackle sexual abuse in the aid industry was inspired by the news that broke on September 29th this year about the allegations of sexual exploitation and abuse of power during the Ebola crisis response in the DRC where over fifty women came forward claiming that they had been pressured for sex both to get or keep employment and to receive treatment (Flummerfelt & Peyton, 2019). The blogpost was both about the occurrence of different forms of sexual exploitation in the aid industry and the debate around the role of ICT when it comes to work against the structures and the cultures that allow these violations to be committed over and over again.

Reports on sexual abuse in the aid industry are far from a new phenomena. According to a report commissioned by the House of Commons it has a documented history dating back twenty years and it has been widely known within the aid industry for at least just as long. Nevertheless it has been going on with little or no consequence for the perpetrators (House of commons 2018 p.8) Rather, reporting on the crimes has often led to whistleblowers being penalized like the staffer who reported on the sex trafficking scandal during the peacekeeping mission in Bosnia in the nineties who initially lost her job (dw.com) (House of commons 2018 p.8ff).

The awareness of sexual abuse in the aid industry and the debate surrounding it, together with initiatives to stop it, has had a big breakthrough in the aid industry and in the general public sphere since the #metoo movement and the following #aidtoo movement emerged in 2017. The public outrage in response to the Oxfam scandal back in 2018, in which it was revealed that senior Oxfam staff had, during the Haiti earthquake response in 2010, paid survivors for sex and that the organization had tried to cover it up (bbc.com) has most likely also contributed to the willingness to put the sexual abuse on the agenda.

The new found attention to the matter has brought on several initiatives to come to an end with the systemic sexual abuse in the aid industry. One of them being the Safeguard Summit in 2018 dedicated solely to the work against the abuse(Parker 2018). One of the solutions presented by the DFID during summit was Project Soteria, an online platform for aid organizations to access criminal records of the applicants for aid work positions. Both the summit and the project were widely criticized for the lack of inclusion and the failure to understand that what is needed to end sexual abuse in the aid industry is not a new ICT tool but systemic change of the culture within aid organizations (Parker 2018). A positive development in all this is however that more victims are speaking up. The emergence of a call out culture such as #aidtoo an with large aid organizations vowing to investigate claims and bring justice to victims have inspired more people to come forward (Taylor, 2019)

What is the root to the widespread sexual exploitation in the aid industry? First of all, abuse of power and sexual exploitation is prevalent in all spheres of society. Therefore, an assumption that the aid industry would be different is not  a realistic one, even though one might naively think that people whose profession is to help people in need would have a stronger moral compass.  In many of the developing countries, where aid organizations are active and these violations are committed, violence against women is endemic and the prevalence of human trafficking is widespread which means there are opportunities for predators that they might not have encountered in another setting (House of commons 2018 p.4f) Then there is the enormous power imbalance between the (usually, but not always) white male aid worker from the Global North and the (usually, but not always) local female who is depending on the goodwill of the aid worker either to receive the aid that she is in fact entitled to (House of Commons 2018 p.77ff). There is also a racial dimension to it that shouldn’t be ignored as the majority of the victims are non-white and the majority of the perpetrator’s are white male acting out in developing countries (Bruce-Raeburn 2018). I therefore believe that part of the explanation can be found in the White Gaze and the othering of non-white people. Another key factor to the repeated occurrence of sexual exploitation in the aid industry is deemed to be lack of accountability for perpetrators.

I elaborated on the issue of lack of accountability in my forth blog post, The Code Blue Campaign – Bringing accountability to the aid industry, by highlighting the Blue Campaign which is an initiative by the Aidsfree World organization lobbying to bring accountability to the aid industry in general and the UN peacekeeping mission in particular. They are calling for an end of, what they perceive as, the misuse of the immunity clause when UN employees commit sexual crimes in service and the establishment of an independent special court mechanism with independently appointed staff to rule in cases of sexual misconduct (codebluecampaign.com).

Concluding reflections

We have been asked to conclude this blogpost with some finishing thoughts on what this assignment has meant for our personal learning and reflections on how it fits in to our academic and professional writing practices.

As a government employee working with public administration for a state agency, mainly communicating directly with private individuals or other state agencies and my main writing practice being to communicate decisions based on administrative law, the form of writing I have practiced in this assignment is not directly related to my current professional writing practices. It is however, very much related to the next professional step I want to take within the organization which is working with the agency’s public and internal communication. This exercise has been a great opportunity to practice both a style of writing that is more accessible to the general public and less bound by academic writing rules or rules the rules set by public administration laws. It has been both stimulating and challenging to decide and research on topics to write about on the blog, taking into consideration that they should be of relevance both to the theme of the blog and to the overall theme of the course. Knowing that my writings are available to anyone and everyone added an extra layer of self-criticism that for me slowed down the writing process. At the same time as it has been very challenging, it has been a great opportunity to get experience in working with WordPress which is often a requirement when you seek employment in communication roles. WordPress as a tool was much more difficult to use than I had imagined, even though I understand that it is one of the more user friendly programs. The experience has given me an understanding of the actual work that is put behind online development communication.

 

References

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