We have all seen the pictures and heard sad music. The starving doll-eyed infant, the tents with big blue logos, the adolescent girl carrying a barrel of water on her head. The celebrity in the African classroom, the waving groups of children, the text begging you to please donate. For me, it always follows with a lump in my stomach.
Even though these aid advertisement claims to be for a good cause, they are disheartening. The portrayal of us versus the other, the saviour and the one in need of saving, the wealthy ‘west’ and the poor ‘third world country.’ An influential international aid organisation telling a story that is not theirs to tell.
Some argue that these practices and attitudes mirror a colonial era and its structural racism and reinforce the colonial dynamics of the ‘white saviour.’ Others say these humanitarian intervention methods were created in the first place to serve Eurocentric interests and its hierarchical worldview and commemorated to ensure that aid recipients stay less powerful than donors. Most agree that there is a need for a substantial shift in power dynamics.
These derogatory communication strategies often furthermore reflect aid organisations’ decision-making. In an article from 2019, the New Humanitarian reports that UN agencies and leading international NGOs often overshadow local aid organisations when a crisis hits, leading to top-down interventions with little to no knowledge of local needs, funding targeting non-necessities and local organisations struggling to survive. In 2020, 200 organisations, primarily from the Global South, wrote an open letter to international NGOs, pleading for a shift in power relations within the international aid- and development sector.
Later the same year, Danny Sriskandarajah, Chief Executive of Oxfam GB, published an article answering the open letter. Sriskandarajah discusses the importance of accountability and striving for positive change and promises changes within Oxfam’s strategies and operations to change power relations within the sector by ‘decolonising aid’. During the following years, other organisations, such as Plan International and Save the Children, would join the mission. But what does ‘decolonising aid’ entail? And what does it mean for the future of aid communication?
In my upcoming posts, we will dive deeper into the subject of decolonising aid to learn about its positive and negative aspects and how this approach could generate success for using ICTs for development.