A Day Without Dignity

I am sorry that I have been rather quiet this week, unlike some people I don't have a good excuse, however I have been eagerly following the A Day Without Dignity Campaign over at Good Intentions Are Not Enough.

Every year TOMS shoes encourages people to go A Day Without Shoes, that day is today, 5 April, to raise  awareness about the plight of the shoeless poor. Of course this has the side effect of being good publicity for TOMS, who promise to donate a pair of shoes to a child in need for every $80 pair you buy from them.

While this might seem like a good idea at first glance, it doesn't take much more than a glance to realise this is a great example of bad aid. Why? The three Ds:

• Donor driven: rather than asking communities what they need, this is a campaign driven by a shoe manufacture... shoes are rarely high on the list of needs
• Demeaning: as hinted by the title of A Day Without Dignity, people want respectable jobs and a sustainable life, not handouts and donations
• Detrimental: not only is goods donations (SWEDOW: Stuff WE DOn't Want) not a good idea, it is a really bad idea, wasting money on importing impractical and often used goods outcompetes local businesses. Importing used clothing caused 50% of the decline of employment in Africa from 1981-2000 and 543,000 Nigerian textile workers lost their jobs due to clothing donations between 1992 and 2006.

I'd thoroughly recommend people read more of the posts collected on the Good Intents blog.

My contribution to this campaign has been to help put together the below video:

Data, Data, Data .... and Pretty Pictures?

I have spent a lot of the last week pondering the distribution of information and the presentation of data.

Coming from a mathematics and science background, I am quite at home with numbers, and would prefer to read a budget then a written report, however I know that most of the general population have more trouble grasping numbers, and possibly because of this, mainstream media reporting focus on qualitative rather than quantitative results and issues. I feel that this has lead to some rather important gaps in public knowledge, and some horrifying misconceptions.

For example, this graph has had me captivated from the instant I saw it:

While most respondents thought they were advocating for less international aid, we could actually increase US aid money significantly, and still be satisfying the public. That the public thinks America spends 25% of it's budget on aid is a failure of media reporting. Methodology here.

I posted a few weeks ago about the Japanese nuclear crisis, there again we saw public panic due to misinformation - people failed to understand that the radiation numbers spoken about were tiny.

One solution to this public ignorance? Make data more accessible and in a format that is easier for the layman to understand. I am going to spend the rest of this post highlighting and applauding efforts to do just that. Hats off to these fantastic efforts.

I start with the wonderful website Information is Beautiful which I could easily spend hours on. One of the best tools is the animation below which puts large financial numbers into perspective. This is the one that those people from the survey above should have seen!

Other gems include: the true size of Africa, the billion-dollar-o-gram, What does China censor?, global fears, and their TED talk.

Another champion of the data is Swedish Global Health Lecturer Hans Rosling, who, as well as giving several really excellent TED talks (most recent), pioneered the fantastic GapMinder tool (demo here), which allows the user to select their variables and watch their interactive graph evolve with the world, a screenshot is below:

Datamarket has a similar tool to Gapminder, but it is not aimed at development specifically. GoogleInsights is also great for playing with data, for example, notice a correlation between terror alerts and elections?


Another worthy website is FlowingData, which again have a wide range of visualisations, and links to even more, such as a map of refugee flows, a graph showing that 40% of over 70s have sex, and the below chart of Faith and Poverty. The site also has lots of information for making your own graphics. If you are looking for the raw data to work with, try Timetric, an aggregate of the world's leading sources of economic data, try Here for lots of governement data about London, or Infochimp of an assortment of datasets. Another diverse and growing set of data available at MEDevEcon (h/t to AidThoughts). Patrick Cain produces interesting maps for just about every social variable in Canadian cities.

The infographic is appearing as the new information transmitter of choice, and consists of standard graphs or tables overlain with maps, pictures or symbols to tell a story. Examples can be found at Good, such as the Quest to Power in Africa below:

If people are seeking a little daily data burst, I'd recommend signing up to the Economist's Daily Chart RRS feed, interesting recent graphs include: Regional Inequality, Representation of Women, and the below chart on Child Brides. I would similarly recommend The Guardian's Data Blog, which also have interesting visualisation of government spending and a really useful timeline for the middle east protests (seriously!).

Finally, as unrelated yet interesting aside, check out OkCupid for data trends from a huge online dating site. Hits include: the lies people tell when online dating, the case for an older women, and finally, Gay vs. Straight sex. Enjoy.

Advertising, Media, and a Book

How do we portray Africa in the media? And how should we?

I was pointed this week to this article in the Columbia Journalism review, and some of the blog commentary on the topic. Rothmyer writes about the tendency of NGOs to exaggerate the extent of problems, emphasis negative stereotypes and spread a gloomy image of Africa in the name of securing funding:

The main reason for the continued dominance of such negative stereotypes, I have come to believe, may well be the influence of Western-based non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and international aid groups like United Nations agencies. These organizations understandably tend to focus not on what has been accomplished but on convincing people how much remains to be done. As a practical matter, they also need to attract funding. Together, these pressures create incentives to present as gloomy a picture of Africa as possible in order to keep attention and money flowing, and to enlist journalists in disseminating that picture.

Over the past thirty years, NGOs have come to play an increasingly important role in aid to Africa. A major reason is that Western donors, worried about government corruption, have channelled more funds through them. In the mid-1970s, less than half a dozen NGOs (like the Red Cross or CARE) might operate in a typical African country, according to Nicolas van de Walle, a professor of government at Cornell, but now the same country will likely have 250.
This explosive NGO growth means increasing competition for funds. And according to the head of a large US-based NGO in Nairobi, “When you’re fundraising you have to prove there is a need. Children starving, mothers dying. If you’re not negative enough, you won’t get funding.” So fierce is the competition that many NGOs don’t want to hear good news. An official of an organization that provides data on Somalia’s food situation says that after reporting a bumper harvest last year, “I was told by several NGOs and UN agencies that the report was too positive.” 

She also criticizes journalists:

Even with shrinking resources, journalists can do better than this. For a start, they can stop depending so heavily, and uncritically, on aid organizations for statistics, subjects, stories, and sources. They can also educate themselves on how to find and interpret data available from independent sources. And they can actively seek out stories that deviate from existing story lines.

Rothmyer's article is hardly breaking new ideas, a decade ago, PM Tony Blair told us that poverty in Africa is a "scar on our consciences" and just last week I wrote about the media's favouritism of photogenic causes. News and media are often blamed for perpetuating the exciting negative stories at the expense of reporting moderate economic growth. See the CNN Effect. But recently attention has turned away from just journalists and towards NGOs, Rothmyer;s article is well written and effective, I recommend you go read it all

Good Intentions are Not Enough have talked about NGO adverts, and how it is normally assumed that the best way to encourage donations is to shock the audiences with appalling conditions and pictures of suffering and tragedy:

Is it any surprise that when constantly bombarded with pictures like this, people think that all children in Africa are either starving or fighting? Some more interesting thoughts about Poverty Porn.

And the effect of all this advertising on public perceptions? VSO's comprehensive report The Legacy of Live Aid provides the data; their summary is below, and the second point in particular I find very worrying.

Are donor funds just getting harder to extract because we have desensitized the public to violence and poverty? Should we uphold the dignity of those people aid agencies are trying to help, even at the expense of helping less of them? Maybe we are being short sighted, more short term funding that involves encouraging negative stereotypes might hinder aid efforts by scaring away investors and discouraging economic growth? I have yet to see a practical solution.

In the midst of all this bad news, I point you towards the new book Getting Better: Why Global Development Is Succeeding—And How We Can Improve the World Even More which is a story of successes. Charles Kenny writes about how, in much of Africa, development is working: life expectancy is increasing, child mortality is decreasing, people are earning and saving more. He goes on to detail how we could be doing a lot more by increasing funding for projects that have been 'proven' to work, Kenny does not including projects aimed and spurring economic growth in this, he focuses on health and education. From Poverty to Power have a well thought out and comprehensive review of this book.

Wronging Right's solution? Reality TV.

Emergencies and Donations

The wonderful blogs listed on the right have done quite a good job of advising readers to hold of in donate to Japan's devastating earthquake.

While Japan needs to start significant and costly rebuilding program, it is also extremely well placed to do so; Japan is a strong developed economy and expert and disaster management. Japan is currently refusing help from almost everyone except a few highly specialized NGOs.

In comparison, this week the United Nations published a list of forgotten distasters, all of which are worse than the Japanese earthquake, and is asking for $3bn for these causes.

Media attention is one of the key drivers of private donations and pressure for government assistance. The reasons for some disasters being neglected and others receiving over-funding is discussed here, earthquakes and tsunamis are sudden isolated events, provide dramatic and vivid images of destruction, and    have an element of unpredictability which leads to donors thinking about the victims and innocents. In contrast, most of the UNs forgotten disasters are typically slow onset famine and drought, conflict where the victims might seem less innocent, and occurring in far off African nations where reporting is difficult and empathy harder to trigger.

The conclusion? Don't earmark funds for a specific disaster, allow your trusted organisation to decide who needs your donation most. I recommend this excellent post on disaster donation.

Update: If absolutely must donate to Japan, Good Intentions Are Not Enough points us to the right guys:

From what I understand, there are two organizations in Japan that help coordinate nonprofit work.

• JANIC (Japan NGO Center for International Cooperation) which, according to their website, is a network organization of Japanese civil society groups.
• The Japan Platform, which, according to their website, is an international emergency humanitarian aid organization made up of a consortium of 32 Japanese NGOs, the business community, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan.

Together they’ve issued a joint appeal (pdf) which explains how disaster response is coordinated in Japan and what the current needs are.

According to JANIC “At the moment, there are 28 NGOs among our members that are assisting the disaster victims in various ways. JANIC is now accepting contributions to support the activities of these NGOs.” And the Japan Platform has an update as to how its members are responding to the disaster.

JANIC’s website includes this statement “Please note that JANIC will retain 15% of the total amount of the donation to cover the operational cost for administering this relief fund.” I do not have a problem with that. Coordinating nonprofits, especially after a disaster, is important but often under-funded work.

For people wanting to support Japanese organizations in the recovery efforts, either of these organizations seem like a good option. Both now have websites up in English which include ways to donate.