For those of us who spend much of our lives at the pointy end of delivering humanitarian aid, we probably have a completely different perspective on what works and what doesn’t, on what we should be doing and what we shouldn’t from the academic or bureaucratic view if we are to be effective in delivering the aid needed in crisis situations.

Telling our story however has suffered a sudden shake in confidence as one man who embellished his has put a measure of doubt on everyone else. But the field is made up of some wonderful people who routinely and sometimes unwisely put their lives at risk in order to do what they see as needed in regions of the world that are crying out for assistance.

On the other hand, there is the ever so frequent occasion when we are simply charged with doing projects that we know that at the end of the day is not going to make the slightest bit of difference in changing the circumstances of the people who are suffering. William Easterly in his book “A White Man’s Burden” described the difference between the Planners and the Searchers, the Planners have the opportunity and the ear of those providing the funds and take an academic approach in designing the methods of providing aid but are not placed in a position of accountability if the plan fails. On the other hand the Searchers are most often in the field and face those at the end of the line on a daily basis and can see the failure as it unfolds and then have to live with and face the consequence of that failure as part of their job.

In my case I have spent several years working in South Asia and Afghanistan in particular. A recent report produced by the Paul Fishstein and Andrew Wilder from Tufts University took a look at an area of aid delivery that I have argued against for several years, the linking of the military and political objectives with the need for the humanitarian requirements. It has failed on a number of fronts but even though it has been responsible for billions of dollars in aid delivery that have had little impact in reaching its objectives mostly it has compromised the work of the humanitarian agencies in being able to reach theirs.

In disaster recovery however there is something of the immediate shock doctrine that occurs causing an outpouring of charity that seeks to apply some sort of salve to the massive losses that people suffer. But the simple replacement of lost assets is not enough when so much more can be achieved by taking a longer and perhaps more commercial perspective. In my most recent project I was in charge of a program to help construct thirty nine thousand permanent shelters to house almost a quarter of a million people who had lost their homes in the 2010 floods in Pakistan. My issues is that we certainly provided the houses but little else. We did not change the lives of the people in any way except we were the insurance company you have when you don’t have an insurance company. Other agencies did other things. I was often frustrated with what I could see was a massive waste of funds with little impact that could have been better used to create better and longer term outcomes than could be achieved by putting up four posts and a sheet of branded blue plastic around a hole in the ground and calling it a latrine.

So how can we create measurable and sustainable impact? Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at the Conference on Aid Effectiveness in Busan during November 2011 made the statement that “we need to continue shifting our approach and our thinking from aid to investment, investments targeted to produce tangible returns”. Secretary Clinton is right.

Simply giving things away is not working nor is it sustainable. We need to shift focus from being a massive logistics and engineering operation to becoming an income generating operation. In the case of disaster recovery and we can rest assure that this year we will see upwards of one hundred naturally occurring disasters, we need to help communities to not only get back on their feet but do it through utilizing their own capacity to do so. What we need less of is the creation of dependence that develops through our present method of aid delivery and help create independence through investing in a recovery partnership.

The people affected by disaster are as equal to any of us in deciding the best course of action to take, what they lack are the resources to do that, mostly in the way of finance, along with managerial and technical support. Simply providing unbelievably expensive one-on-one loans through microfinance is not the answer either. Over the years it has not measurably demonstrated it has changed the course of economics or living conditions for the millions of people who take these loans out in fact when analyzed by researchers outside the banking circles who provide them. The good news stories we hear are marketing exercises.

But small investments can work albeit investments larger than a hundred dollars at a time. We can do that through a process of joint venture finance where the profit and loss is shared unlike it is with microfinance. It is through direct investment of funding and technical support into the village enterprises start-ups that can make a difference in small communities, communities who otherwise could never imagine they could be part of a larger operation. At the same time, disaster not only affects householders who we deliver most of our aid to, it also affects thousands of small businesses who need financial, technical and marketing assistance if they are to recover quickly and employ people. These would be enduring and sustainable enterprises from the community we are now giving pots and pans to or through the aid agencies seek to assist in forming socialist inspired co-operatives to do the same thing. What we do however is ignore their plight and often establish competitive operations to do the same thing.

We need to change thinking from engaging in grand plans with no accountability to actually pulling our sleeves up and working in a fashion that makes us a direct part of the economic recovery process and not just as a bystander giving out sage but often useless advice but by being directly involved. The Islamic finance people call it Musharakah.

The following is the opening chapter to a book that I am currently writing on the subject of Disaster Recovery and how I believe we should be approaching it. Given that it still requires editing I am seeking early comments on style and of course content and the overall premise I am making. At the end of the book I hope to make a reasonable argument for my current quest in delivering international assistance through partnership investment in village enterprises rather than simply providing unconditional aid.

With the possible exception of the equator, everything begins somewhere.
Peter Robert Fleming

A Case for the Beginning.

While I was passing through the early years of my life I suppose that I never really thought much about world poverty. Like many other people in my particular middle class economic and social station, I was too concerned with my own problems and the various issues that I faced day to day, issues concerned with raising my family and the various financial cyclic extremes we seemed to go through, issues about the various career paths I had chosen, issues as inconsequential as to the colour that I might paint the living area. I had little time to be worried about the plight of millions of poor people in far-flung lands over whose life I had little or no capacity as I thought at that stage or even an interest to make a significant difference.
That is, until I actually went out there in the wide world and saw face to face some of the problems other people encounter on a daily basis. In hindsight it is now something I believe it is not only incumbent on me to make a change to the way the world is but to impress on everyone to change their perceptions of how the rest of the world live and how they trade with the world at large.
I also believe that the seemingly universal approach we presently engage in to do so is wrong. The world will not progress on the varying strength and political whim of our charity although that does provide something of a limited relief when applied. It needs more. It needs reasonable opportunities to advance alongside the rest of the world and we need to invest in its ability to do so. As US Secretary of State, Mrs Hillary Rodham Clinton was disposed to say when she gave the Keynote Address at the Forth High Level Conference on Aid Effectiveness in November 2011, “we need to continue shifting our approach and our thinking from aid to investment, investments targeted to produce tangible returns.”
Looking back in time, in the first instance my reasons to go to work overseas were somehow self-serving. Faced with some immediate decisions that pre-empted a change of my life, it was catalysed by a series of international events that caused me to move out of my comfort zone that had moved into a somewhat lackadaisical indolent lifestyle, prompting me to take notice of what was going on about me. There was a large element of financial self-interest in that I was also to be paid for the work that I would do which at that particular stage of my turbulent economic life had taken on an increasing importance.
It was the earthquake in Turkey in 1999 caused me to sit up and take an active interest in world events. It was memories of that city of some twelve million people that some years early when I had travelled there and became infatuated with the history and charm that Istanbul conveys, the smell and hubbub of the Grand Bazaar, a visit to the hammams to languish in a sleepy daze under the sweltering heat of the steam room and the pummelling by the heavy masseuse that accompanied it, the smell of the spice markets and the opulence of the cities historical architecture. Then to see it significantly destroyed in a few moments by the power of nature; to understand that fifty thousand people had lost their lives in a matter of a few moments, that half a million people had lost their homes and businesses all because the earth decided to shift about its tectonic plates in some sort of random stretching motion was all it took to make me want alter my life and offer what I considered to be my professional services to humanity.
Within hours I had drafted a letter and reconfigured my resume that had been sitting idle for several years while I played at my chosen vocation at the time. I sat at my computer and sent out missives to fifty organisations that I thought might be interested in an engineer with some prior if not hazy construction experience.
Spam still had a lot to answer for and had yet to reach the dizzying heights it has today however for the most part I am of the opinion my letters were similarly consigned to the trash then as they are now. It was not until some several weeks later that I received an email that stated simply, “we don’t have a job in Turkey at the moment but we do have one in Kosovo if you are interested.”
This was something of an inconsistency in what I was proposing for myself. The only immediate question that came to my mind was “they kill each other in Kosovo don’t they?”
After some explanation and much vague to and fro-ing with the representatives in Sydney, I eventually accepted an assignment to participate in a program that would provide temporary shelter to some of the million or so refugees that were now in the evening news returning from the neighbouring countries. Within a week I had packed and was on my way to a new adventure and what would ultimately become the most satisfying and attitude changing period of my life.
Initially I was employed by the international aid agency, ADRA about whom I also had to satisfy myself in as much as they needed to satisfy themselves about me. They were associated with the Seventh Day Adventist church, also something about which I knew almost next to nothing other than they were considered at the time to be a fringe religious organisation, something that troubles me far less now that I know and understand someway in their beliefs.
It was through this experience that I was shifted out of a lifelong malaise of suburban comfort and peaceful security and into the real world of suffering and hardship. The most significant learning curve for me was to understand the intolerance that one set of individuals can exert over another. It was a black stain on humanity so far as I was concerned, one that I have never really recovered from a decade or more further along the road towards trying to understand it all.
But as I entered into this new world I took a greater interest in the extremes of human nature. Kosovo was an experience that culminated when I had tired of the community position where “greed had overtaken need” as the dominant consideration notwithstanding that many people still suffered the travails of losing all they had and had little opportunity to recover fully in their lifetime.
The public perception that international aid is largely wasted was becoming manifestly clear once the first stages of providing basic assistance to the most vulnerable had subsided. The next levels of beneficiary were coming to the fore from which a greater number of those we were delivering aid to were beginning to profit and prosper.
After some eighteen months the social purpose and activity within the community had altered such that I felt I was not longer serving a useful purpose within the constraints of what was possible at the time. I took what I considered to be a well-earned break, that is, until the next catastrophe occurred in New York on the eleventh of September 2001 upon which a new field of endeavour opened in an even less understood country, Afghanistan.
This was different. This was more basic in its need. In the first instance the project I was assigned to was not a task to provide shelter or emergency assistance to the communities. They were residing in the refugee and IDP camps and had survived being in a war zone for the previous twenty-five years or so managing to skirt around the worst of the excesses that war can bring. Theirs was a more fundamental desire to expand upon their development that had reached a hiatus many years before.
Ours was a project that has ultimately failed and fail dismally due in no small part to the inadequacy of the attempt. The project in itself had merit in that it was to provide alternative employment to those engaged in the production of opium in and around Nangahar province towards the east of the country. But it was symptomatic of how the west approaches the problems that exist in these countries in crisis; how we misread the needs and process that is part of the life cycles of the local citizens. Certainly they needed work and they needed schools and clinics and roads and bridges yet nothing about the project was intended to provide enduring options other than to the curtail the production of opium. A number of projects were commenced in and around the period of the opium-planting season with levels of conditionality intended to continue past the harvest season yet even then it failed to stall the season itself. Opium that year flourished. The outcome produced some local infrastructure but nothing like that required and the program had no sustainability beyond that one brief period of our project.
By 2012, after years of foreign interventions and international aid packages for a raft of purposes, the world generally is largely no better off now than it was in 1980 or even 1950. Poverty still exists for billions of people, preventable illnesses plague whole countries bringing about early death and a drain on the economic constraints of each of them, infant mortality in some of the poorest countries is no better and even worse than it has ever been, unemployment in some countries exceeds 80%, and commonly 30% to 40% of a countries total workforce is unemployed or underemployed.
On the other hand, people in some western countries and for the past few years with the meteoric rise in oil fortunes, the Middle East has shot further into prominence as has Asia’s super elite and super rich. The 200 richest men of the world now control almost 60% of its common wealth.
One can be critical of the power of wealth accumulation in the hands of a few however the real issue is the lack of wealth accumulation in the hands of many. Wealth by itself is neither the problem nor the solution it is merely the degree of separation between the two groups. Where the problem lay is when one group denies by its actions the other group access to acquire sufficient wealth to sustain the basic functions of life.
The question bought forward by the United Nations when they formulated the Millennium Development Goals was how to solve the issues that affect the worlds poorest and most vulnerable, a basic policy that underlies and stems back to the Charter of the United Nations in 1948.
WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINED
• to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and
• to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and
• to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and
• to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,
AND FOR THESE ENDS
• to practice tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbours, and
• to unite our strength to maintain international peace and security, and
• to ensure, by the acceptance of principles and the institution of methods, that armed force shall not be used, save in the common interest, and
• to employ international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all peoples
.
Aside from the aspects of security and the culmination of five years of the world at war, the primary reason Roosevelt and Churchill sponsored the United Nation’s formation and Truman continued in its support as it sprang from the remnants of the previous League of Nations, the idea that universally, the world should promote social progress and better standards of living for all men was a core tenet that was felt across both Presidencies and Prime Ministership.
Truman was a folksy kind of president who coined or promoted phrases such as “the Buck Stop Here” and “If you can’t stand the heat stay out of the kitchen” reasoning that he used to convince the American people that poverty is the breeding ground for communism.
To get Congress to spend the vast sums necessary to restart the moribund European economy, Truman used an ideological argument, arguing forcefully that communism flourishes in economically deprived areas. His goal was to “scare the hell out of Congress.”
Yet for all the good will expressed, for all the intent of the free world at the time, the world has failed to curb poverty, it has failed to curb the continued development of socialism and it has failed to advance the social and economic advancement of all people.
The difficulty is not however in the intent, it is in the application of that intent. Since 1948 international trade barriers have been installed that destroyed economies at the outset. International funding through loans offered by the World Bank with conditions predicated by the International Monetary Fund have resulted in the poorest countries of the world labouring under massive debt and interest repayment that the social development of the countries have suffered significantly.
The ideals of the United Nations have been lost and necessitated a revival of the tenet as was done by Kofi Annan in 2002 in the drafting of the Millennium Development Goals. How committed to their implementation the world will be however remains anyone’s guess. In the post MDG conference period, little has been achieved in reaching the measures enunciated by them.
It is in this discussion, the reasons behind that are plain and simple. The economic framework of the countries that suffer the most have not changed at all and hardly facilitate an expansion that will make sustainable provisions for the people they govern.
Foreign aid has become a charity scenario where leaders of poor countries go cap in hand to leaders of rich countries and appeal for funds more often than not to cover the repayment of loan interest to other international institutions.
The application of funds has little to do with economic development and more to do with cementing the power of the governments concerned. It is only when this perspective takes a change, when countries can rely upon their own economic frameworks and fund accumulation practices that real change will take place in the relief offered to the most vulnerable.
Providing governments with fund to build “roads to market” is fine in principle if indeed the markets exist. More often than not, they don’t and that is the crux of the matter that governments are not able to resolve. That is the logical domain of private enterprise where supply and demand precipitates the economic outcomes and achievements.
Too often funds allocated for development programs are channelled in to projects that fail dismally to provide any relief to the economic travails of the particular country. Too often they are subjected to ministerial or government abuse and misappropriation that the world has tired of trying to deal with the issue surrounding them.
The developed world also has a myopic vision of how development should take place, largely in comparison to their own systems and practices while failing to establish the core basis of how those systems come about. It is a sort of benevolent overlord, rich man poor man relationship and not designed in any way to be a partnership between ourselves and the people we propose to assist in building sustainable economic development. Economic might has power and the power is wielded in manners that preclude development. There is an overwhelming reliance on a laisser faire growth to the economy and industry of these countries that is failing to meet expectations.
Donor countries also practice a sort of de-facto socialism in allocating funds to recipient countries, supporting the expansion of large ineffective government while hoping to put in place monitoring and capacity building programs that can deal with it. At the other extreme they offer a social welfare program to the most vulnerable that is largely unsustainable. Public appeals in the developed countries are largely driven towards charity as social support, providing relief to the vulnerable with no expectation of any return. In that its objectives are so loose and are unsustainable, it has no end to the application of support required or solutions offered how that support might be forthcoming from the country in receipt of the aid. Even the major international activists are driven to expand on the social welfare component of foreign aid without explaining where it should come from other than being the fundamentals of a socialist policy or wealth sharing. The likes of “Band-Aid” and this aid and that aid are all similarly disposed philosophically, they are merely a band-aid to the problems, but they are not the cure.
I was driven to consolidate my thoughts on all of this when I read an article in Time Magazine authored by Bill Gates who talked about the need for Creative Capitalism , an idea that he believes could solve some of the world’s social problems. Reading through the article however I felt that Gates has also missed the point. His is an appeal to the major corporations to follow in his example of philanthropy. He discusses how successful major international companies can extend their participation in the developing world by taking something off the bottom line of their output and donating it to the various international charities that exist, by looking for new markets within these poverty constricted communities, by providing them with technology and the like as he does.
In the main however, he is extending the policy that has existed for all time, of the developed world finding profit by engaging the poorer countries and not by where the real need is however, by assisting those inhabitants of those poorer countries derive a profit for themselves. Bill Gates has made a powerful argument for capitalism and building business, he has however not made one that is likely to build nations.
His offer to increase the level of philanthropy is to be much admired and congratulated, more people of his ilk and station should take time to observe the difficulties billions of people face in life and look for solutions. Extending the handout process however is not one of them. At some point in time, the world has to treat the causes rather than the illness if it wants to have sustainable solutions. The primary solution is to reduce poverty.
In working out some of the ideas I wanted to express in this book, I was discussing the issues with my partner and she drew the analogy with international aid and nation building to that of constructing an ordinary building. In order to build nations they need to have solid foundations to suit their immediate purpose and a strong structure upon which the rest can be supported. The foundation of a nation is in the constitution and the legislation while the framework is in economic ability of the nation to support the development of social networks and programs that will ultimately line the walls and surroundings. In many ways, the approach of solving core issues is akin to painting the walls before the foundations and the framework and even the walls are in place.
In May of 1942, almost a decade before my time in fact and for many Australians, a great political leader and Prime Minister at the time, Sir Robert (Bob) Menzies delivered a oration that defined the Forgotten People of Australia, those people he described as the middle class and who he and his political party largely represented.
In doing so he enunciated how it was this class in society that were the engine behind the economy of the nation
“They are envied by those whose benefits are largely obtained by taxing them. They are not rich enough to have individual power. They are taken for granted by each political party in turn. They are not sufficiently lacking in individualism to be organised for what in these days we call “pressure politics.” And yet, as I have said, they are the backbone of the nation.”
It was through reading this oration that I came to understand that development is not only about supporting the building of big government with wide reaching powers, it is not only about supporting and providing aid to the most vulnerable, and although these two aspects are extremely important, they are not the whole, it is also about supporting that portion of the community that as Menzies states, are the “backbone of the nation”. It is through this middle class that a government can and will build the nation and the economic power behind it from which everything else can be supported including the increasing demands of the most vulnerable and curbing the excesses of the most corrupt.
It was out of all this consideration that the idea for “social risk capitalism” became more apparent.
Instead of just handing over funds to ill-prepared or dubious governments or programs that have no end to the demands in sight, corporations and developed countries need to invest in the processes that build nations, to look at the structure of the capitalism however looking at it with a social perspective. A donation of one million dollars with no prospect of monetary or lasting social return is one way. Investing that same million dollars in industrial and economic development that has high risks, has a high possibility of failure however if successful will provide a basis for others to follow and for nations to become economically independent is another.
It is this that the in following pages I hope to provide a discussion platform for future process to take place that offer solutions to the core problems and not just to look at the most obvious. Much of what follows in the first half of this book is an account of personal experiences in some countries in crisis, how the aid process works, what it is perhaps looking to achieve and where it has gone wrong and then going back and seeing how all that effort measures up with what is finally achieved some years down the track.
In conclusion and based on what ultimately has or has not been accomplished over the years, it is my opinion that the present direction of aid funding is completely wrong. We are not solving problems but simply delaying the processes, a never-ending hole into which aid money needs to be thrown. There are solutions however and it is that aspect that the second half of the book will focus on expressing the mechanism that can make a sizeable difference to the economic processes of countries in crisis and enable their movement towards engaging self help in solving and dealing with many of the issues they presently face.
As we move between one natural global disaster to the next, from one shift in tectonic plates after another, from one civil conflict to the next, from one catastrophic deluge caused by the ever change in weather patterns and the effects of global warming, the impact of our efforts to help people recover and move on with their lives rapidly is hampered by the fact that we constantly repeat the same mistakes of previous efforts time and time again.
We and in this particular case I speak of the international humanitarian community, has a propensity to miss out on determining the impact of what it has done and transition its sense of place and importance on to the next disaster as it occurs, the next project and of course the mandatory included additional paragraph of our past efforts on the curriculum vitae. As funds dry up the disaster is left only with the diehard social soldiers. We are not challenged by the fact that the last effort has not been fully resolved or what these affected communities achieved with the assistance. We concentrate on promoting the facts surrounding our effort primarily in an effort to secure more funds for the next program and the next disaster. That we delivered one hundred thousand tents and four thousand tons of wheat or another million blankets are presented as the salient points about the programs, what we did is the metric rather than what happened because we did it.
What we are good at and what we constantly do with each disaster, we start in the middle and fail to return to the beginning. We address the effects rather than examine the causes.
Many international situations are the outcome of poverty, not just of large sectors of the communities but the countries themselves. They are saddled with huge international debts paying for infrastructures that benefits only a few, that strip the country of their valuable assets instead of developing the countries wealth, they are bereft of capacity to address the major issues weighed down by ineptitude, corruption and a lack of resources.
This book is to not simply address the effects of poverty and the myriad ways we have to do that but to draw attention to and shift focus to address the causes. We are all born with nothing. Some people simply never get the opportunity to rise above that. If we are to adequately address poverty and create a solution for it, what people need to start with is that opportunity and we need to learn is how to provide it.
I might start off sounding negative and in many ways I am quite disillusioned but I am not disheartened. I have formed a very negative view about what it is we do in the field of humanitarian aid and some of the people involved in that process and the how and the why we do it. But after I show what I believe to be wrong with our current approach I also would like to offer a solution on how we can change it use that to create a real difference.
What I have to deal with and provide you as the reader is a succession of counter arguments to this strange model we have adopted over the years and compete with a raft of authoritative figures who have built careers around managing the failed system we now have in place, a system that has at its core the need to keep pumping funds in to provide unconditional social relief where it is needed rather than take positive steps to eliminate it. I have to make an argument that despite all of the economic models and predictions for the world, poverty is not reducing and very few of the social indicators we have to measure it are changing. The same can be said for our treatment of disaster recovery.
The irony as I see it is where we set up to resolve poverty is that in the developed OEDC countries whom are the primary funders and subsequently planners of international assistance, the economic home model put simply is based on being entrepreneurial, centered on small government with manageable but limited and controlled social welfare and driven by the open market. What we have in delivering humanitarian assistance however is this contrived socialist model based around creating collective enterprise with the delivery of social assistance that has no conditionality or sustainability and those delivering these packages have a non-profit modality. Of course the whole process is then often designed by career bureaucrats whose whole career has been living off the fat of the public purse with no practical experience in business or market forces or in dealing with the economic conditions that is required in generating a private income. The problem with socialism, as Margaret Thatcher famously said, is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.
The thing is, and I feel qualified I can say this is after thirteen years of being engaged in the international humanitarian business I am more and more convinced that what is being done is not working, in fact I would go further than that and say it is an abject failure that we just keep massaging and pouring more cash in while it keeps moving along in this overwhelming tide of promise that lacks any punch. It concerns me greatly that the work I have done in this last almost decade and a half has been meaningless outside of the personal rewards by way of a salary I might have received. So much so that I have now opted to move out of the institutional structures of providing aid in all its forms to establish a new school of thought that seeks to invest in the form of partnership with the poor in order that they can address all of the elements of poverty on their own accord if they are given the right tools to do that.
The latest reports produced by the United Nations in their Human Development Report now available on the subject suggest that there are at least one point seven billion people living in poverty or to put that into perspective almost one third of the world’s population, many of them living in extreme poverty. We contribute to that condition because primarily we use humanitarian aid to treat the effects. We apply band-aids to global wounds that need major surgery and then we acknowledge but ignore correcting those same causes. The will of the people is often subject to the detrimental will of commerce.
We know that year in year out countries face the prospect of serious drought and then when the rains come, they face the prospect of major and catastrophic floods. What is needed in this case is a large scale water harvesting and flood mitigation program. The construction of a sizable reservoir in those areas where it is most needed that is not simply put there to supply to major landholders but the population at large. Instead of solving that particular problem which is within our capacity we establish programs to clean out the canals after the floods subside or we drill deeper wells when the drought has forced the water tables to sink lower or in the worst case scenario, we allow international banks to provide funds to projects that have a detrimental effect on the wider population.
The humanitarian aid delivery business (and it is very much a business, a subject I will came back to in a later chapter) started with the creation of the Red Cross one hundred and fifty years ago. As we know it now, it probably started at the end of World War Two when religious missions were delivering aid to people starving in the aftermath of the war in Europe. That eventually turned that into a billion dollar problem solving Marshall Plan out of which evolved hundreds of non government organizations many of whom still exist today.
After seventy years however, we still have one third of the world’s population living in poverty on less than two dollars a day, some on less than a dollar a day. They do not have access to clean drinking water, infant and maternal mortality is five to ten times that which it is in developed societies and they fail on every other social minimum living standard we have set for them to achieve.
In 2005, the United Nations under the stewardship of Kofi Annan set an ambitious Grand Plan to address the issues of world poverty with the introduction of a global objective in the Millennium Development Goals or the MDG as they are otherwise known. One hundred and ninety three countries signed up to work on those eight goals. It was a noble objective but from the fanfare start it was doomed to failure. While the UN agencies work to see that the target figures can be met propping it up with further program funding they are facing the never ending prospect that it cannot be done although they will be the last ones to acknowledge that. I say that in that it did nothing about solving the basic problems of what is the root cause of poverty while seeking to deal only with the effects and issues of poverty. If we are to make a difference, seriously make a difference we need to keep diving back to the beginning, to discover the source of poverty and solve those solutions through active engagement and not simply treating the effects as we do.

Enter the Cart followed by the Horse

This book comes with two purposes in mind. The first to analyze what it is we currently do in the humanitarian business and why it is not affecting any serious change in the economic circumstance of billions of people around the world. The second part of the book is to look at an alternative means that seeks to be more inclusive of these poor people and in particular people who have experienced a major catastrophe that has affected the whole community into a working partnership by which that can provide them with the means to address poverty reduction and their economic recovery and all of its inherent effects them self.
Over all the years I have been involved in humanitarian programs I have been responsible for and seen more than three hundred million dollars in aid being dispensed in a variety of forms. More often than not that has been in the construction of new infrastructure or housing programs and in other cases working with livelihood programs that offer people with no other form of income the opportunity to earn a few dollars for some laboring work they might do. As I look back at it all however, I am devastated by the sheer lack of impact that it all has had on changing the lives of the people with whom we work. They are still impoverished, their children will be impoverished and their children’s children will be impoverished ad infinitum and they are no closer to economic recovery than they were when we first entered their lives.
So how can we change that? For one thing we have to stop setting up programs where we are simply giving things out that do not create a tangible result other than a transfer of assets. We have to stop using number outputs and start setting impact outputs as a measure of our achievements. We have to stop using short cycle program timelines that have no possibility of achieving a realistic output and set in place enduring. We have to stop using cash burn rates as a metric of success. We have to do a lot of things and stop doing a lot of other things. We write a lot about of end of projects that have lessons learned and then take no notice of what has been learned by repeating the same mistake time and time again.
More importantly, we need to be more cognizant of human nature of the poor. That poor people are only relatively poor to the measures of those that are not but human nature of poor people is also exactly the same as those that are not. They can be happy and hard working but they can also be duplicitous and deceitful. They will fight and at time kill one another over a bag of wheat or a can of oil that has been given to them freely. While we continue to give them things with no other criteria than they are poor they will continue to take them without concern that others might be more deserving. We have to stop helping people who will not help them self and stop rewarding bad behavior by simply rewarding good behavior.
There are distinctions of course. Humanitarian assistance as it is takes up three distinct phases following any particular crisis. Simply put initially there is the relief phase where emergency shelter and food is required. They will need blankets and cooking utensils as well and medical treatment for a range of issues. The next phase is the recovery phase. Dealing with the immediate aftermath of the crisis to see to it that people revert back to the conditions they had before the crisis. Then there is the development phase where efforts are done to improve people lives above that which they have previously had.
What we need to do is put a development perspective on the relief and recovery phase and be given the tools by which to do that. The tools I speak of is in programs that have at the start a partnership relationship between all actors in inclusive of the people receiving the assistance recovery outlook instead of a benefactor – beneficiary relationship where the provider of services is seen as and assumes the role as more powerful in the relationship. Instead of creating new but exceedingly temporary process and supply chains that compete with local markets we need to invest in the recovery of those process and supply chains in the first instance. We need to stop looking at constructing the most sophisticated building in any village that will serve as a monument to the prestige of the local bureaucrat be it a hospital or school or a new government administration building. These are projects we do while thousands in these same communities are faced with hunger because they are unable to earn a suitable income due to the lack of suitable employment opportunities.
We have to stop entering into programs that create dependency and invest in programs that create independence. People can and will alter their own effects of poverty; they will find a way to have they children educated; they will be able to treat the illnesses that kill millions of them every year; they will be able to rebuild their lives when catastrophic events occur; they will be able to ensure they have food security at all times if indeed they are no longer poor.
We have to stop targeting the middle classes in these communities and specifically target the poorest classes and assist them to rise up out of their abject poverty. In this I speak about the nature of programs that target farmers and find measure to improve their lot in life yet neglect to find permanent solutions for the farm workers whose greatest expectation from all of our efforts is to be able to gain a few extra days labor per year in working for the farmers.

Experts, Experts Everywhere but Nothing on Which to Think.

Necessarily there are hundreds of books on the subject of poverty and how it should be treated or dealt with. As I look at them are mostly adopting the same principle by looking at treating the effects of poverty and not the causes. The issue of HIV or malaria treatment is not that they do not have a suitable net, but that they do not have the capacity to acquire a net and why do they not have the capacity to acquire a net because is because they do not have sufficient income and why do they not have sufficient income is because they do not have access to suitable sources of income and why they do not have access to the source of income is because the source of income does not exist in any meaningful quantities. We can provide millions even billions of nets but it is not going to solve the problem that the next generation of impoverished people will require them as well. What we need to do is look critically at addressing the root cause of their problem which is their sources of income. The rest like it does in all the developed world then should fall into place.
One of the most highly respected narrators on global poverty is Professor Jeffery Sachs who writes an ambitious volume on the way to solve poverty, a project he has managed to convince the UN and various donors to invest almost half a billion dollars in developing an experimental approach in the Millennium Village Project. While his results look impressive, they are not sustainable nor is it replicable. At twelve thousand dollars investment per household an expansion of his villages would require almost six trillion dollars in non recoverable grants to bring the bottom two billion now facing poverty out of the cycle of poverty they face.
I am more heartened by academics such as William Easterly, in his book The White Man’s Burden who has described the difference with academics such as Sachs and other is that there are Planners and Searchers. People like Sachs are able to develop the Grand Plan much like UN has done with the Millennium Development Goals where he has no real accountability of the outcome whereas the Searchers and I possibly class myself into that second group more than the first have to implement these Grand Plans without being able to bring a voice to the fact that they are a failure and to then be held accountable to the magnitude of the failure, if not to the donors then to the people we deal with and more importantly, with ourselves.
The problem is people intrinsically know they are failures but either do not have the capacity or the will to alter it. People o not like to hear that the programs they have designed are a failure. People and organizations do not like to hear bad news.
But even so, Easterly like almost everyone involved in looking at the problem associated with poverty, also starts at the middle and does not necessarily take into account what is the inherent cause of the poverty about which he speaks. Everything else is a symptom. It is only by addressing the cause of the problem that a solution can be achieved. At the end of the day even then it may not be achievable because the very thing that has causes it, the frailty of human nature, will prevail in trying to alter the means no matter the good intentions of many thousands who might be engaged in trying to make a difference. One only has to look at the state of politics in the US concerning issue such as poverty reduction, unemployment universal health care and education to understand that there are also even greater extreme limits in what can be achieved for the poor in developing countries.

Hoping the Middle Class Will Pass on the Benefits

People however work at all manner of things in their daily life in order to sustain themselves. They know that they have to work if they are to feed themselves and their families if that is their added responsibility. What they do or can do is limited by their surrounding circumstance. A villager living in a remote location might work as a farm laborer, a man in a city urban sprawl might work is some form of laboring work that he can manage to find. The limitation is on the variety and frequency of job opportunities. A farm laborer can work if there are crops to plant or to be harvested.
A further problem to those already identifies is that we do not set in place the correct economic recovery facilitators to create change beyond the immediate.
In 2011 I was charged with implementing a program in Pakistan whose purpose was to construct some thirty-nine thousand one room shelters that would house almost a quarter of a million people who had been affected by the floods. What we did was build them a house. What we didn’t do was create any change to their lives beyond that nor did we alter the lives of anyone else in the process in a sustainable way beyond the period that the program lasted. The effect of fifteen million dollars was transitory.
What is more, there is far too much dependence placed on the capacity of governments to affect the economic circumstance of its people. The United States which many of its inhabitants would argue that it is the most advanced economy has the misfortune to hold some fifteen percent of its population who live below the poverty index for that country. So it begs the question that if the most advanced country in the world cannot solve the problem of the poverty of its own people what chance is there for newly constructed governments that do not have the same regulatory control or suffers undue corruption from its leaders ebing able to achive a better result?
The same might be said for many of the Grand Plans. Experience shows that even the greatest economies in the world cannot stabilize their economies without incurring enormous debt or verging on bankruptcy as a number of OECD countries thoughtout 2012 are experiencing.
At issue with aid delivery is also to whom we provide it to? While looking at the latest report from the Livelihood and Food Security Trust Fund operating in Myanmar which is a multilateral donor program managed by the United Nations Office for Program Support, who they provide most assistance to what is not in fact the most impoverished but to what might be classified as the easiest to service.
Myanmar like all communities has a people who own land and people who don’t. They might all have the same level of domestic cash supplies but one group has valuable assets whereas the other doesn’t.
Farmers in Australia can often be heard lamenting how bad things were at different times when the income they are able to obtain is seasonally down. What they fail to acknowledge or at least take advantage of in defining their overall wealth is that they are sitting on a piece of dirt that was worth almost a million dollars by today’s standards. But farmers in Australia have an advantage over others in that they are able to take out loans and often do to smooth out the seasonal disparity in their incomes. What they have much like the landholders in Myanmar have is a cash flow problem, not a state of poverty. The people who have neither land nor cash are the people who are the ones who are impoverished and are where we need to be directing our attention. In the case of Myanmar that represents about twenty eight percent of the population. Their income is fully dependent on the availability of jobs which is in these rural communities, is fully dependent upon the ability of the farmers to employ them.
The primary assistance being provided however according to this report is to replace the assets of the farmers that have been lost with the cyclone and where it can be done, create short term Cash for Work opportunities for the landless to work at.
Myanmar and the approach that is now being taken are not new. In fact it is typical of most aid delivery programs. The expectation that the farmers will pass on the increase in their income to the landless is grossly mistaken. The landless workers might obtain a few days a year more employment but the overall benefits given to the farmers’ escapes them.
Similarly the improvements to irrigation canals or roads to market or any other infrastructure improvement miss out on providing direct benefit to the landless. These are benefits to the effective asset rich cash poor middle class in these societies. Why is that the case? Primarily because it is easier to provide this form of assistance than it is to manage assistance to the lower laborer class. The results are easier to demonstrate since it is in the nature of the metrics that are used.
In making this point clear, Afghanistan is a good illustration. The major thrust there for the foreign powers is to dissuade local Afghans to join the Taliban through a “Hearts and Mind Campaign”.
A local farm laborer might under usual circumstances expect to earn around forty to eighty dollars a month working from dawn to dusk seven days a week for a farmer in managing the farmer’s agricultural pursuits. His perhaps more dangerous option is to earn a hundred dollars a day to plant a road-side bomb on behalf of the Taliban.
Instead of looking at providing this laborer with options that will assist him to arrive at the same point in the wealth stakes as the farmer, the usual activity is to provide extra assistance to the farmer. Whether that is providing improved seeds or fertilizers, or access to machinery that he otherwise does not have, generally all with no appreciable cost to the farmer. In the meantime the laborer sits on the sidelines and watches and with great trepidation can look forward to an extra day of working in the field in the hot sun at no actual increase in his daily reward for doing so and is then expected to not take up arms with the Taliban.
A report just released in January by Paul Fishstein and Andrew Wilder, two researchers at Tufts University in the US in essence condemns the counter insurgency program that has cost billions of dollars in attempting to win over the people of Afghanistan and suggests that rather than do so it has had a counter effect.
Myanmar is the same without the inclusion of the Taliban. Colin Powell made a point that “the US cannot win the war on terrorism unless we confront the social and political roots of poverty”. However we don’t actually address it. We paper over the cracks and then hope it will all go away.
Afghanistan has a GDP around one thousand dollars and a growth rate of eight percent a year which is less than the inflation rate of the dollar. Even though it has a floating Afghani, it is for all intent and purpose solidly pegged to the US dollar. What that also fails to take into account is the depreciation of the dollar since it is no longer linked to a universal standard such as gold. The following illustration represents the decline since 1800 noting the unpegging in the US in the 1930’s and then the international severance in 1979. For Afghanistan to achieve anything like a modern middle economy like Malaysia, it will take at least one hundred years given the present rates of growth and inflation and that is far too long.

But many countries face the same prospect. Increasing the income of poor people in the most affected parts of the world is in believing we are achieving success by going from one dollar a day to two. Success will be when we take their income to twenty times that which it presently is in today’s terms.