meeting in the aisle

Weekend reader - links I loved

Another week closer to summer, and today, I can almost tell. Sunshine is on my shoulders, I’m almost warm, and I’m definitely ready for the weekend. Are you?

Links I loved this week:

Yes, I’m just another Mad Men tragic, but it’s with good reason: The Mad Men guide to changing the world with words is one of them - Copyblogger

Transparency is something I am hyper-aware of in my communications-adviser/NGO world, so my ears pricked up when I read Paul Wallbank’s thoughts on the illusion of transparency:

Transparency is one of the great excuses of our era; the belief that something is correct as long as it is disclosed has been used to justify unethical or downright deceptive behaviour by groups ranging from financial advisors to gadget bloggers - Paul Wallbank

I also surprisingly enjoyed this look at the arguments behind providing Afghanistan with more reliable electricity, mobile phones and other technologies as a way to ‘win the war.’

In my quest to learn more about where good ideas come from, I found Alain de Botton’s words interesting about workplaces (or better yet, work spaces):

Objectively good places to work rarely end up being so; in their faultlessness, quiet and well-equipped studies have a habit of rendering the fear of failure overwhelming. Original thoughts are like shy animals. We sometimes have to look the other way – towards a busy street or terminal – before they run out of their burrows. - Alain de Botton

What’s this? Another reason for me to dislike Tony Abbott? - Grogs Gamut

Thank you, Meanjin, for bringing together two of the things in my (and possibly your) life this week: Mad Men and Freedom - On liking the unlikeable: the case of Betty Draper

Are you a womanist? (Alice Walker, PDF file, via my ever-insightful friend Jo)

7 talks to help you change (the world) in one place - handy! My personal favourite is The Secret Powers of Time.

Radiohead front man Thom Yorke (one half of the voice in This Mess We’re In, perhaps my favourite song of the decade) has a new project, predictably odd: 2 minutes silence. I am not convinced enough to hand over my hard earned, but maybe you will be?

And finally, did you know 1000 people from America’s underlclass live underground in Las Vegas?

p.s. I’ve written you a letter

p.p.s. What do you think of freedom?
 [image]

The problem with DIY foreign aid

I heard a story worth sharing this week. A friend of mine (let’s call him Finn) was in Cambodia a couple of years ago, where he met a guy who had set up an orphanage himself. While there, Finn was invited to a little show by the kids in the orphanage, and he said it was a great night. The kids did their dancing and were smiling and happy and so proud and there were a few other foreigners there watching on, and the whole night was a success.

Finn was pretty impressed with the setup, and that night was always a great memory of his Cambodia trip. Until recently when he got an e mail about the guy running the orphanage - he is under investigation by British Police for child exploitation and paedophilia.

I’m very familiar with the feeling of urgency and outrage and impotency that comes with experiencing a developing country. I understand the desire to do something! Anything! to help people who are living without the most basic things I take for granted: quality food, safe shelter, school. And on the ground, I can definitely understand how tempting Do-It-Yourself Foreign Aid can be when solutions seems so possible, and obvious - i.e. paying for the children in one child in an orphanage to go to school. That would theoretically only cost me about $50USD a year, right? Totally doable.

But early on in my career I decided to direct my attention to International NGOs rather than going it alone, or teaming up with a mate to start my own NGO, because I believe it would take an extraordinary amount of luck for me to be capable of implementing a program as effective as an organisation with a long history, skills, expertise and accountability in the field of development.

But I do understand the temptation to ‘go it alone,’ take the more grass-roots approach, and feel the buzz of small-scale success.

This debate between DIY, small scale foreign aid versus the approach of International NGOs (INGOs) is getting some attention (again) as Nicholas Kristof (of NYT prestige) argues for, while many others are critical of his “anecdote as evidence” approach to policy.

My initial reaction to Kristof’s argument was open-mindedness. I still really do like the idea of DIY programs being able to achieve things it is difficult for large, inflexible, bureaucratic international heavy-weights in development program delivery to do. But Finn’s story reminded me of why I’ve chosen the INGO route.

There is no guarantee that a development project is going to work, but I would rather throw my energy behind a project that is accountable.

Monitoring and evaluation - you woo me every time.

October - that’s a wrap! My top 10 blog posts this month

For all the people too busy saving a life, being the change, sleeping, sunning themselves, or generally too preoccupied with life to read blog posts as they happen, I’ve compiled my top 10 blog posts of October in one tidy post:

1. Why the revolution might be tweeted (in ten years time) - brings you my take on Malcolm Gladwell’s ripple-causing New Yorker article on activism and creating social change.

2. R U OK? - was written for #RUOK day, a day intended to increase awareness of mental health and suicide prevention. The social media campaign has come under some criticism, and I think Jonathan Crossfield has a point, but I err on the side of support for initiatives like this. Conversations can be so damn difficult.

3. The true size of Africa is a great infograph, appropriately named.

4. This quote on poverty porn was popular (and popularly reblogged in the wonderful tumblr way)

5. I asked if we all have internet cause fatigue (and had to explain myself in the comments)

6. And I argue cause marketers should give Gen Y a bit more credit and try marketing to this generation differently to stay ahead of the curve in does it have to be about me all the time?

7. What makes a good NGO website is something I’ve been working on lately, and so have other people I presume given the popularity of the post, but I would have liked some comments with other people’s tips of good NGO websites. I blame myself for not being more specific with ‘my ask’ (oh, can you tell what industry I’m in?) - or you could read the post & help me out now.

8. I went and saw I’m still here and then wrote a review of it, and then posted that on my facebook page, which is where the extra traffic for this came from. This tells me something about spreading the word about my writing across different channels, the importance of getting personal, and that…my friends like movies. Profound.

9. The next two installments of my ongoing blog post series Africa is not a country…is it? came out - did you miss discovering more about Cameroon or Cape Verde?

10. And finally, this quote on internet litter, is spot on.

p.s. Did you miss my weekend link reader? It comes with extra sauce.

p.s.s. the photo above was a welcome surprise I ordered from a coffee shop in India, the memory still makes me smile.

Weekend reader - links I loved

What better weekend to launch into the links I recommend, given the wild weather Melbourne is expecting this weekend. For everybody else not in Melbourne - lucky you!!

I have been arguing for a while now that the people, organisations and companies who provide us with the tools to personalise our lives will be the strongest over the next decade, so it is a relief to read that shopping malls are dying.

This is about the masses rejecting mass marketing. - SAMBA

Speaking of consumption, what is the value of a dollar?

With all this focus on ‘what works,’ I agree with the Acumen Fund that following what happens to things that don’t work (like investments, for example) is also important. It says something about the value of failure and of taking risks.

If learning from failure is essential to our future success, what lessons does our field continue to miss as a result of not learning from the deals we did not do? - Brian Trelstad, Chief Investment Officer at Acumen Fund.

I like this (small) photo diary of Uganda for the …normality it displays. No starving children. No sick mums. Smiles. Lush vegetation. Food. Water. Life.

I’ve linked to Duncan McNicholl before, but I’ll do it again because his work on pictures, pity and poverty is so important. Framing is everything (in my communications-drenched world).

I really like the idea of a sharing economy (and no I am not a secret communist - a year living in Russia cured me of ever heading down that path)

The rise of sharing requires us to use a new language where ‘access’ trumps ‘ownership’; social value becomes the new currency; ‘exchanges’ replace ‘purchases’; and people are no longer consumers but instead users, borrowers, lenders and contributors. - Neela Sakaria (via Social media for social well being)

Did someone say food? The Australian Veg Food Guide has launched! - Lisa Dempster.

And finally, Mexico’s underwater sculpture wonderland is creepy and captivating and kind of wonderful…

[image: Mexico’s underwater sculptures]

Africa is not a country….is it? - Cameroon!

This post is part of my ‘A Country in Africa’ series.

A coastline, mountains, deserts, rainforests, beaches, iconic animals - Cameroon, otherwise known as mini-Africa, certainly sounds like it has a lot to offer a travel-devotee (like myself). Relative political stability is also an attractive feature, as is the famed local makossa music.

Quick facts:

• Cameroon has one of the best named coastlines in the world - who wouldn’t want to swim in the “Bight of Bonnie”?
• The word “Cameroon” means river of shrimp, courtesy of the Portuguese sailors who stumbled ashore in 1472
• The capital city is Yaounde
• French and English are the official languages, and there are over 200 other identified linguistic groups in the country. That’s impressive.

The money

After the shock of Burundi, it is somewhat of a relief to find Cameroon languishing somewhere ‘in the middle’, though a GDP per capita of $2,300 is not exactly great news. (Canada, $38,200; Nepal, $1,200)

The ease of doing business in Burundi is incredibly discouraging, with Burundi ranking 171 out of 183 economies around the globe. (Canada, 8; Nepal, 123)

Corruption is a serious inhibitor of business and investment, with Cameroon standing at 146th our of 180 ranked economies. (Canada, 8; Nepal, 143)

Much of the population lives in extreme poverty and relies on subsistence farming, and income disparity is a very real problem. Apparently there is oil and relatively developed infrastructure to support resource extraction (ouch!), but unfavourable business conditions are limiting investments in the country.

Health
Like many countries in Africa, Cameroon has been devastated by the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and other serious infectious diseases, which have taken a huge toll on life expectancy and health indicators. If you are born in Cameroon today, you can expect to live until the age of 52. Still, this is an improvement from 2003 when life expectancy was a mere 48 years.

 
Cameroon compared to Australia and Burundi - life expectancy & GDP from 1900-2009 via Gapminder.

Looking at the Gapminder graph above, the past twenty years have not been kind to Cameroon. While not as erratic as Burundi, which has experienced serious conflict, it is not great to see a triangle in these indicators. It is also sobering to note that Australians in 1901 were living longer than people from Cameroon in 2000.

In terms of the Milennium Development Goals - there is not as much good news as I would like. But let’s look at the good news first. Cameroon is on track to achieve universal primary education. If some changes are made, there could be gains in combating HIV, malaria and other serious diseases.

The bad news? Cameroon is off track in maternal health, gender equality and women’s empowerment, and reducing childhood mortality. There is also insufficient information available to track environmental sustainability, and there is not enough information to track extreme poverty and hunger.

While I could go on and on with more and more facts, I am summing up all my research by asking myself two questions based on what I have learned

Would I travel to Cameroon? Yes! Mini-Africa and relative political stability make it look like one of the more appealing destinations on the African continent.

Would I want to live there? No. But I would consider it in the capacity of aid and development work so I can tell more stories like this one.

This post is part of my ‘A Country in Africa’ series, see also: Algeria, Angola, Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, and Burundi.

Have you got internet cause fatigue?

Let’s start with disclosure - I work for an NGO, and one known for its activism, but what I’m about to say is all me (is that enough for the legal eagles? I’ll presume so and move on).

Now, did you know yesterday was “350” day for climate change? Or that last week there was an #RUOk day campaign on for mental health? Or two weeks ago there was a sit-in by mothers in a Coles supermarket in Melbourne to protest nasty ingredients in baby food? More than that, did you participate in any? I didn’t, and I’m what I would consider an activist.

I sign petitions. I turn all the switches off for Earth Day. I saw An Inconvenient Truth. I have marched and held banners and slept out in the cold and sponsored a child and hell, even wandered off to the other side of the world to work in a developing country as a volunteer.

I still get all choked up when I watch footage of the lone man in Tienanmen Square who stood up to the tanks, or read about the crumbling of the Berlin Wall. I love the sight and the sound and the spirit in the air when people come together for a cause, speak out, stand up, be counted, and demand change.

But lately, I’ve been feeling a little lack-lustre, and with the decreasing numbers of people taking to the streets to visibly participate in “causes” both in Australia and around much of the world, I can’t help but wonder - is the internet to blame?

Are all these online petitions and e-mails from NGOs and tweets and facebook updates and blogs and their comments and you-tube videos and flickr uploads and on and on exhausting us to the point where we prefer to spend our Saturday morning’s strolling around, head firmly in the clouds, in a bid to escape the causes which are constantly shoved in front of our faces, into our inboxes, and in nifty little campaigns that suck us in long enough to watch 90 seconds on how YOU can end [insert worthy cause here]!!!!

I worry about this.

As someone who truly believes you can save a life, and make a positive difference as one person, and that we should all try and “be the change” we want to see, I hope this isn’t true.

Over at Political Dynamite, a new blog dedicated to the world of activism, they suggest there are different reasons (namely that NGOs have gone soft following a period of sympathetic governments they’re not enemies with), and while I think this is probably part of it, I wonder…

I wonder, and I worry, that it might be a bit simpler than that. But I don’t know for sure.

Why aren’t you out on the streets fighting for the changes you want to see anymore? Have we all got a case of internet-cause fatigue?

My top 10 blog posts of September

Too time poor to read blog posts as they happen? You’re in luck! I’ve compiled my top 10 blog posts of September in one tidy little post.

Without further ado, here’s what you liked reading most this month:

1. Banning the burqa - the debate I don’t want to debate was by far my most popular post. Which makes me happy, as I’d rank it as my most important post in the past 30 days too.

2. The new CARE Australia video was also a hit - it’s all slick n stuff. You should watch it.

3. I always suspected there were more poetry fans out there than people admit, which explains why my live-tweeting post from the Overload Poetry Festival was popular.

4. And people wanted to know why the kids are all right too.

5. My Africa is not a country series is generally popular, find out why by checking out Burkina Faso

6. Or better still, check out Burundi (which was less popular but arguably more important, so I’m bending the rules)

7. Did you see this? No, me either is worth the attention. Really.

8. People also wanted to watch Sheryl Wu Dunn’s TED talk on women and poverty, which makes me smile.

9. And apparently people are wondering what to get my for my 30th at the end of the year

10. Finally, the popularity of this post tells me my wonderful readers are probably the type who think books are an essential item and should be GST free.

Did you like something that didn’t make the list? Tell me, I’d love to know what tickled you.

[image: out in America]

Poverty doesn’t cause conflict

Poverty doesn’t cause conflict, according to Chris Blattman, who is doing research on conflict and governance in Africa.

I like the stuff from Chris, and link to him fairly often, because he says new things about poverty. He challenges my preconceived ideas (like that unemployed young men increase the risk of conflict) in interesting ways.

Of particular interest to me today are his thoughts on the future of International NGOs and their role in good governance:

• It’s a good moment for conflict NGOs to rethink their future
• Institutional change and peace-building are a local processes you can (at best) support
• It’s harder than most of the things you do
• Do it seriously or don’t mess around
• Have realistic expectations of the pace of change
• Experiment and innovate

One thing I worry about with NGOs is the ability to turn the ship around mid course, if that’s what is needed. More than that, I worry that many NGOs work so hard, with so little staff, on such big/important projects, that the capabilities for quality monitoring and evaluation are seriously limited.

Suggestion? Add Chris to your google reader/news feed (you have one of those, right?)

Banning the burqa - a debate I don’t want to debate

In the previous couple of years I have lived in a majority Muslim country, Bangladesh, and traveled through Turkey and Egypt. I confess that before I had deep personal experiences with Islam as a religion, I may have thought banning the burqa could be a lesser evil for women’s empowerment than not banning the burqa.

But now I know, I was absolutely wrong.

For some women, banning the burqa would be the equivalent experience of forcing me to wear a bikini to the supermarket in Melbourne, or a mini skirt to work. And that is something I can never support, though this is not at all what the debate is about.

After watching this week’s Insight program, and reading the article The burqa mural, should it be painted over in The Punch, I am saddened by the intensity of the debate, by the fear, and by the underlying implications that burqa=Muslim=dangerous.

One of the most common reasons given on Insight for banning the burqa was security. It was argued that the burqa should be banned because it makes identification difficult, and that is a security risk.

My thoughts? It is not women in burqas I am worried about when I am walking home from the station at midnight. It’s not women in burqas I cross the road to avoid in dark streets. It is not women in burqas I was told to be wary of when being taught stranger danger.

I find it very hard to believe that crimes are being committed in any number statistically relevant for “security risk” to be a legitimate reason to outlaw the items of clothing a woman can wear outside her home. But even if is the women in burqas we need to be identifying, then there are very practical and easy ways around it - having female personnel available to make the idenitifcation when required.

This is how the rest of the world does it, and if Australia is serious about this as a security risk, then we need to be hiring women as security and law enforcement staff specifically for the purpose of identifying these women in burqas in situations where establishing identity is paramount.

The argument that banning the burqa because it infringes on the rights of women, and contributes to the oppression of women is much more complex, and has much more validity. As someone who has worked intensely on women’s empowerment issues, and women’s empowerment issues in a majority Muslim country, I feel I am in a better position than many Australians to offer my point of view, which is why I am weighing in on the debate.

Education, education, education, and I will say it one more time - education - is the key to women’s empowerment, not outlawing an item of clothing. Educating women and girls is the sole most important, influential and effective way of empowering women the world over.

The education of males is also a part of the picture, of course, but it’s not as effective as education females. It is education that will progress culture and education that will provide women with choice.

If I thought banning the burqa would lead to improvements in the lives of women, I would be all for it, but let’s be real - this is Australia. A law against a religious item of clothing worn by a very small minority of the Australian population, is much more likely to alienate women for whom wearing the burqa is an essential part of their religious and cultural identity.

It could force these women indoors, prevent them from participating in a society outside the household, and worst of all, make them feel persecuted against by a country that calls itself the lucky country, the country of the fair go.

Please, let’s not ban the burqa. Let’s not give in to fear and prejudice and bigotry. Let’s get serious about educating women and girls around the world. Let’s get serious about giving women the world over real choices.

Did you get this far? Then you should watch this video on ‘The girl effect.’

Child hunger, as seen at Walmart

This week I am being overwhelmed by all the stories doing the rounds about poverty. This is reassuring given the UN Millennium Development Goals Summit is happening in New York right now (oh, if I could be everywhere at once).

This huge wave of media coverage in support of eradicating extreme poverty in our life time is at once thoroughly exciting and a bit overwhelming at times. This is the stuff that keeps me up at night. It is why I do what I do every day.

And yet…the fact that at the beginning of every month people are traipsing the aisles of Wal Mart at midnight, waiting for the stroke of midnight to click over so they can feed their children serves as a good reminder that addressing income disparaty must be an ongoing priority.

And if you really think about it, the only reason somebody gets out in the middle of the night and buys baby formula is that they need it, and they’ve been waiting for it. Otherwise, we are open 24 hours — come at 5 a.m., come at 7 a.m., come at 10 a.m. But if you are there at midnight, you are there for a reason. - Bill Simon, the head of Wal-Mart’s U.S. operations (via NPR)

For more on income disparity in the US, this is what class warfare looks like is a good place to start.