Tales from the Hood takes on Nicholas Kristof, author of Half The Sky, for his recent article in Outside magazine titled “Nicholas Kristof’s Advice for Saving the World”.
I am also critical of this article. Given his audience Kristof could have provided practical advice to donors on how to see past aid agency advertising to make wise funding decisions. Instead his only advice to donors is in the final paragraph (added on later?) where he encourages them to develop their own sponsorship programs:
“…if you’re trekking in the Himalayas, come back not with stories of impoverished villages but rather ones about a particular 12-year-old girl who, if she received just $10 a month, could stay in school. Come back with photos of her—or, better, video that you put on a blog or Web site. Make people feel lucky that they have the opportunity to assist her, so that they’ll find helping her every bit as refreshing as, say, drinking a Pepsi.”
Nowhere does he mention the problems common to sponsorship programs, nor any of the standards developed to protect both the sponsored child and the sponsor. Just a few InterAction standards for child sponsorship include:
7.11.14
Members shall have the capacity of providing financial and performance oversight and child monitoring at the local level, whether through a field office structure or through partnerships with local entities. They shall have established policies and procedures for ongoing program monitoring and evaluation.
7.11.6
Members shall never knowingly enroll a child or family already enrolled by another sponsorship agency; nor shall a member seek more than one sponsor for a child unless this fact is clearly communicated to sponsors.
7.11.8
Members shall have clear policies and procedures to respect the privacy and dignity of sponsored children and their families. Members shall seek to protect sponsors from inappropriate solicitations from sponsored families.
Does Kristof want the takeaway for Outside readers to be that they can save the world by finding children to sponsor in their travels? If so, he should have discussed issues such as: how to ensure that they’re not being conned; how to monitor the sponsorship to ensure the money actually benefits the child; how to transfer funds to the family; how to determine if the child is already receiving funds from other people; and how to protect the privacy of the child.
Kristof’s article covers none of these common problems, instead the bulk of his article appears to be aimed at the aid world.
People are far more likely to donate to a single person in need
Kristof does share some interesting research that found that people are far more likely to donate when it is just one person in need. The chances of donating decrease significantly when two people are featured, let alone thousands of people in need. He also found from his own writing that people are more attracted to stories of overcoming adversity rather than people still in dire need. He states:
“If one lesson is the need to emphasize hopefulness, the second is that storytelling needs to focus on an individual, not a group.”
While good to know, this is nothing new to the aid world. Child sponsorship programs have been around since the ’90s and one look at Heifer International’s website shows they’ve got the story telling aspect down pat. Personally, I ignore these “happy stories” and tell donors to do the same because they are just advertising and do not prove that the aid agency is successful, competent, or providing the type of aid that is most needed.
Non “sexy” projects are hard to fund
Kristof readily states:
“Unfortunately, the most cost-effective aid interventions tend to be the kind that are incremental and save only a small proportion of lives—and are thus least satisfying to the giver…. Right now, about one-third of families in poor countries don’t get enough iodine, and the result is not so much goiters as diminished intellectual capacity… This is a lifelong intelligence deficit and a significant burden on poor countries, and it can be resolved very cheaply; iodizing salt costs a couple of pennies per person per year.
Studies have suggested that iodizing salt brings real economic returns of nine times the cost—and yet we don’t do it.”
If iodizing salt is so cost effective with an economic return of “nine times the cost” why doesn’t his website and article feature organizations iodizing salt and encourage donors to fund these programs? Perhaps because it’s not what is known in the aid world as a “sexy project”. Continued from the quote above:
“The reason is, I think, that the results are statistical, not visible. You can never look at a child afterwards and say, “This girl would have been retarded if it weren’t for iodized salt.”
If his purpose was to help Outside readers be more effective donors, Kristof could have highlighted more programs that have a real impact but are difficult to fund, encouraging readers to look past “sexy projects”. Instead the rest of the article focuses on how aid agencies can make their projects look more “sexy”.
Funding teacher salaries is not “sexy”
It is well known in that aid world that inherently sexy projects are easier to fund. It is simpler to fund the construction of a school than it is to fund teacher salaries, school maintenance, or utilities. In the field we’ve all seen schools that were built far larger than the actual need or libraries full of English language books that go untouched. While at the same time we’ve seen areas with so few teachers that they rotate between classes or even schools, or are paid so little they rarely show up to teach.
Kristof talks of slicing and dicing aid projects so that donors can fund specific items such as textbooks or school uniforms. This is not a new concept, every Peace Corps volunteer learns this and there are now numerous charity “gift catalogs”. It is not the items themselves that are difficult to fund, it’s the administrative and staffing cost of determining the need, developing the program, and distributing the goods that is difficult to fund. Kristof does not discuss any of this.
Donor Illusions
Kristof focuses on the need for aid agencies to create the feeling of a one-to-one connection with the aid recipient. To make his point he touts two examples, child sponsorship and Kiva.
Aid groups are getting savvier, and they are seeing how people want to help particular individuals, not causes. Child-sponsorship organizations like PlanUSA have always used this device, but the biggest success in recent years has been Kiva.org, which matches donors online with borrowers in poor countries who need microloans. It is very satisfying to make a $25 loan to a small shop owner in Paraguay, and so Kiva has boomed. Now other organizations are trying to figure out how to make these kinds of online direct connections as well.
Although Kristof was a reporter covering humanitarian affairs, he fails to mention the issues that arose around child sponsorship in the ’90s when the Chicago Tribune uncovered questionable practices. Here is a quote from the Chicago Tribune via David Roodman’s blog (which I highly recommend):
The Tribune’s yearlong examination of four leading sponsorship organizations…found that several children sponsored…received few or no promised benefits. A few others received a hodgepodge of occasional handouts, such as toothpaste, soap and cooking pots. Some got clothing and shoes that frequently did not fit.
Sick children were sometimes given checkups and medicine, but not always.
One child, a 12-year-old Malian girl sponsored through Save the Children, died soon after being sponsored, although the charity continued to accept money on her behalf for nearly two years after her death. A subsequent investigation by Save the Children found that at least two dozen other sponsors had sent the charity money on behalf of dead children in Mali for varying periods of time, in two cases as long as five years.
It is these very problems that lead to the push for general charity standards in the US as well as the child sponsorship standards listed previously. Kristof also fails to mention the recent flurry of articles about Kiva’s advertising practices, which began with David Roodman’s posting Kiva is not quite what it seems.
“In short, the person-to-person donor-to-borrower connections created by Kiva are partly fictional. I suspect that most Kiva users do not realize this. Yet Kiva prides itself on transparency.”
Philanthropy Action has kept an updated list of all the articles and blogs written about the “Donor Illusions” controversy. Kiva has since updated their website to more accurately represent their process.
In failing to mention either of these issues Kristof ignores problems that can easily arise in an effort to attract donors. If aid projects are misrepresented it hurts the entire aid industry by diminishing donor trust.
Reinforcing bad donor practices
Until donors become more knowledgeable and change how they chose projects and charities to fund, it will be a continued struggle to improve aid practices and programs. Unfortunately, Kristof’s article does not provide Outside readers with any real “Advice On Saving the Word”, but instead reinforces bad donor practices that have made it so difficult to fund projects like iodizing salt.
—–
Related Posts:
Deceptive advertising hurts the entire aid industry
Kiva, Heifer International, the American Red Cross, and donor trust
Does your aid agency website inform or misinform donors?
Bad donor advice perpetuates bad aid practices
It’s time to stop telling pretty stories and start really evaluating the impact of aid
Other articles or blogs:
Kiva is not quite what it seems
A mostly comprehensive guide to the Kiva and Donor Illusion debate
In which yet another “aid expert” give advice that’s not really very helpful…