I’ve been following the debates surrounding professionalism, amateurism, innovation and good practice in aid and development work on the blogosphere and Twitter for awhile now. In their most extreme and exaggerated form, they go something like this:
Extreme side 1: Amateurs are evil
Aid is about the poor. Amateurs and would-be overseas volunteers should stay home, give money to experienced international organizations, volunteer locally, and stop getting in the way of professionals who are trying to get some serious work done. Aid and development are complicated and there is no silver bullet. They require experience and expertise. Amateurs, voluntourists and unskilled volunteers do more harm than good — they are clueless, showing up with no experience or concept of good aid or development processes. They bypass coordination structures, create confusion and duplication, repeat mistakes and don’t follow known best practices or proven ethical and industry guidelines. You may be a brilliant designer, marketer, manager or engineer but if you don’t have experience in aid and development, please use your skills elsewhere.
Amateurs make major mistakes and get themselves into trouble, and then professionals have to waste their time dealing with them instead of on the people in most need of help. They parachute in ideas and technologies designed from afar that have no basis in reality because they don’t have any experience in aid, development or the developing world and they don’t listen to past experiences or lessons learned. They come up with stupid ideas, take away paid jobs from local people, create hand-out schemes and other unsustainable and inappropriate models of helping, and then leave. In no other field are amateurs allowed to go in and muck around in other people’s lives with no preparation or experience just because they have good intentions, so why are they allowed to barge into poor communities and bumble around just because they feel guilty about their own wealth and privilege or think it’s their right to help? The poor deserve better than that. Aid should be left to professionals who know what they are doing.
Extreme side 2: Aid and aid workers are evil
There’s no point in talking about professionalism because aid workers and aid and development in their totality have been an utter failure, regardless of how professional aid workers think they are. Aid is aid, how hard can it be? We need to get things done! Everyone can and should get involved in helping, because it’s everyone’s right and responsibility to help. How will things advance if new ideas and innovations aren’t tested? And by the way, my latest product/ invention/ idea would easily solve that issue that aid workers have been struggling with for centuries…. I just need a place to test it out, got any communities? Volunteers and people with good intentions can do just as good a job as professional aid workers, who have made a total mess of everything anyway with their outdated models and bureaucratic, slow, top down procedures.
New ways of doing things and ideas brought in by youth, volunteers, design students and for-profit innovators from different sectors are beneficial to aid, which is currently stagnated and ineffective and needs an overhaul, or better yet, total annihilation. Aid workers drive around in giant SUVs and don’t have any commitment to local people because they live in fancy ex-pat houses with servants, getting rich off of the backs of the poor they profess to help. It’s just a big business that is perpetuating itself and preventing the poor from developing. On top of that, the only way you can get into it is to start as a volunteer, but volunteering is discredited by those same aid workers. The dying field of aid and development is a closed and exclusive club. Aid should be abolished, and/or bypassed by small groups of dedicated, good-hearted, every-day individuals and/or social entrepreneurs and capitalists with good intentions who really care about people in the developing world, and can bring in new ways of working and innovations.
Hmmmm.
I’m finding the arguments really interesting. A little mixed up and too generalized sometimes, but both sides resonate with me because I’ve seen concrete examples of a lot of the above. (By the way, I hope no one takes offense at how I’ve portrayed the sides – this is just an exercise here – I love you all). So I was trying to step back and look at the discussion.
It struck me that the arguments sound a lot like the old media – new media arguments. New media is less professional, less rigorous, and sometimes unethical and low quality. But it often it brings innovations and truths that old media misses. It’s quick, accessible, open, less controlled and often pretty freaking amazing and right on. Old media is solid and has a long history of quality and impact, but it’s also slow, unresponsive and conservative at times. Old media that’s not finding a way to integrate and learn from new media is dying.
So how might old aid, old development and new aid, new development work together? What can traditional non-profits learn from traditional media outlets that have embraced new media or morphed their old models into something that is still solid and proven, yet offers a space for participation and innovation by the public?
What general standards and knowledge need to be out in the public to help amateurs or people from non-aid and non-development backgrounds who want to engage avoid pitfalls and known errors, and avoid breaking laws or forging forward unethically or foolishly, and doing damage? Can old and new come to terms and work together? What examples are there of this already happening in a way that both old and new agree is working? Or are these two sides totally incompatible and doomed to work against each other?
[Update] See Deconstructing volunteerism and overseas exchanges for a Part 2 to this post.
For more background….
Update: Penelope has written a great post called “On Entrepreneurship and NGOs”
Saundra over at Good Intentions are not Enough does a great job of sharing standards, practices and educating on how to select good charities/organizations, and has published a “Smart Aid Wish List” you can add to.
Check out this excellent chapter (.pdf) by ALNAP on Innovations in International Humanitarian Action (thanks to @talesfromthhood for sharing).
[update] Michael Keizer at A Humorless Lot wrote a great response post here: The professional volunteer (impossible in aid?) and how about the salaried amateur?
Check out the #smartaid and the #1millionshirts hashtags on Twitter.
Follow some of the bloggers on my blogroll — they pretty much span the different sides of the issue in less extreme and more nuanced ways than I’ve done in my exaggerations above.
Related posts on Wait… What?
Thank you for this! I am an incoming graduate student in international development and the two extremes are extremely frustrating! Last summer I went to Uganda with American Jewish World Service: an organization very much cognizant of the critiques on both sides focusing on granting and providing support to local NGOs, but also providing volunteer opportunities of various lengths and types.
Aside from such organization and an abundance of disposable income how are amateurs supposed to become experts? How do experts gain their knowledge and experience? Or at least I hope they gain experience along the way.
My problem with the extremes is that too many folks really are on the edges. During my undergraduate type I focused on anti-genocide activism. In efforts to bring peace to Sudan the experts and to a lesser extent the activists are similarly split to as they are in development. Do we focus on humanitarian efforts and fundraising for aid or do we actively nudge our government to get involved with peace, provide protection and hold perpetrators accountable? Where do we do the best good and where do we create problems?
Both sides need to open up their eyes and ears and learn from one another. We need new ideas and we need those to filter out the ones that won’t work. I am encouraged by the debate since at least those on both sides are taking the time to argue their side. A handful of those are open minded enough to both learn and teach. The increased interest in the field both by experts and amateurs will hopefully lead to innovation, but only by collaboration and communication.
Posts like yours acknowledging the positives and negatives of the debate and clarifying both sides. Someone needs to hold the fringes to task on how they’re making the collective goals of development more difficult and celebrate those open to truly moving forward.
So again, thank you!
Thanks for your comment Leran! I agree with you that the debate is really healthy, and I have a lot of respect for most everyone involved. Appreciate also that you took the time to weigh in.
I hope all the dialog can start to move from the blogosphere into the mainstream so that a broader set of the public can also learn from it. Cheers and thanks again, Linda
Thanks for this post. It’s good to see the different perspectives laid out in the extremes to reflect on how far to the end of the spectrum you find yourself. Agreed that both sides have valid arguments as well.
Thanks for commenting Saundra. I think you’ve been really instrumental in bringing these debates to the forefront, and really appreciate your tireless efforts to educate people on these issues and build debate and discussion around them. Linda
[…] ever-excellent Linda Raftree recently wrote an article about amateurs, professionals, innovations and smart aid. In it, she sketches in its extreme form two diametrically opposed views of volunteers and […]
[…] } While writing my last post on amateurs, professionals, innovations and smart aid, I was also thinking about why organizations or institutions offer volunteering, voluntourism and […]
Great stuff Linda! I have to admit that if I leaned in a direction it would be in the anti-volunteer group. However, I cannot think of volunteers to be entirely terrible (I have been one in many capacities). One issue to me is if confirmation bias can play into either of the two generalizations. I think you have pointed to two thoughts than are in fact held which can often be confirmed because the individual wants it to be so. If we start at a point where there is something to be learned from each we can begin to make honest evaluations.
Thank you for this exercise to show how both can be unfairly critical of each other.
Thanks for your comments Tom. I was a little unsure if I should post or not, so it’s nice to hear it can help the thinking along. I think one issue is that there are so many scenarios and so many different kinds of people, and so many different project set ups and situations, but they tend to get all lumped together and judged as one. Linda
Linda – I think you make a very important point here when you say “both sides resonate with me because I’ve seen concrete examples of a lot of the above…” It reminds me of the analogy of the pedestrian and the driver. Many of us have been both, but how often do we find ourselves in a situation as a pedestrian complaining about drivers who seem to be cutting us off, and as drivers about pedestrians who are moving too slowly? Somehow it seems to be human nature when we are in one situation to be critical of those representing a different point of view, even if (taken to an extreme analogy) under other conditions, we ‘are’ that other person. It is a good reminder to us all that to be most effective we may need to try to see things from others perspectives as often as we can. Making concerted efforts to do so may give us new appreciations that will allow discussions to proceed forward in constructive ways. Thanks for modeling this approach!
Hi Bonnie and thanks for your observations. The pedestrian/driver analogy is fantastic. ~L
Great post Linda. Thanks for sharing the ALNAP chapter, I’ll definitely have a look. Last week I was attending a meeting on development, ICT4D and innovation. The funny thing was that all the speakers totally forgot the existence of unofficial actors (such as DIY-hackers, programmers, innovators, development actors etc. that do amazing work despite not having any Ph.D status nor venture funding).
That’s a really interesting point, Mika- thanks for commenting!
How-matters.org explores the skills and knowledge needed by all international “do-gooders” (professional and amateur alike) to truly raise the level of human dignity within international assistance and to put real resources behind local means of overcoming obstacles.
From my perspective…it’s not about what we do, but HOW we do it.
Just checked out your site – love it. I’m a big fan of the Barefoot Guides. And agree that it’s about the how. And also the why.
Thanks so much Linda! I would appreciate if you would include “How Matters” in your list of related blogs. I’ve done this for yours too.
How-matters.org is an expression of my professional, but more importantly, a personal resolve to nurture alternative models of international development that genuinely build on the dignity, knowledge, skills, culture, and abilities of local people.
The journey begins…and thanks for your support.
Will do gladly Jennifer.
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Nice one, Linda, I can definitely agree on the concrete examples of both. I’d have to say I’ve seen some incredibly useless professionals sitting in very high levels of aid, with stillborn projects floating around them that are un-implementable, tying up millions of dollars, and if they were in the private sector, they would have been fired a long time ago. The new-aid / old-aid vs new-media / old-media analogy is a good one – time stands still for no-one, not even extremely important aid gods, so I hope we can learn from the past and embrace the new, though our track record in this is not terribly good. Onwards and upwards!
[…] en señalar que las buenas intenciones no alcanzan, a la vez que es necesaria una reflexión sobre el voluntariado y el trabajo amateur. Para sumarnos a esa reflexión con una sonrisa, les comparto hoy una historia publicada por el […]