photos of sad children, always works hey?

NGOs still fail standards on appeal images
14 Jan 2004

By Ruth Gidley

LONDON (AlertNet) – Whenever a sudden disaster strikes, aid agencies face a quandary -- how to tug at donors' heartstrings with powerful images without breaking self-imposed rules about portraying survivors with dignity?

Dozens of NGOs launched funding appeals within days of a massive earthquake hitting southeastern Iran in late 2003, knowing the short attention span of television media would soon move elsewhere, leaving scant time to harness public sympathy.

"The point to watch with appeals is you're trying to make money out of an image," said Tony Vaux, a former Oxfam worker and author of a book about the aid world, "The Selfish Altruist".

"I don't think you can just say, 'I'm making money for a good cause, and therefore anything's justified.’ I think you have to be saying to yourself, 'I'm exploiting this situation. What are the bounds of morality?'"

Vaux said he had seen few shocking examples of bad practice after the December 26 Iran earthquake, but that the risks were always there.

"The root of the problem is they're competing with other agencies," he said. "If they put in a bland image with all sorts of educational stuff, they don't get the response, so I think there will always be this tendency.”

Eva Von Oelreich, head of disaster preparedness at the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) said: “We have to overcome that enormous gap that means we are much more sorry for a neighbour's dog and our neighbouring countries than those far away. We need to show we are part of one planet."

Fundraising appeals have come a long way since the days when European churches collected money with pictures of starving black babies.

"The very far extreme -- the obscene images -- have been wiped out," Vaux said.

"I can't remember seeing the (starving) Biafra child for a long time. You do see pathetic people needing eye operations. Those kind of shock images are still around. Or people with some dreadful disease.

"(But) you don't get the leprosy limbs you used to get 20 or 30 years ago, so I suppose there's been a certain improvement."

HARD TO PIN DOWN

An entire academic discipline has emerged covering development, humanitarian relief, refugee studies and so on, and the aid world over the past two decades in particular has become much more aware of its responsibilities to people receiving assistance.

Von Oelreich said she noticed that agencies often used images that were degrading or portrayed people as helpless victims, and the worst examples were usually related to drought.

"It's people who are emaciated and it's ignoble to portray."

Vaux said it was unacceptable to use appeal photographs to make false generalisations.

For example, he said appeals for African food crises sometimes still used images of children in nutrition centres as if to suggest that the emaciated children before the lens were representative of kids throughout the country.

But experts agree it is difficult to pin down exactly what is inappropriate.

Sometimes photographs of mourners are intrusive, and sometimes they are acceptable if taken from a distance, Vaux said.

"An image always gives a very emotional impression and there are so many ways (of taking a photograph)," Von Oelreich said. "A sobbing person might be quite all right. It depends what is around that person."

Vaux said images inspiring pity by showing victims holding out their hands or waiting for help were misleading.

"It's not actually what people are saying,” he said. “People are saying: 'We're getting on with trying to sort ourselves out, and if you want to give us a hand, that's great.’ That would be more truthful."

’NOT HELPLESS OBJECTS’

Vaux took part in a critical evaluation of the response to the 2001 earthquake in western India by the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC), an umbrella group of British agencies.

The evaluation report said a DEC appeal photograph of an old man with his hands raised in supplication failed to emphasise the dignity of the people it was aimed at helping, and was therefore a contradiction of the Red Cross Code of Conduct, which most responsible NGOs agree to abide by.

The Red Cross code says: "In our information, publicity and advertising activities, we shall recognise disaster victims as dignified humans, not helpless objects."

This is further defined as a commitment to portray "an objective image of the disaster situation where the capacities and aspirations of disaster victims are highlighted, and not just their vulnerabilities and fears."

Relief agencies struggle to be accountable to both donors and the people they work with in developing countries.

Von Oelrich said humanitarian organisations had a duty to give the general public a realistic picture of where its donations were going, even if that meant tackling some complex issues.

"It's absurd to try to build on a bad conscience or pity or those very legitimate feelings we can have,” she said.

The DEC evaluation of the Gujarat earthquake response said: "(We) detected a tendency amongst some aid agency staff in the UK to regard public sympathy as a commodity to be exploited rather than a perception to be developed."

LOCAL PEOPLE IGNORED

Von Oelrich said NGOs should work more on describing how humanitarian work was connected to recovery, poverty and development.

"It's our fault as humanitarians that we can't make this understood to people in simple terms, so we keep them ignorant, in a sense," she said.

"We have spent a lot of time on building up financial and legal accountability towards our donors, including the general public, but it's much more difficult to find an appropriate way of being accountable to the people who are affected by a disaster.”

Experts noted that disaster images rarely portrayed local people helping each other.

"Ninety percent of the people saved are saved by their neighbours and family and about 10 percent by people rush in from round and about, and about 0.01 percent by people who come in from the other side of the world," Vaux said.

Von Oelrich agreed.

“We over-emphasise the international part. We want to show how we are the helpers whereas we show so little of local initiatives. I miss that because it has to do with capacities which we can build on, rather than weaknesses which we can come in and help with.”

With the number of NGOs in the world on the rise and the industry’s standards coming under increasing scrutiny, the humanitarian community has come up with guidelines to raise its professionalism.

The Red Cross Red Crescent movement and the Geneva-based Sphere Project are the most prominent promoters of quality and accountability in humanitarian response.

The Sphere Project focuses on minimum standards in humanitarian action, and its handbook provides indicators to measure compliance. The document includes the principles of conduct for the international Red Cross and Red Crescent movement and NGOs in disaster response programmes.

"I see that there are new organisations coming up with the same problematic ways of using images that we have tried to... get rid of," Von Oelreich said, adding that the proliferation of new agencies had led to lower standards.

"Sometimes there are barriers between different parts of an organisation and not enough interaction or penetration of essential policy issues to all parts of our organisations."

’VOCABULARY OF THE 19th CENTURY'

Von Oelrich said that when fundraising and communications staff came from the private sector, it could take time and education for them to understand the political implications of the language and images they used.

"When they talk about people as 'victims' that already says something, if you don't see people as human beings with capacities," she said.

She was also critical of initiatives -- especially common among business efforts to be involved in socially responsible projects -- that talked about "charity" and "philanthropy".

"They are using a vocabulary of the 19th century," she said.

Alison Joyner, project manager at the Sphere Project, said her personal impression was that NGOs paid less attention to the politics of images than they used to.

"There's a feeling that things have slipped in the last five or six years," she told AlertNet.

Von Oelrich disagreed. She said: "I think it's slowly, slowly getting better."

Joyner said NGOs tended to overlook the code of conduct, and it was no longer promoted as much as it used to be.

"New people might not even be aware of it," she said. "In practice, people think of Sphere as standards and don't really think about the charter.”

Von Oelreich said the IFRC had agreed to register organisations that choose to sign up to the code of conduct.

"But there is absolutely no compliance mechanism," she said.

new internationalist
issue 194 - April 1989

The wide-eyed child, smiling or starving, is the most powerful
fundraiser for aid agencies. But no matter how effective the image,
the message can be very destructive. Paddy Coulter explains.

Appealing eyes pursue the reader like a latter-day Mona Lisa. ‘Team up with a needy child,’ reads an advertisement for Christian Children’s Fund. Many organizations favour this fund-raising approach nowadays. Children crop up constantly. They are usually pictured alone but sometimes in groups – or in a classic ‘Madonna and Child’ composition. One UK study found that 60 per cent of fundraising photographs were of women and children portrayed as ‘victims’.

Aid agencies now claim to exercise great care in the selection of images. ‘We’re not big on big-bellied children’ is how Christian Children’s Fund of Canada puts it. Paula McTavish, National Director of Foster Parents Plan in Canada, explains the current approach: ‘We try not to focus on dying, emaciated children but on children in need, with pictures of sad, wistful-looking children with big, gorgeous eyes who stir some emotion’. Happier, more positive images don’t bring in the money. These images are kept for ‘the converted’ who also get more information: ‘You can’t tell the whole story in an ad’. Foster Parents Plan of Australia are also satisfied with the way they tackle the issue: ‘We believe our photographs and messages capture the need, and yet maintain dignity and strength of character’.

George Smith, chairman of the London-based advertising agency, Smith Bundy, believes that progress has been made. In the past Smith has worked for Oxfam, Action Aid and War on Want. He says: ‘Charity advertising is rarely demeaning nowadays. The lesson that it should not demean was learnt a long time ago. It’s an old battle which has very largely been won’.

But the starving child image is rarely absent for long – as one can see from a recent front cover of a leading left-wing UK magazine, New Statesman and Society. An article supporting the United Nations Association (UNA) appeal for Sudan gave the starving baby approach a gloss of legitimacy. The consciousness-raising can come later. What matters now is the money.’ The UNA’s advertising agency justifies shock tactics on the basis of expedience: ‘We tried to make advertisements far more positive - and get away from the ‘starving baby’ image. But no-one dipped their hands into their pockets. The only thing that does it is guilt: you have to shock people’.

Squalid images
Indeed the advertising which has recently been appearing for voluntary aid agencies portrays a universally squalid Third World full of passive, needy people - especially children. The television appeals are particularly disturbing. In Canada it is almost impossible to turn on TV after 11pm or throughout the weekend and not come across one of the many documentary-style shows aired by World Vision or Christian Children’s Fund to promote child-sponsorship. The World Vision appeal takes viewers on a whirlwind tour of the world’s children - just waiting for their prospective donors to pick up the phone. Last stop: northern Kenya and a slow zoom in on an embattled child’s face. ‘Help change one child’s life - forever,’ the voice-over intones, ‘call right now.’ With very few honourable exceptions, the causes of this suffering are never mentioned although we are assured that the solutions are easy.

Solutions are also cheap although the exact sum varies: it may be ‘only eight dollars a month’ or ‘just 40p a day’. Very little is ever said about what Third World governments or local organizations are doing to improve conditions in their own countries. The language is invariably of ‘them’ and ‘us’ - the apparently helpless ‘them’ being helped by the neo-colonial ‘us’.

A disturbing photographic variant is the depiction of a white Western adult alongside one or more ‘wistful’ black Third World children. A World Family advertisement, for example, includes a British TV personality who comes to the conclusion that ‘we really can change the world, if we do it steadily, one child at a time’.

Absent partners
Save the Children Fund’s (SCF) Christmas advertising in the UK avoids such crass claims. But it does mislead through omission. The impression given by SCF’s copywriter is that the Fund single-handedly provides medical care and health-education overseas. Yet as SCF’s excellent educational report Prospects for Africa attests, the role of small charities like itself is ‘not primarily to provide a service but to enhance the ability of the people of the country to establish and run these services themselves... All SCF’s activities are therefore undertaken in partnership with national governments or indigenous voluntary organizations.’ But there is no mention of these partners in the advertisement.

One also looks in vain for references to the debt crisis or other international economic pressures which are squeezing the health-care budgets of so many poor countries: or explanations of the links between rich countries and poor - and a shared responsibility for the failure to protect millions of children against preventable disease.

The Oxfam UK Christmas ad is no better. The ‘Perfect After Dinner Drink’ may have substituted a more sophisticated graphic design for the appealing child - but the copywriter’s approach is virtually identical. Again there is no suggestion of any local person acting as intermediary between ‘the children like Musa Alif’ in rural Somalia and Oxfam which provides the water pump. No hint either of the bloody civil war raging in Somalia which has created tremendous additional suffering.

Fund-raisers would argue that their ads make only a tiny dent in public perceptions. But several recent studies in the UK show that ‘helpless-child’ imagery has reinforced patronizing attitudes amongst young people towards the Third World - particularly in the wake of Band Aid and other African famine appeals. Whilst such appeals evoke compassion for Third World children, they also strengthen young people’s perceptions of Africa as a helpless continent - in which the only healthy, happy people are ‘aided’ people. And they do nothing to help youngsters understand the connections between conditions in Africa and what happens in the West.

Worse still, the unbalanced diet of ‘helpless-child’ images and references to an underprivileged Third World rebound on ethnic minorities in the West. A group of young black Londoners recount their personal experience of adverse effects in a new educational video, Developing Images. Says one: ‘All the images that we see of the Third World are negative… People associate me with the Third World and it makes their views towards me very patronizing because they feel the Third World is all about charity. It’s almost as if they’re being charitable by letting me in this country! That can fuel resentment and racism’.

One boy, Junior, recalls internalizing such racist feelings at school: ‘People related underprivileged children from the Third World to me as well... I felt like I was inferior. It’s not a nice feeling’. And several young women describe visiting their parent’s birthplace in Pakistan and being staggered by the contrast between their expectations - generated by TV and charity appeals - and the reality. The experience made them aware of having implicitly accepted the stereotype of Third World people being ‘completely helpless until white people come and help them’.

Says Junior: ‘I’d feel a lot better if we saw black people helping themselves. It would hopefully improve the way people think about Africa - what Africans have done for themselves. Whenever we see these pictures we think the only things that are done in Africa are done by white people, which is just not true’.

Stripped of dignity
Advertising agencies frequently claim that such publicity material cannot be judged by non-professionals. But there are many people who understand rather better than copywriters and art directors what such images really mean. Representatives from African non-governmental organizations have attacked ‘the image of Africans incapable of dealing with their own problems’. At last year’s ‘Images of Africa’ conference, they pressed for a dialogue about fund-raising imagery. ‘It is time to abandon the stereotypes of poverty and to substitute the voices of poor people themselves’, argues one leading conference participant from Zimbabwe, Sithembiso Nyone.

She complains that too many voluntary agency initiatives strip Africans of their real dignity: ‘As regards something like Band Aid, people were certainly saved and we are grateful. But we are living with that negative image. It has reinforced racism. It has reinforced the colonial mentality of looking down on Africa, which is a damaging attitude if you want to engage in a dialogue about human development with the West. Although Band Aid and the like addressed short-term necessities, we need also to look at long-term consequences’.

Paula McTavish of Foster Parents Plan in Canada is quite frank about the pressure on charities to spend as little as possible on fund-raising costs: ‘We can’t spell out the whole story to everyone. Other groups can spread the more positive experience - we can’t do everything. We simply can’t educate every Canadian’.

And as long as fund-raisers have to get as much cash as possible, international aid agencies will continue to exploit children. For fund-raising in these circumstances becomes an end in itself rather than a means to an end. The psychological needs of potential donors are seen as more pressing than those of distant Third World beneficiaries. Interestingly, anti-poverty organizations working for disadvantaged groups in the West like travelers (also known as gypsies) are obliged to refrain from this kind of racism. As one veteran fund-raiser admits ‘travelers fly off the handle’ if insensitive techniques are employed to raise money to help them.

Fund-raising adverts should reflect the real development issues. But for this to happen, international aid agencies will have to overhaul their priorities. They have to stop treating fund-raising as the overriding objective and accept some responsibility for public education.

Paddy Coulter is Deputy Director/Education Officer for the International Broadcasting Trust in the UK. He was previously Head of Communications at Oxfam UK.

1 The Image of Africa - paper given at The Conference for International Exchange on Communication and Development Between Africa and Europe, 1988.
2 See Images of Africa Project by Nikki van der Gaag and Cathy Nash, published by Oxfam UK, 1988. Also Awareness or Understanding? by Ross Grant and John Cameron, published by the Centre for World Development Education in the UK in association with the Hunger Project, 1988.
3 Developing Images, an educational video on images of the Third World. Available from the International Broadcasting Trust at £22.94 ($39) per pack.

To reach the needy, some groups make a devils bargain

We've all seen them-those big-eyed waifs with distended bellies _ in some hell-hole in Africa, South America, or the Far East. TV is filled with such images. "Give money, save a child!" implores the earnest celebrity as our senses are battered by a stream of horrific visuals that often ends with a female aid worker desperately holding a famine-stricken, fly-covered skeletal child to her bosom. Timed to coincide with our Sunday dinner, late night insomnia, or early morning "good-to-be-alive" breakfast, these infomercials massage our conscience to the point of "enough."
Or, as intended, to the point of reaching for our wallets.

But how much good is accomplished with our hard-earned dollars? Do they alleviate the misery? Do they help children in an Africa so devastated by the effects of El Nino that crop fields are nothing but a dust bowl? And how much of the millions raised actually reach the poor? The last question is easy: 30 or 40 percent at most, experts agree. The $5.6 distributed to Oxfam and Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), out of $13 million raised by Britain's Disaster Emergency Committee Famine Appeal for the Sudan in May 1998, is typical.

Humanitarian aid organizations, or non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as they're called, are big business. In 1997,443 NGOs were registered under the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) umbrella. With a budget of $1.1 billion, $500 million from private donations, and a thousand refugee projects in 131 countries, the UN estimates there are some 22.4 million refugees, seven million in Africa alone. But suffering is a commodity that raises money, and everyone wants a slice of the pie.

As with any growth enterprise operated by naive, principled people of goodwill, the opportunists and the flimflam artists take advantage of the chance to cash in.

A PERFECT DISASTER

The largest humanitarian aid operation in history is Operation Lifeline Sudan (OLS) a multi-layered logistics business. Operating under the aegis of the UNHCR in the Bahrel-Ghazal province of the southern Sudan, its TV promotions, newspaper ads, and direct mailings brought in over $3 billion between 1989 and 1998. In one three-week period last May, it raised close to $20 million from a barrage of TV commercials. Pleading for funds to increase feeding capacity from 2700 to 5000 starving children a week proved highly effective. Even commercial enterprises marketing desirable consumer products would be hard pressed to match the response that campaign received.

Media conglomerates in North America and Europe are in the forefront of the "raising money for disasters" business. They alone have the expertise to mount effective media campaigns. Skimming off high percentage fees for their Madison Avenue and Fleet Street services, they've developed a profile of the ideal emergency. Modifying their normally stringent up-front payment policies and instead keeping up to 40 percent of the donations, they've developed a surefire approach to marketing what they call a "complex" emergency.

"To mount an effective campaign for charitable donations," reveals Andrew Edwards, a Las Vegas infomercial producer, "one needs a given set of criteria. First, the organization must have a recognizable name. Oxfam, Save the Children, Medecins Sans Frontieres, or any one of a dozen will do. Secondly, the exotic location must be reasonably safe for relief workers as a ground presence is necessary. Third, access for TV crews must be relatively easy, the scenery spectacular, the weather hot and sunny for good lighting effects, and, finally, the victims must be photogenic. Mud huts, scrawny cattle, and torn, dirt-encrusted rags as props also help. Swarms of flies don't do any harm, either."

The Sudanese Bahr-el-Ghazal famine emergency fulfills all those conditions ... and more. With the addition of propellers whirring, white planes raising dust clouds on hard-packed runways, skeletal children sucking on their gaunt mother's wizened breasts, a frenzied mob fighting for grain dropped from the skies, and the de rigueur blond, female aid worker sans makeup clutching a rag-covered child, the Sudanese famine is perfect Madison Avenue fodder.

Totally unmentioned, however, is the fact that this tragedy is caused by an on-going war stoked by the US and Uganda on one hand, and fundamentalist Islamic Iran and northern Sudan on the other. That the Sudanese tragedy is as much a war between religions as a consequence of nature's ravages is never mentioned. Human cruelty doesn't generate as much money. But this raises the question of whether more of the donated proceeds should be used to pressure rebel movements and despotic governments to cease and desist, and less to pay high-powered advertising companies and NGOs with staff in air-conditioned offices from New York and Geneva to Nairobi.

DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD

Aid organizations have two inherent problems: They operate in a war zone where power comes from the barrel of a Kalashnikov, and they suffer from the corrupting influences of the big business syndrome. To Band-Aid both, they've made a pact with the devil. Actually more than one.

The primary cause of the Sudanese famine is war, not drought. But stressing that leads to howls from outraged aid agencies and their supporters. Those doing it anyway -like Claire Short, the British International Development Secretary who called a high-powered British TV appeal misleading and unnecessary-are labeled cruel and hardhearted. Who could
question that helping starving refugees is so undeniably right?

"In the past, we have acted on a simple sense of moral outrage, as if that was the only reality you had to operate in," explains Roy Williams, head of the foreign disasters office in the multi-billion dollar USAID. "But, as in Rwanda and Bosnia, we found that there were too many others all too willing to take advantage."

Raising money for "complex" humanitarian emergencies requires a well-rounded campaign. TV, print media, and direct mail are all required to generate the maximum income. Thirty-second TV spots, detailed 30-minute infomercials, and free talk show discussions all play a part in raising financing, while full page "hit you in the eye" newspaper ads, preferably in Saturday or Sunday editions, catch their demographic target- people with Monday-Friday jobs and money in their pockets. Stragglers are hooked with the direct mailing, which serves both as a reminder for those already committed and as a final appeal to those who have slipped through the net.

Most ''complex'' emergencies scattered throughout 131 countries are in areas wracked by civil wars. To gain unfettered access to refugees, aid organizations sign "agreements" with the warring parties. The precedent for this tragic decision was set in 1994, when the UNHCR agreed that the genocidal Hutu Interahamwe be allowed to run the refugee camps in the then-Zaire. In exchange for such access-and to ensure the safety of staff-donated grain, medical supplies, transport, and communications equipment is bartered with rebel and government forces. Additional side agreements for "security" services are concluded with combatants on the ground. In the Bahr-el-Ghazal, Sudan Peoples Liberation Army (SPLA) soldiers are even used as policemen to keep the starving refugees from overwhelming the NGO staff distributing the grain and high-protein biscuits.

Lurking in every "agreement" is the unspoken fact that some grain is resold, with the proceeds used to purchase the very weapons of war that prolong the conflicts. How else do rebel movements in countries with no natural resources raise the necessary hard currency to purchase the millions of rounds of 7.62mm AK47 firepower? At the very least, donated grain is used to feed soldiers, releasing finances for weapons purchases. One has only to tour the besieged Sudanese Military garrisons in Juba or SPLA rebel forces in Torit to see bags of donated grain stored in their Quonset-shaped warehouses. Visiting mess halls where donated high-protein biscuits are dunked into mugs of tea by the AK47-toting forces on both sides only reinforces the truth. Aid is clearly a double-edged sword.
Systematic diversion of aid has been unquestioned to date. Now, however, the NGOs' motives and operational philosophy are coming under scrutiny. To many, it's like turning over a rock. Something slimy is sure to jump out.

"Are we not just prolonging the wars?" asks Rakiya Omar of African Rights, an agency critical of the work of charity organizations in the Sudan. "Are NGOs giving a hand to one or both of the combatants because it is a matter of institutional survival? They need a presence on the ground to raise money and to justify their existence and are not willing to ask themselves whether they are just making the situation worse."

For shure this benefit was about business

Bitter 'wise' idiots...