A Second Glance at Western Altruism

Source: Wikimedia Commons In a world of instant communication, instant gratification, and speedy travel, activism and altruism has found new life and a new buzzword: awareness.

But awareness and goodwill alone are not enough.

The Kony 2012 campaign is a recent and high profile example of this. The Invisible Children brainchild attempted to raise awareness and funds with the goal of stopping Joseph Kony, the leader of Ugandan militant group The Lords Resistance Army. The video campaign went viral and Invisible Children raised almost $20 million dollars through donations and “awareness products” such as t-shirts and bracelets and brought attention to the atrocities committed in Uganda by Joseph Kony and the LRA.

On the surface, the campaign seems like a success. But as novelist and Georgetown professor Dinaw Mengistew wrote, “Change has never come with a click, or a tweet; lives are not saved by bracelets.” The fundamental flaw of Kony 2012, and many other campaigns or organizations, is one of simplification. The campaign took the complex situation in Uganda, boiled it down to one man, then asserted that the solution was a click of a button or a small purchase. The only reason Joseph Kony had not been arrested and a 20 year conflict has not been resolved was supposedly due to a lack of awareness in the West, mainly the United States. Even the name of the organization has similar connotations to the colonist’s attitude towards “the new world”: if we don’t know about it, it doesn’t exist. However, to the families whose children were being kidnapped and the organizations already trying to help in Northern Uganda, these children were never invisible.

The infantilization of Africa, its many dynamics and its complex issues is what allows a campaign like this to be so financially successful while simultaneously ignoring the years of UN, Ugandan, and Sudanese efforts to ameliorate the situation. Willful ignorance is just as pervasive in another altruism based industry: voluntourism. Every year, well-off westerners decide to combine volunteer work with a trip to an exotic locale, paying organizations to give them the opportunity to work on projects such as building houses, working in schools or taking care of orphans. It’s a rapidly growing industry; over 1.6 million tourists spend about $2billion every year.

As noble as it sounds, there are quite a few pitfalls. Many of the organizations that facilitate these trips are focused on the experience of the volunteer, not on the actual communities involved. For the organization, accommodations and staffing required for these trips often come with high overhead costs, resulting in an increased effort to please the tourists for the additional revenue. In situations where the organization works with schools or orphanages, staff is often pulled away from caring for those who need them most to take care of the volunteers’ needs.  The trips are mostly short term and consist of unsustainable, low skill or quality work. They often drive out local workers who could get trained and paid for the service being provided by outside volunteers, and rarely asks or considers what the local population wants or needs.

Here’s another example. An American church partnered with a church in Haiti and decided to build houses for local residents. The volunteers paid their fees, arrived, built the houses and promptly left. The Haitian families moved in, but very soon returned to begging for money and food. The underlying issue for this community was poverty, and building houses did nothing to alleviate the lack of jobs, education or professional skills endemic there.

In South Africa, a particularly popular travel option is volunteering as a short-term caregiver to AIDS orphans. A report by the Human Sciences Research Council outlined a lot of the issues surrounding the growing niche market. Due to the large unemployment and poverty in the area, there is a large number of local youth that would be grateful for the opportunity to receive training and regular meals and would provide a consistent and long term source of care. Instead, tourists are paying to take those spots for short periods of time. This is potentially harmful to the children, having already lost their parents and are now constantly making new intimate bonds that are then terminated as soon as the volunteer leaves.

Of course, there are organizations that get it right, donations that do in fact make a difference and true merit in building awareness around important issues. But due diligence is key to making the right choice in organizations and causes to support and dispelling what has been referred to as the “white-savior industrial complex”.

The organizations that truly make a difference work with the communities that they want to help. They work through existing local infrastructure, avoid quick projects with little long term impact, and focus on finding and addressing the local needs in cooperation with the community.