Just up on THIS Magazine. Based on a previous article published in the Guardian (UK), this post takes a closer look at Canada’s role in the Cambodian draft NGO & Associations Law.

Slate just published a scathing – and refreshing – article on NGOs working in Cambodia. A number of the author’s comments ring true for aid and development work anywhere in the world. In particular,

The point here is not that every seemingly good cause is a fraud and that all international aid groups are poverty pimps (though some certainly are). It’s that people should bring the same degree of scrutiny to NGOs as they do to corporations and governments (and the media for that matter). And nowhere is a jaundiced eye more warranted than in examining the do-gooder community of Cambodia.

Silverstein also highlights the relationship between the corrupt Cambodian government and NGOs. One approach of choice by NGOs is working in the ‘back end’:

Gauntlett declined to comment for this story, but Wildlife Alliance provided a general response: ‘The blame game doesn’t work for groups like us inside Cambodia. We have to be careful and build alliances that are sometimes uncomfortable. It’s delicate because the government can shut down an NGO whenever it wants. But we work on the inside, quietly, and get things done. We’ve been able to get things done and reverse concessions by working quietly inside the government and reminding it of its own legal obligations.’

But, when is this simply just not worth it anymore? Silverstein concludes the article with the following:

The NGOs desperately want access and the basic equation is that the government grants it to them in exchange for their silence about corruption or anything else remotely controversial,” says the Western expatriate who has worked on land issues. “At a certain point you have to ask yourself, ‘Where is this going, and what are we accomplishing?’

Sunrith Ham, Deputy Director of Monitoring & Protection at LICADHO, works with a number of human rights victims in Cambodia including the Dey Krahorm community (pictured above). Members of the community were evicted from their land in 2009 for ‘development purposes’ and moved to a relocation site. Their former land remains vacant.

At first face, working as a lawyer in Cambodia seems like a disheartening experience. Corruption is endemic: the rich and powerful bribe judges to have cases found in their favor and use criminal sentencing to deter resistance from members of the community. The police, acting under the instruction of the government, often comply in the harassment and arrest of human rights activists.

Someone recently asked me why anyone would continue working within such a broken legal system. I think Sunrith’s story is a good example of how coping with difficult circumstances in the hope of helping suffering individuals starts with a personal decision – one intimately connected to culture and religion. In the end, perhaps change makers are not inspired by a single defining event, but rather an uphill struggle led by instinct.

Sunrith graduated with a legal diploma from a Phnom Penh university in 1997 at the age of 22. The government appointed him as a law clerk in his hometown. As a government employee, he was making $20 USD a month. His first experience with the evolving Cambodian legal system was not a positive one. He recounts how a woman’s child was arrested and arraigned in front of the judges. The mother offered them a bundle of money carefully tied with a rope made from banana leaves. The money had clearly been saved up – diligently, meticulously, through hardwork. She bought her child’s freedom; the judges did not complain.

Religion and culture can deeply influence a person. In Cambodian culture, and particularly in Buddhist families, youth are taught to obey their superiors. But, Sunrith was different. He felt he had received two messages: to listen to people older than him; but also to question decisions like those made by the judges at the provincial court. He says his religion, Buddhism, also helped him make the difficult decision to leave his clerking position: “I didn’t feel like I was doing a good thing. I felt that if I was not making people feel better, I was not taking the right route.”

His parents were surprised by his decision. As a class-conscious family in a class-conscious society, they were delighted that their son had found work with the government. Despite this family pressure, he left this position to permanently move to Phnom Penh, the country’s growing capital, some 160 km away.

Sunrith’s first job was as a typist. At first, he was content. He was financially independent as the new job paid more than the government. However, after a few months, he began questioning his decision: should someone with a diploma in law work as a typist? Could he push himself to do more?

Soon he decided to leave his relatively comfortable position as a typist and began volunteering and then interning withLICADHO. He spent the first five years working with the Prison Office. Cambodian prisons, notorious for their horrific living conditions, became a second home to him. While others would express fear or disgust towards prisoners, Sunrith was happy to talk with them, bringing them bananas to help the day past faster. Seeing people energized and rewarded by his presence clearly made him happy.

Eventually, Sunrith transferred to LICADHO’s Human Rights Monitoring Office and this helped him make the decision to become a practicing lawyer. “You see injustice from case to case, but as an observer [a human rights monitor who tracks human rights abuses] you cannot express yourself, you are not in the system.”

Sunrith says that some days he is exhausted and considers leaving the legal profession. Yet, his friends and colleagues convince him that if he stops working, human rights defenders will have a difficult time finding a trusted lawyer to represent them free of charge. Around LICADHO, Sunrith has the reputation of a formidable lawyer: someone with a chilling confidence in front of the Cambodian Supreme Court, the country’s highest judicial body.

While he acknowledges that changing old societal practices would be difficult, he does believe that he can help change the attitude within the courts in Cambodia. To fight corruption and injustice, Sunrith hopes that the next generation will not be taught to accept the orders of their superiors, but rather to question authority. He says that future legal professionals should not concentrate on whether or not there is law, but rather on implementing the existing law and abiding by the rules set out within.

Working with LICADHO, Sunrith, who has been in the thick of human rights activities in Cambodia since the late 90′s, does note some positive changes. He says that the number of political killings has decreased substantially. Rather, the government is now using the courts to dissuade people from challenging them. The fact that the government’s weapon is no longer primarily the gun, but rather the law, is seen as a step – although a twisted one – forward.

Watching community activism in action also seems to give Sunrith renewed hope. He speaks admiringly of the communities living around Prey Lang forest who came all the way to Phnom Penh a few weeks ago to protest the destruction of their forest. He advises the residents of Boeung Kak lake, another community being evicted from their land, to believe in their struggle. “How can you change injustice? How can you change the attitude of the government? Hope comes day to day, from the people. It does not come from institutions or the policymakers.” He says that while Boeung Kak lake residents may lose their homes, in the end, they have set a fighting precedent that will hopefully grow and overcome the “cancer”of corruption and exploitation ailing the country.

Cross posted on the McGill Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism blog.

Recent articles on the Three Cups of Tea scandal offer some important lessons in aid and development communications. First of all, check out Kristof’s article:

I worry that scandals like this — or like the disputes about microfinance in India and Bangladesh — will leave Americans disillusioned and cynical. And it’s true that in their struggle to raise money, aid groups sometimes oversell how easy it is to get results. Helping people is more difficult than it seems, and no group of people bicker among themselves more viciously than humanitarians.

And Margaret Wente writing in the Globe and Mail:

Maybe the moral of this story is that, if it’s too good to be true, it’s probably not true. And doing good is harder than we’d like to think. When it comes to our good intentions, we have every reason to be humble. After all, if all it took were goodwill and three cups of tea, we’d have this thing licked by now.

Both articles highlight that aid and development is much more complex than publicity makes it seem – and there is a danger to this. This danger seems to play out in two ways:

First of all, honesty is key to successful development programs. There are several facets to this. How can you ask your recipients to be accountable for the funds they receive if you are not? Moreover, donors, while they do not have a right to get involved in the tangible programming, do have a right to know where their funding goes. This is an elementary principle to all public institutions. Finally, if one does not realistically track how funds are being spent and what impact they are having, how can one learn to develop better programs?

Secondly, by simplifying the message behind aid and development we are taking out so many of the important nuances and debates that challenge people to think and learn for themselves. I have only met a few people (see Texas in Africa, Good Intentions are Not Enough and the Katine Project) who have managed to successfully present a complex problem in digestible, but still challenging terms. It is not a talent that comes easily, but something that we must prioritize.

In support of Good Intentions Are Not Enough‘s goal to teach smart giving and their “Day Without Dignity” campaign. A more substantive post can be found here, “Breathing Meaning Into Sustainability.”

During the presentation on Women of Kireka earlier this week, a student, originally from Rwanda, asked me how she might go about making a similar investment in East Africa. She also asked how Women of Kireka had come to meet people like Hadijah and Project Diaspora, who are key to making the business run. It was hard to answer the latter part of the question, as much of it was based on a fortuitous set of circumstances. As for the former, I tried to emphasize that duplication was a concern and that, after trying to understand whether the kind of investment you wanted to make was a sound and welcome one, whether the structures to do so already existed. I was sent this article – “To Help Africa, Sell Diaspora Bonds” – earlier today, and I think this might be another viable avenue that ties into what Project Diaspora is aimed at facilitating, but on a much larger scale:

In other words, Africa needs not only greater investment in agriculture, but also in roads, ports and other facilities that are vital to moving the land’s products to consumers. Fortunately, part of the solution could lie with the almost 23 million African migrants around the globe, who together have an annual savings of more than $30 billion. Tapping into this money with so-called diaspora bonds could help provide Africa with the equipment and services it needs for long-term growth and poverty reduction.

These diaspora bonds would be in essence structured like any bonds on the market, but would be sold by governments, private companies and public-private partnerships to Africans living abroad. The bonds would be sold in small denominations, from $100 to $10,000, to individual investors or, in larger denominations, to institutional and foreign investors.

Preliminary estimates suggest that sub-Saharan African countries (excluding South Africa, which doesn’t have significant emigration) could raise $5 billion to $10 billion a year through diaspora bonds. Countries like Ghana, Kenya and Zambia, which have fairly large numbers of migrants living abroad in high-income countries, would particularly profit from issuing diaspora bonds.

 

Another exciting lecture coming up at the McGill Faculty of Law in Montreal, QC.

A couple of months ago, there was a rather large debacle around I Wear Your Shirt when they tried to launch 1 Million Shirts. I wrote an open letter at the time commenting on this initiative. Instead of blocking out the constructive criticism being offered by development professionals, they eventually ended up closing the project and starting “Free Days on I Wear Your Shirt For Non Profits and Charitable Organization.” Time constraints prevent me from writing a longer post, but I would like to commend I Wear Your Shirt’s responsiveness to the development/aid community and applaud their effort to contribute in an innovative way ‘at home’.

A friend sent this to me this morning. Fascinating (not least because of the excellent drawings!). The main point is that charity (development, aid) is not bad, but doing charity using money made in the systems that make the poor suffer is immoral (and ridiculous, when you think about it). These interventions are simply “remedies” that prolong the actual disease. I also really liked this extract: “It is much easier to have sympathy with suffering than have sympathy with thought.” I think that’s something you could say big pushers like Enough in their blood minerals campaign ascribe to.

Benefit of having a library at your fingertips (and a good one), Autesserre’s book came in yesterday. Now in my hungry possession. I’ve only managed to digest Chapter 1, but my first impression might dictate my thoughts on the rest of the book, or at least influence my reading.

The concept of organizational culture (or corporate culture) is inherent to any “industry” – whether it be aid or banking or being a professor. Each profession and its environment comes with rules – norms – that have been developed over a long period of time. Did we think aid or development was an exception to the rule?

@tmsruge’s first comment to me is that the aid industry is so worried about its own survival that it leaves no room for innovation. I’m not really sure that is the key issue. Unfortunately, I think humans do as humans do and we often end up with the same organizational product.

Finally, are people naive enough to think “do-gooders” get a free pass to not be seen as controlling and hierarchical as the next human? Anyways, it seems like a pretty smooth read so I would urge you to dig in and let me know what you think.