Foreign Aid: Are we really helping others or just ourselves? | Maliha Chishti | TEDxUTSC

I love the idea of foreign aid don't you you see I see it as an opportunity to practice the virtues of compassion and generosity to help others especially in times of war and conflict aid workers do some great work they build schools they provide access to clean water healthcare they deliver emergency food aid to people who are suffering but good intentions aside on a much much larger scale foreign aid has not improved the lives and living conditions of the world's most poorest and vulnerable people it just hasn't and this is despite an international aid apparatus that has been set up with thousands of organizations and institutions that distribute billions of dollars of aid to every corner of the world over the past 50 years you see the gap between the world's richest and poorest countries is tremendous and it's increasing in my own work researching war affected States I can tell you that Aid has not achieved desirable results in places like Angola Rwanda Sierra Leone Somalia Kosovo Afghanistan Iraq and what's worse is that the international aid community keeps making the same mistakes over and over and over again and they keep getting away with it oh it's all too complicated they'll tell you but what if it's not what if giving aid to the world's poorest communities are just stories we tell each other to feel good about ourselves as a nation but that the infrastructure of third-world aid is set up in such a way that we living in the richest part of the world have been benefiting it from it all along I can pull out the facts that indicate but for every dollar of aid rich countries give to poor countries they receive between seven to ten dollars back through debt repayment profits trade etc and if you add that up each year according to the UN conference on Trade and Development there is a net transfer of wealth that moves from the poorest countries of the world to the richest countries in the amount of 200 billion dollars a year Wow our poor countries subsidizing the wealth of rich countries in any case we have a serious problem and to fix the problem we can't rely on the same structures and paradigms that created it in the first place what we need is an ethical and a conscientious pause as a consultant and a researcher on Afghanistan I am painfully aware that billions of dollars of aid did not reach the majority of Afghans and this is devastating considering after the us-led invasion of Afghanistan there was a genuine sense in the international community to help Afghans and Afghan women especially because they suffered tremendously from decades of war and living under the repressive regime of the Taliban at around this time 2002 I was working with an Afghan women's organization based here in Toronto that for many years was supporting local women's group across Afghanistan these groups were doing some important work they were educating girls and providing basic support and services to countless women under the Taliban regime well we approached this network of women we circulated a needs assessment survey asking them how can we as a Canadian NGO help you we received an overwhelming response they wanted access to basic health care so I wrote a project proposal for a mobile health clinic with a very modest budget and I went knocking at the door of the Canadian government and they politely refused they said for us to come back this time with a brand new proposal we can double the budget so long as we provided a human rights training program for Afghan women so that's exactly what we did we went to Afghanistan and we implemented a training program and you know what I noticed when we got there that our training program was one of several similar training programs offered that week by different agencies not a single mobile health clinic in sight I realized that the priority to offer human rights training over basic health care was determined by us the aid establishment and not by Afghans there's something else that I was amazed at when I was in Kabul you see for centuries Afghanistan was known as the Hermit Kingdom it was impenetrable to foreign influence and meddling but it was just as if overnight after 2001 the country was flooded by foreign nationals from different countries but especially from Europe and North America hundreds of NGO staff consultants advisors construct workers they like us we arrived in the country very easily and while we were there I noticed that as soon as we landed in the country we were pretty much in charge of running the country every sector health the private sector government civil society media you see we had Authority and decision-making power without having to know anything about the local context we didn't have to learn the local languages of duddy or Pashto we didn't have to know the political history of Afghanistan the complexity of the war the warring factions we didn't have to know the role of religion customs tradition the ethnic diversity of the land you see when the international community entered Afghanistan Afghanistan was rendered empty a blank slate a tabula rasa if you will and we as the foreign experts poured into this empty land our goals for the country our visions for the country our approaches for the country in effect we became the architects of their future we imagined created designed implemented and supervised all of the major programs in the country and then we went ahead and evaluated ourselves we restructured the entire government from the security sector to the judiciary we wrote government policies we wrote curricula for schools we wrote national laws imposed elections revised the Constitution and then we went ahead and we planned the economy for the next 12 years we did it all we did it all without domestic sent oh it's all too complicated they'll tell you but what if it's not what if the situation was actually reversed what if here in this very city there is an emergency a natural disaster our city shuts down but instead of receiving aid from another country we get a flood of foreigners that arrive and take over the city they passed new bylaws they run our schools they run our clinics and they do this all in another language that we would have to learn just to keep up with the changes it sounds absurd doesn't it it would never happen right so if it can't happen here why does it happen in almost every other part of the world without anyone questioning it you see I think that the reason why we cannot help vulnerable communities in the world is because our interventions are more about us a celebration of who we are and who we think we are when the West engages with other societies especially non-western ones it's trying to find a glimpse of itself in them it's looking for Western values ideals and principles and when it can't find them it sets up an aid relationship that has very little to do with helping others and more to do with disciplining them reforming them to become more like us Western capitalist liberal democratic states but here's the thing you see it took Western Europe over 200 years of struggle and violence to achieve state maturity but Afghanistan Afghanistan has like a minute or a decade to accomplish the same task this is the main target for reform I'd like to introduce you to Surya I met her for the first time in Afghanistan she was to lead the health module of our training program and I have to tell you I admit I was really nervous see I didn't think that she was competent enough to run the training module because it was technical and it was a difficult training module I approached Surya and for some reason I started asking her if she knew about icebreakers because we always begin each training session with icebreakers so I started to explain icebreakers what they were why we use them and then I drew a blank because I couldn't come up with a sample icebreaker that she could use in her session so she introduced and she politely states well I always do icebreakers I've got several maybe I could use one of mine and I said oh all right so I stood at the back of the room while she conducted a brilliant training session Surya is a medical doctor and educator and activist and so much much more and when I got back home I was really embarrassed but the assumptions that I had of her and I realized that my assumptions were based on an underlying relationship that exists in the international aid system this binary of who we are us and who they are you see we in our aid encounter with them and they could be Africans Asians Latin Americans we are always modern and progressive and they are in varying degrees of traditional tribal backward we're problem solvers and they always have just problems we're technical experts they have no capacities we are knowledge creators and they're passive receivers we are efficient and productive and they are always always lazy and corrupt I realized that the entry point that we have to almost all of the sought societies that live in the majority world are based on what these countries lack what is absent what doesn't work what needs to change what needs to be reformed when was the last time that you read something interesting or positive or inspiring from countries like Pakistan Yemen Afghanistan I realized that if an aide relationship is based on one party that fundamentally believes that they are always better than others morally culturally politically intellectually then how could anything good emerge and be sustained by such an unequal and pejorative relationship so if we could begin anew a fresh start give aid a tabula rasa I would think that we should begin by shifting the way that we perceive and construct third world societies and States understanding them by how they define themselves not by our labels about them to build aedra lations based on their identified strengths and capacities not our assessments of their failures and weaknesses you see if you were to ask Surya how she would describe herself she wouldn't say I'm oppressed and subordinated please rescue me she would say I'm resilient I'm a survivor I'm hopeful I'm determined I'm pious I respect the traditional values of my country and I'm a fighter I fight a oppression and injustice wherever I will find it Surya is full of complexities as is her country maybe we should do a lot less perhaps if the Western aid establishment stepped back and allowed other countries and societies to do more to imagine and to create their futures based on their own terms their own cultural political trajectories what this would entail is that the aid apparatus embraces the politics of pluralism diversity and multifocal 'ti this means opening the table up and enabling and appreciating and validating different and even contending points of view perspectives and worldviews you see pluralism opens the door to mutual learning sharing and the transformation of both ends of the ade relationship I wanted to leave you with a simple statement that I came across several years ago that transformed me it had a profound impact on me and this very simple statement is echoed by the world's indigenous traditions and it reads to do good work in the world you must first be good I was intrigued by the statement and I realized that what it meant was that what is manifested in the world by our efforts is a reflection of who we are as individuals as a society as a civilization thank you you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 63,496

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Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Canada, Global Issues, Developing World, Development, Foreign policy, Government, International Affairs, Nonprofit

Id: 1xJ6p0B5V_A

Length: 17min 39sec (1059 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 03 2016