Page 210 - Volume 1_Go home mzungu Go Home_merged with links

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20 century 'zuŋ u 'not for profit' empires
"Veni, Vidi, Vici ",Steti - ego adduxit amicis meis

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INGO in Africa - effect(iveness)

Prolonging Conflict
“ In Sierra Leone, I realized that the rebel soldiers who had been hacking off people's
hands and feet, they actually could explain to me how to manipulate the aid

system....They explained to me that for 10 years, all those years they were fighting and
the West didn't want to hear about their war. It was only after they started to amputate

people, more people and more people, that the international community was taking
notice of their war.

Those simple rebel soldiers in Africa could explain to me how that aid system works.”

"The World's Humnitarian Aid Organizations May Do More Harm than Good, 206
Argues Linda Polman “ The Boston Globe.(September 2010)
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Negative and stereotypical images of Africa
Why NGOs prefer bad news

“ Reinforcing the sense of economic misery, between May and September 2010 the ten
most-read US newspapers and magazines carried 245 articles mentioning poverty in

Africa, but only five mentioning gross domestic product growth.

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...the main reason for the continued dominance of such negative stereotypes, I have

come to believe, may well be the influence of Western-based non-governmental
organizations (NGOs) and international aid groups like United Nations agencies. These

organizations understandably tend to focus not on what has been accomplished but on
convincing people how much remains to be done.

As a practical matter, they also need to attract funding. Together, these pressures

create incentives to present as gloomy a picture of Africa as possible in order to keep
attention and money flowing, and to enlist journalists in disseminating that picture.

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Stories featuring aid projects often rely on dubious numbers provided by the
organizations.

Take Kibera, a poor neighborhood in Nairobi. A Nexis search of major world publications

found Kibera described as the "biggest" or "largest" slum in Africa at least thirty-four
times in 2004; in the first ten months of 2010 the claim appeared eighty-three times.

Many of those stories focused on the work of one of the estimated 6,000 or more local