doing good.

When I first started in development over 20 years ago, I often asked the question what are we helping this country develop towards? Sometimes that was clear. Sometimes it wasn’t. What part did I play? What part did the project play? What was the actual goal? At a very basic human level, it was a broad goal of basic human rights and dignity. Helping people claim their right to education, water and health and a safe place to live.

I’m still asking that question. At every level. What’s it for? What is our goal?

There are a lot of people shouting in this space right now, about axing the UK’s commitment to 0.7%. They are rightly holding Aid agencies, consultancy firms and the charity sector to account. As we have seen in the UK, ours is a sector which hides it’s perpetrators of injustice and exploitation very well. But it is also a sector which does a tremendous lot of good in the world. And one doesn’t cancel out the other. Bringing very real relief to people who are in desperate situations is a good thing.

There is an argument that goes something like this:

‘Countries need to solve their own problems. For example, Rwanda by the very experience of it’s genocide will need to form institutions that work for them, based on their experience and horror. Providing a Rwandan solution to a Rwandan problem’.

This is true. I don’t know better. I grew up in conflict affected Northern Ireland. I understood the nuances of facial expressions, language and accents at that time, in that space. Outsiders generally didn’t. But what they did offer was a drone like ability to hover above the situation and observe how things maybe could work. They looked for similarities between conflicting people and offered a brokering to people in the thick of it who couldn’t see a way forward.

The thinking is correct— there must be country specific solutions. Led by the people within that country. And thankfully this is happening all over the place. Amazing women and men are taking the lead and doing their thing to make their country a better place to live. My very human-ness means that standing by and watching on the sidelines without helping in some way is not an option for me. What I do need to be wise about is when to get the heck out of the way.

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