Rights vs. Needs

                                                              Rights vs. Needs

As a student of development sometimes the ’industry’, viewed through the lens of academic journals, endless lists of statistic and shiny NGO websites can seem to be an almost  self-perpetuating entity. Much of its work seeming to focus on providing for basic and immediate human needs but failing to engage on a broader level with the economic and social power structures that perpetuate the cycles of disempowerment and marginalization that permeate many poor communities both North and South of the equator.

Can fragmented funding for small scale agricultural in the Global South have any real effect while the same countries markets are flooded with hugely subsidized produce from the Global North? Can a few hundred million spent on climate change adaption measures make any real difference while emissions continue to spiral out of control in the industrialized World? Is the economic model of unfettered capitalism, and the increasingly gross levels of inequality and environmental damage associated with it, one that can bring any kind of lasting development to the worlds less economically developed nations?

There have undoubtedly been huge gains made in improving people’s access to health care, education and employment in much of the world over the last decades; however, whether this level of gains will continue as we continue to move into a resource depleted, climatically altered future is uncertain at best. If we truly seek a fairer and more just future should we be looking beyond aid funding for the essential but often short term gaols of the provision of basic needs, to achieving a more equitable distribution of power and resources at all levels from the household to the global?

The increasing integration of the perspectives and language of human rights into the development community and its many papers and policy documents is an important step in formally acknowledging some of these broader issues. The distinction between needs based and rights based programming in development work may seem somewhat abstract from afar but in actuality it can have a huge bearing on how aid money, or funding within an organisation, is distributed and on how policy is designed and implemented. I would argue on a broader level a rights based analysis can also challenge some of our fundamental notions about aid and development itself.

The more I study the issues around aid and development work the more I feel there is a need for a paradigm shift away from the notion of giving  ‘aid’, rooted in the notion of charity, to a view of development as an obligation to assist in fulfilling the realisation of peoples human rights.

The distinction, as given by the UNFPA, is that where a need not fulfilled leads to dissatisfaction, a right that is not respected leads to a violation, and its redress or reparation can be legally and legitimately claimed. A human rights-based approach to development differs from the basic needs approach in that it recognizes the existence of rights. It stresses the role of duty bearers, domestic and international governments, corporations and fellow global citizens to respect, protect and guarantee these rights.

Where a needs based approach can often frame the ends as justifying the means, a rights based approach considers the means fundamental to the ends, not just hitting targets on a log frame but actively involving, consulting and seeking to empower communities concerned. This distinction in how humanitarian and development projects are conceived can have a huge bearing on how they are formulated and carried out.

A rights based analysis of development interventions can ask some fundamental questions about their aims and purpose. Is the role of the development sector to provide for the bare essentials in people’s lives while at the macro level, governmental, corporate and institutional structures continue unabated in ignoring and exploiting those same communities targeted.

It often seems in development work there is a focus on the micro: from the seemingly exponentially expanding number of small scale NGOs to the focus on particular areas of people’s lives and livelihoods like education, employment or health initiatives, often without any real questioning of the broader position of developments ‘beneficiaries’ in the power structures that perpetuate the cycle of poverty in which they are trapped. Needs based programmes can be implemented in order to provide for basic and essential services but not necessarily impact on what one hopes is the ultimate goal of ending those cycles of poverty and disempowerment to enable communities to stand on their own two feet.

Another important question a rights based analysis of development programmes can pose is how funds are allocated and who should be targeted in a given intervention. Concentrating on the most marginalized people, socially, economically and geographically, is an essential part of a rights-based approach. Organisations often try to reach the greatest number of people they can with the resources they have, this can lead to those who are more difficult to reach being overlooked. Sadly those hardest to reach are often also those suffering some of the most acute poverty. A rights-based approach seeks to identify those who are most marginalized and ensure that their rights are not ignored. These issues will become increasingly important in a not too distant future of severely depleted resources, an increasingly unstable economic system, changed climate and wide-scale environmental degradation. How to achieve more in terms of people reached and targets met, with less funds is, and will continue to be, a serious issue for humanitarian and development organisations.

In trying to come to terms with my own place as a student of development and as a human being hoping to at the very least do no harm in a future career in the sector I feel these issues around how development is conceived of and implemented are fundamental to how I view my role and the role of the ‘industry’. For development to work it needs to first and foremost give voice to those it seeks’ to help. The always insightful Paulo Freire put it pretty succinctly,

‘The generosity of the oppressors is nourished by an unjust order, which must be maintained in order to justify that generosity. Our converts, on the other hand, truly desire to transform the unjust order; but because of their background they believe that they must be the executors of the transformation. They talk about the people, but they do not trust them; and trusting the people is the indispensable precondition for revolutionary change. A real humanist can be identified more by his trust in the people, which engages him in their struggle, than by a thousand actions in their favour without that trust.”
― Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

C. C.

Development Jobs 101

The Beginning:


The Bare Bones of Prepping for an International Career:
Alanna Shaikh has a great blog, and she writes an international development careers newsletter that costs $2 a month and is well worth it. This post has five basic things you can do now for your career, available here.

International Development Jobs, An Introduction:
This article explains the various sectors and job roles in the international development sphere – a good introduction. Scroll to the end for a list of articles from professionals on how to get a job. Available here.

How to become an AidWorker:
Another introduction, with some useful insights. Good blog to explore, available here.


The Middle:


Aid Work: What Recruiters Really Look for:
Full blog post here.


“Many candidates interested in working in international development and emergency aid are convinced that finding a job in this sector is just a matter of knowing the right people inside organisations and getting recommendations from them. This is absolutely not the case. Many others think that if they get the right kind of education - a master's degree in a relevant subject, for instance - they they automatically qualify for a job as aid worker. This is not true either.
It's difficult to board a moving train, but once you're on, you can move easily from one car to another. That's what it's like in relief and development. The key can be summarised in one word: experience.”

Education, Experience and Personality:

The third in a five-part series, available here.

“There are a lot of people wanting to be aid workers. Far and away the most popular roles are those that are based out of western countries but with a healthy dose of travel...
In brief, aid agencies are looking for a mix of appropriate skills, relevant experience, and the right personality. It’s a bit of a nebulous mix and there’s no magic formula. However, if you’re lacking one of these three, you’re really going to struggle to get employed by an NGO.


And The End...


How to find a job:
How to network, and how to apply for jobs, available here. Extensive list of sites with job listings at the end.

Experiences from the Field

Sian Cowman talks to Dug Cubie about his work in refugee camps in Nepal; tsunami relief with the Red Cross; and challenges in the field.

It will be no surprise to students of international development that luck is a major factor in getting that all-important first position. When I interviewed Dug Cubie, currently a PhD candidate at University College Cork, he told me that after his law degree in the 90s he was lucky enough to walk straight into an internship with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in London. A key part of his job was to document the conditions detained asylum seekers were being held in: “I got to go with my boss to visit places like Wormwood Scrubs and Rochester Prison, [it was] fascinating but scary stuff to go into these old Victorian prisons, all red brick and door clanging shut behind you sort of thing...” It is no longer so easy to get these positions: “Now the application procedure is through the Headquarters in Geneva....and to be honest I imagine that there’re very few undergrads now who’d get an internship [at UNHCR] before having done a Masters.”

After completing another 6-month internship in the EU, and his Masters in international law, Dug’s first job in a developing country was in Nepal with the UNHCR. Kathmandu was as lively as expected but the village where he was posted had only 200 inhabitants despite being a government administrative centre. The work itself was in seven long-running refugee camps, inhabited by over 100,000 Bhutanese refugees, and at the time the camps were embroiled in a sexual abuse scandal. The situation sounds difficult: “The key issue was how it had been dealt with, the refugees had been dealing with the allegations internally rather than going to the Nepalese authorities and UNHCR hadn’t been informed by the refugees they were doing this. UNHCR at all levels had probably taken their eye off the ball... but then staffing levels, and so the level of monitoring going on, had been cut, as the camps had been there 10 years.” Certainly it was an eye-opening first job.

After more fieldwork with UNHCR, and later project management with the International Organization for Migration, Dug landed a job with the Red Cross in Dublin as a desk officer for the Asia-Pacific and Middle East regions. It was 5 years after the Indian Ocean tsunami: “It was a question of how do we wind projects down, hand over to the local Red Cross, accept that you’ve moved beyond the emergency phase into the development phase.”  While Dug was there, they undertook the scheduled shut down of Irish Red Cross offices in Indonesia and Sri Lanka, a difficult but necessary task.

The story about the Nepalese refugee camps and the criticisms I’ve heard of the Pacific tsunami relief prompted me to ask about the challenges facing the humanitarian sector. Dug’s answer is relevant in some of the situations we see in the news today: “One of the biggest things [is] the consistency of response, especially at a political level, [for example] if you compare Libya and Syria...” Money, of course, is a deciding factor in the level of response – the tsunami received huge amounts of funding, but other disasters can become “forgotten crises”. Humanitarian response must also ensure consistency in minimum standards of protection and human rights. For example, in the case of sexual abuse, standards must be in place for prevention of abuse in the first place, rather than just responding to the problem.

  

One positive change Dug sees in the humanitarian sector today is the increasing recognition that ‘we’ don’t always know best. For example, the Indonesian Red Cross sent workers out to Haiti, who of course were very experienced in earthquake relief: “The local capacities are increasing and that’s the way it should be. We need to defer to their knowledge and experience [by] working in partnership with them.” Encouragingly, there is a move away from the hierarchical mind-set of ‘we know best’ and toward collaboration with organisations in developing countries.

I asked Dug what students can do to prepare for the challenges of the development working world: “It is important to know yourself; know your limitations, strengths and weaknesses. I was in Nepal at the time Iraq was kicking off, and I knew I did not want to work in the middle of a war zone. Some people are able to work well in those situations; others work at a higher level of capacity in more secure situations.”

Understanding why we do what we do is important too: “What do we mean when we say someone has a right to health or a right to food... at a basic level, why are we doing this? Additionally, understanding how you do it - project management, the tools you need to ensure that at a practical level the work you’re doing fits in with the funding you’ve got. ” Really, the degree is just the beginning - building up the skill-set is what matters. There is no replacement for field experience - as well as the all-important luck, of course!