Representations of Global Poverty: Aid, Development and International NGOs

Visualising Africa at diaspora expense? How and why humanitarian organisations ignore diaspora audiences in their ‘ethical’ communications

“…Comprehensive analyses of humanitarian mediation also foreground the so‐called ‘infantilisation’ and ‘feminisation’ of poverty by which humanitarian and media organisations convey the impacts of poverty as the predominant preserve of helpless and vulnerable children and women (Cohen, 2001; Dogra, 2012; Harrison, 2010; Lamers, 2005; Wells, 2013; Young, 2012). Additional critiques orbit around what Harrison (2010) calls the ‘Africanisation of poverty,’ where Africa is portrayed as the quintessential realm of misfortune and victimhood intimately‐tied to the social embeddedness of an urgent and ‘do‐gooding’ philanthropic benevolence.…”

“…Additional critiques orbit around what Harrison (2010) calls the ‘Africanisation of poverty,’ where Africa is portrayed as the quintessential realm of misfortune and victimhood intimately‐tied to the social embeddedness of an urgent and ‘do‐gooding’ philanthropic benevolence. We see this played out by international charities in their affective and emotionallydriven African fundraising appeals motivated by short‐term pecuniary gain, and which ventriloquise colonial‐racialised discourses of an impoverished place that is both underdeveloped and stewed in a prolongation of a pre‐industrialised past (Dogra, 2012).…”

“…Relatedly, Phoebe's statement suggests the inappropriateness of distinguishing an audience's diasporic composition – a task presumably more appropriately‐placed with such organisations whose work concern these communities. Dogra (2012, p. 125), maintains that assumptions and treatments of humanitarian audiences as undifferentiated configurations are informed by INGO's uncritical elevations of an essentialised ‘Oneness.’ Within this frame, Northern publics are normatively defined by a seemingly commonsensical homogeneity, monoculturalism and a priori ‘Eurocentric Britishness.’ This systematic omission of African diaspora as audiences of humanitarian communication, reveals a critical unpreparedness, a certain inattention, by INGOs of the material and immaterial consequences of their images for such populations who have varied identifications with the mediated ‘subjects’ (Ademolu, 2020; Dillon, 2021; Young, 2012). As such, if African diaspora are thought of and treated as incomprehensible then they are unseen, or peripheral at best to contemporary debates and practices of ethical storytelling.…”

Racialised representations of Black African poverty in INGO communications and implications for UK African diaspora: Reflections, lessons and recommendations

“…Unsurprisingly, the ‘poverty porn’ imageries of the Live Aid era and their contemporary iterations by Comic Relief and such like organisations, fuelled public and academic criticism (see e.g., Benthall, 1993; Chouliaraki, 2012; Moeller, 1999; Smillie, 1995; van der Gaag & Nash, 1987). Not least in Media and Communications Studies and International Development literature, which have critiqued how, and the compositional and colonial‐racialised modalities through which, charities problematically convey Africa(ns) in their philanthropic communications (see, e.g., Pieterse, 1992; Tester, 2001; Dogra, 2012). Indeed, the implications of this for how Euro‐American audiences view and comprehend the so‐called ‘beneficiaries’ (called ‘contributors’ 2 in this article) of INGO programmatic intervention, as well as their resultant propensity to donate (Breeze & Dean, 2012, p. 134 cite a compressive list).…”

“…Scholarly contributions from within the international development and humanitarian communication subfield—largely, independently commissioned reports by NGOs and policy institutions, equally problematise the negative impact of charity aid appeals and related promotional materials on Western donor publics. We gain important insights from five main studies in particular, namely: van der Gaag and Nash (1987) ‘Images of Africa’; The Department of International Development (DFID 3 ) report ‘Viewing the World’ (2000); the Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) ‘The Live Aid Legacy’ research report (2001); Kaplan's (2005) Chatham House study on British Attitudes to Africa and; Dogra (2012) ‘Representations of Global Poverty’.…”