The author is a researcher in international relations. She wrote the book Lose the South (Éditions Écosociété, 2020).
A few days ago, stroller in one hand and coffee in the other, I was asked if I wanted to give $5, $10 or $15 a month to save the planet or polar bears or sick children in the Zimbabwe. I barely slowed down as I looked away. Poor young man with his green bib faded by time and refusals.
The reductions in public funds granted to international cooperation and charitable organizations have for several years forced NGOs (non-governmental organizations) to turn to this type of practice. Except that individual donations also decrease year after year… Inflation and rising interest rates do not improve the proportion of funds available in our bank accounts to resolve the world’s problems.
A friend who works for an environmental organization whose name I will not mention told me that, in their meetings, they plan their campaigns by addressing a fictitious “Josée”. Josée, a 50-year-old woman, with an established career and a pension fund, who inevitably has a few dollars to spend and who shows gentle compassion.
It is Josée who must be convinced that the world is going badly and that she must open her wallet. Except that my priorities and my socialization as a millennial differ from those of Josée. Besides, there aren’t many Josées left today… it seems like they all bought a condo in Florida. So I wondered if this model of public solicitation still worked.
Problematic individualized financing
The biggest problem with citizen funding of solidarity NGOs is that it fluctuates depending on the interests of the donor populations. Individual donations follow the vagaries of one-off crises rather than problems that are often more important, but with less direct consequences. We feel less and less emotion when we hear the words climate crisis or international inequalities. A war in El Salvador with clearly identified good guys and bad guys will also raise more donations than poor soil irrigation in Peru.
More publicized crises, such as that in Ukraine or that which shakes Morocco, victim these days of a powerful earthquake, also collect more donations than structural crises afflicting countries whose names mean less to us, like the Central African Republic or Uruguay. The lines are not clearly drawn, but in general, crises afflicting populations who speak French (as in Haiti), or with whom one identifies rightly or wrongly (as in Ukraine) will receive more solidarity than crises in North Korea or Zimbabwe, for example.
As compassion is also stronger in the event of a disaster, financial inflows are often spontaneous, depending on the day’s report. International NGOs like Oxfam or Save the Children suggest doing the opposite: giving globally to organizations rather than only giving when a disaster strikes.
Impulsive donations force them to use funds in the targeted countries and thus neglect other countries which are just as in need, but which are less “attractive” at the moment for donors. Even more so, large influxes mean that only a fraction of donations can be distributed effectively.
How to generate compassion?
To obtain crucial funding for their activities and in the face of competition, organizations are redoubling their efforts to generate compassion from potential donor populations. In the case of international solidarity, this encourages the adoption of a miserable portrait of populations in the Global South, despite the best intentions. An economic empowerment project for “poor Malagasy women” will collect more donations than the need to pay the Malagasy administrators of an NGO.
To convince Josée when she leaves the metro, the canvassers in red or green jackets don’t have much choice. Organizations have developed a hyperindividualization of their campaigns, such as: “give $20 and we will give Rosario a sewing machine” or “give $5 a month to send Abbas to school”. “Aminata needs your $10 to raise chickens” works much better than “Équiterre needs money to work to fight the climate crisis” or “Oxfam needs money to pay for electricity for its offices in Abidjan “.
This type of strategy overshadows the deeper problems of the international system, which deserve major reforms (I talk about this in my book Lose the South). Rather, targeted campaigns give the impression that through donations, we will resolve inequalities between countries.
Purely government funding would not necessarily be better, since it would be dependent on the interests or disinterests of the parties in power. In Canada, for example, the conservative government of Stephen Harper funded proselytizing and religious organizations at great expense, while the liberal government of Justin Trudeau preferred organizations with a liberal feminist vision. Every election cycle, organizations must review their plans, and some must close shop if they are no longer in the good graces of public donors.
And even for organizations that can find funds, fundraising capacities are necessarily greater for large NGOs than for smaller ones. Of course, these larger organizations are able to fill out the application and tracking forms correctly and have greater capacity for action.
And it is more difficult to give a multitude of small amounts to small organizations than to give larger amounts to organizations that have the resources to manage them. However, organizations which act in specific localities or which have more restricted mandates are often well placed to enable real development adapted to the context.
It is imperative to develop ways to finance social justice organizations when Josée no longer exists, or when she no longer has the means…