Reframing aid
Why Australia, and the world, may need to rethink how it approaches development communication
Thursday, September 5, 2013. It was a day where I managed to bask in three minutes of wonderful news, before the sky seemingly crashed down, co-workers went into a frenzy and the atmosphere in the office transitioned from relative calm to utter despair.
It wasn’t the Australian election – although I’m sure there were enough people in the office disappointed at that result as well. Instead, the Coalition had just announced that, if they were to win Government, they would cut $4.5 billion from official development assistance (ODA) over the next four years, including a $656 million cut to this financial year.
How dare they!? In the face of a number of cuts and delays to Australia’s aid program, I know many that held the feeling that it had to stop somewhere. There was a largely unspoken expectation that any incoming Coalition government would cut ODA spending, but most didn’t expect the cut would be this large – or damaging – to Australian aid.
In reality, the development sector in Australia have backed themselves into a corner, with no easy way to forge ahead.
Australia, you’re doing it wrong.
For at least 10 years, agencies and campaigners in Australia have put much effort into campaigning for an increase in ODA to 0.5% of gross national income (GNI), with 0.7% as the end goal. In and of itself, there is nothing wrong with this. It’s a target that Australia has agreed to multiple times at the international and national level. It’s a target that many have latched on to as an easy way of communicating aid and our responsibilities as a nation to the public.
It is a target that I have wholeheartedly supported for years, and I still do.
It’s also utterly demoralising for aid supporters when leaders decide to renege on commitments, cut aid and throw the target down the toilet without a second thought.
Perhaps this single-minded emphasis on percentage targets has been misguided. At the very least, it has allowed the sector to be backed in – at one stage the sector pushed hard on the target of achieving 0.7% by the 2015-16 financial year. When it became obvious that this was unrealistic and would ultimately be detrimental to the work of AusAID, as it would require such a massive scale-up in a short amount of time, the target became 0.7% by 2020, with an interim target of 0.5% by 2015-16. Then we were promised by 2016-17. After the most recent announcement by a now-new government, where do we head now?
The more I think about it, the more I believe that aid communication in Australia has to drastically change from an emphasis on funding, commitments and promises to a focus on success and the ultimate end goal.
Change it up.
After all, that’s what we’re asking our politicians to do.
I know that I’m ruffling a few feathers among many friends who work in the campaigning space. After all, we’ve all spent countless hours crafting that perfect email to supporters or thinking up ingenious ways to encourage supporters to pick up a phone and call their local MP. But I think we’ve all missed something along the way: the end game.
No matter what you think of the Millennium Development Goals, what form you believe the next international development agenda should take, whether you think there should be an overarching set of goals in the first place, or your feelings toward neat catch cries that couldn’t possibly account for the complexities of “doing development,” the end of poverty is a compelling message. After the High Level Panel on the Post-2015 Development Agenda handed down its report, it seems that the catch cry for the next 15 years will be eradicating extreme poverty by 2030.
If anything, that throws a bunch of opportunities out there for campaigners in the development space.
I throw these thoughts out to create discussion, not as a blueprint on how to move forward. Some of these ideas may indeed be crazy and in the end may not work, but that’s okay.
1. Highlight stories of success. And please, no more celebrity endorsements
The world is full of amazing stories of success and stories of why aid works. Bring them to the front, shine a light on those stories and show the public their tax dollars at work. Many agencies pay lip service to this idea, but it’s time to go all in on this. Also, these stories should stand on their own. We don’t need to adopt celebrities again as endorsements and the major drawcard.
2. Call out bad policy, and don’t be afraid to criticise
Sometimes governments get it wrong. They release a policy or make an announcement that is clearly bad and ill-thought out. The sector shouldn’t be afraid to call out bad policy for what it is, even if that means putting some people off-side. In the end, better policy means better development, which means we’re closer towards the end goal. Agencies need to become more aggressive and proactive in this area.
3. Experiment in how we communicate aid
We need to take some risks and experiment with how we communicate aid to the Australian public. Do something different that actually grabs the attention of the public. If that means BASE jumping off a building with an ironing board (extreme ironing, it’s a thing, Google it), try it. And if anyone figures out how you could link that to aid, please let me know!
4. Focus on the end goal, not the interim targets
In the end, we all have an end goal that we want to see. Instead of framing the debate around the interim targets, frame the debate around the end goal. The end of poverty, while being a lofty goal, is a much more powerful story and rallying cry than a continual focus on percentages.
Continue to focus on development financing – in the end, it’s an extremely important aspect, and the 0.5% and 0.7% goals remain international commitments.
In the end, frame it around the end goal. Don’t frame the end goal around achieving a certain level of funding.
