Why transparency?
And why in aid?
This week, creativity has been a bit low on my end, hence I was struggling with finding a good topic to write about. So I went back to a constant source of inspiration: TED Talks. I did a quick search on corruption and found a list of 35 suggested talks. While I was browsing at those titles one stood out to me, a talk by Charmian Gooch with the title -My wish: To launch a new era of openness in business-¹. An idea was quickly born, I have talked to you previously about the problem of corruption in aid, about what we could do with the resources lost and even about why we as a team started EnlightAID in the first place. But it dawned on me that I have actually not written yet about why we chose the aid industry to begin with.
As you may have read already, corruption exists in all countries, every industry, and it affects more than 6 billion people² in their daily lives. “Avoiding climate breakdown, preventing conflict, violence and persecution. There is a common theme, an underlying force behind so many of the problems we face. Corruption, the way the money is stolen, laundered and spent.”³ If corruption seems to be all around us, why focus on aid?
Choice and competition in aid is much more limited than in business and the citizens who contribute to an NGO or a charity with their donations are, generally, not the ones who will directly benefit, or so we tend to think. However, can we really say that? The truth is that we don’t necessarily understand the ramifications of every single project we have ever contributed to, and we probably never will. There is a movie I like to use when I do talks to exemplify this phenomenon. In 2009 Cameron Diaz and James Marsden starred in The Box, in the film they interpret a suburban couple struggling to make ends meet. One day they receive a box with a transparent dome, inside the dome, a button. The next day a visitor comes to their door and tells Norma, Cameron’s character, -“If you push the button two things will happen, first someone, somewhere in the world, whom you don’t know will die. Second, you will receive a payment of one million dollars. You have 24 hours”⁴.
I know, it is a dramatic choice to make, but bare with me, it is a Hollywood movie after all. The couple struggles with making a decision as they need the money and the premise is that the death of the stranger wouldn’t really touch their lives at all. Eventually they choose to press the button, giving start to a chain of events that definitely touches them both. I will not give you any more details in case you want to watch the movie, I definitely enjoyed it when I saw it back in 2009. But why am I telling you this story? Well, even though we can think certain choices do not affect us because they involve people we don’t know in places we can’t see, they do. I think there are two very clear examples I can write about that to exemplify how we are in fact affected by these things happening in what seem to be far away places.
The first one, protecting the rainforest. Even if we haven’t been, or will never get to visit Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Bolivia, Suriname, Guyana or French Guiana, the countries in which the Amazon rainforest is located, most of us understand that the effects of its destruction will be felt across the world. While, negative impacts such as soil erosion, flooding, loss of habitat and biodiversity might be seen as local problems. Climate change, increased greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere and the alteration of the amount of water in the atmosphere are problems that have a profound impact on the earth. Even if you are on the opposite side of the planet the rainforest’s destruction affects you personally. The second one would be protecting the ocean, that large blue mass of water that surrounds every single continent. Even the one where you are standing on as you read these lines. The ocean regulates earth’s climate, it is the home of many species and produces over half of the oxygen we breathe⁵. Marine environment degradation affects us all.
You might be thinking there are certain aid initiatives that target people who you don’t know that will probably not have an effect on you. Providing education for a child in a far away refugee camp could also fall into a similar set of circumstances as the ones from the movie. Press the button and a child whom you don’t know will get educated. We would probably all jump on that one, and the thing is we will most certainly never know what was of that child, but they may very well become the next Elon Musk, the new Malala Yousafzai or the future Greta Thunberg. Wouldn’t that be worth pressing the button for? Knowing there is going to be a good outcome certainly would make it easier. The truth is that either being aid recipients or givers, its impact affects us all. Whether we know it or not.
Less anonymity and more transparency!
As I mentioned before, choice and competition in aid is much more limited which reduces the possibility of self regulation from the various markets in which it operates, thus creating spaces for malfeasance. As you may imagine, aid has the tendency to inject money and other resources into economies that don’t necessarily have tools or the incentives for these resources to be used correctly. Anonymity makes things worse, Charmian Gooch explained this very well in her TED Talk. She speaks about anonymous companies. You might think this is very different from aid organizations. But aid organizations are never alone on site. They collaborate with both local and international companies along with other entities. Anonymous companies are part of this relationship, and they are “making it difficult and sometimes impossible to find out the actual human beings responsible sometimes for really terrible crimes”⁶, in her talk she speaks about a case she worked in the Democratic Republic of Congo, “where we exposed how secretive deals involving anonymous companies had deprived the citizens of one of the poorest countries on the planet of well over a billion dollars. That’s twice the country’s health and education budget combined”⁷. These tactics have been used for decades to deprive citizens of rich, poor societies and everything in between, from what is ours.
I cannot say that secrecy must disappear in every sector. Countries use secrecy to protect themselves from foreign attacks, companies use secrecy to protect intellectual property. But in a time where we have so much information out in the open, why should data such as where funds we donated were used, remain hidden? Why should it continue to end up in tax havens, in the pockets of corrupt officials or being used to support criminal activities? Even if we are certain we might never know about the good outcomes donations can facilitate, wouldn’t we like to give them the best chance of making it so? To me, this is where transparency comes from. Transparency is the tool to ensure contributions from across the planet have the best chance to be used as they were intended, to improve lives.
[1] My wish: To launch a new era of pennes in business (GOOCH, Charmian. TED Talk 2014)
[2] Transparency International
[3] Global Witness
[4] The Box, Official Trailer (2009)
[5] 8 Reasons we love the ocean (United Nations Development Programme, 2017)
[6] [7] My wish: To launch a new era of openness in business (Charmian Gooch, TED Talk. 2014)
