With Red Nose Day right around the corner and red noses in every supermarket, we’re just weeks away from one of the biggest charity fundraising nights in the UK calendar. A host of celebrities will be involved, both on the night and in the run up, involved in a range of activities from climbing Mount Kilimanjaro to visiting the charity’s projects in countries like Uganda.
So far, so normal – until this week when MP David Lammy tweeted about the backlash presenter Stacey Dooley was receiving for her Instagram picture of her holding a Ugandan child. “The world does not need any more white saviours,” Lammy wrote, adding that Dooley’s image “just perpetuates tired and unhelpful stereotypes” and that the UK should be “promot[ing] voices from across the continent of Africa”.
Cue a media storm. Dooley and the politician exchanged tweets online with thousands joining the conversation via comments and retweets. Comic Relief also became involved, suggesting the MP had turned down their offer to collaborate on a film in Africa. Though news attention around the charity has now turned to the summit-reaching Kilimanjaro group, this week’s conflict will likely cast a shadow on March 15th.
However, it would be a grave mistake to write this episode off as simply a clash between two personalities - another Twitter beef in the age of social media - or even as an example of individual charities needing to do better in terms of the images they promote. It’s the UK’s whole attitude to aid and our public response to international poverty which desperately needs an overhaul and it’s this need which has been thrust into the spotlight over the past few days.
The issue of the ‘white saviour’ stereotype in charity images and videos has been widely discussed, but this Western hero narrative often takes more subtle forms, which are much harder to detect. The UK is currently struggling to shake the idea that any help it gives will automatically be of benefit to the intended recipients and that only gratitude should be expected as a result. In the West, we’ve come to realise that solutions need to come from the first-hand experiences of those impacted by issues and from knowledge gained on the ground, if we’re to see real, lasting change. But this understanding often fails to permeate through to the public at large.
If the UK’s international aid and charity work is to be effective it’s only through a bottom-up approach and respect for the individual needs of those who you’re trying to help. There’s no one size fits all, media-friendly approach to aid which can be transposed to every area and community. For example, rather than building a toilet, a handwashing awareness programme could be more effective in reducing illness and malnutrition. It all comes down to letting local knowledge and networks inform your work: without this, your aid will be at best ineffective, at worst a waste.
It seems that discussion around UK aid is reaching a critical point, with this week’s debate closely following Bob Seely’s proposed multi-billion aid budget cuts and plans to incorporate ‘the nation’s overall strategic goals’ into overseas spending. It’s this idea of the aid-giver benefiting from what they give which is the crux of the problem in our aid attitude, and which some saw in Stacey Dooley’s Instagram. As we march towards the 15th and further into 2019, we need to remember one simple truth when it comes to international aid: it’s not for the benefit of those that give.