Category: Charity

The Children Are NOT Invisible

The Children Are NOT Invisible

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Invisible Children has produced a viral YouTube video that is dangerous. Like other U.S. organizations embracing an African cause they exploit part truths to make a buck.

My young hero, Conor Godfrey, wrote an incredibly balanced and unemotional blog about this that you must reread to understand the facts of the case. That way I can just continue screaming in good conscience.

I’ve written disparagingly about Invisible Children before. Among their most outlandish accomplishments was accepting money from naive high schools in America’s heartland for a cause that no longer existed. IC did this by teasing emotions and grossly ignoring details.

IC’s raison d’etre is to tell the stories of child soldiers who played such unspeakable rolls in mostly Uganda and The Congo in the 1990s, while under the control of a still wanted fugitive, Joseph Kony. That’s true.

But when the Windsor Colorado high school (and presumably others, too) raised money for the effort at the behest of IC, the cause was already over. There have been no child soldiers or Joseph Konys or Joseph Kony wanabees in Uganda since 2006.

IC’s response was to change its website slightly and go on accepting money from lots of naive high schoolers, much less pensioned widows and disabled truck drivers. The teachers, administrators and even local newspaper reporters in Windsor refused to comment on my blog or even talk to me about it.

I am so incensed by this exploitation, and watching the video that’s gone viral on YouTube makes my blood boil. IC is continuing its false cause campaign by generalizing to the point that details be damned!

Of course we all care about children! Can’t criticize the palsy filmmaker Jason Russell for spending two minutes at the beginning of the video showing baby pictures of his son, followed by a minute segment showing the birth of a very white child. Warm us up, so to speak.

The entire video is so tweaked with these generalized but irrelevant emotive gimmicks that I feel I’m watching a drug company commercial on the evening news. Russell’s honey coated commentary belies a very disturbed psyche, someone whose deepest soul is daring pushback against a blind evangelical drive to tell a story … that really isn’t.

The true story, as Conor reviews above, actually has parts with happy endings, not particularly conducive to a charity campaign.

Joseph Kony is a fugitive, probably in the Central African Republic (CAR), not Uganda. He hasn’t been there since he was roundly defeated by the Ugandan military in 2006.

We should presume Kony continues his sadistic ways of conscripting, drugging and brainwashing young children to be killers – the heart and soul of IC’s craven drive for wealth and fame. But we have little hard evidence of a scale anywhere near his robust days in Uganda.

Voice of America reported in March of his redeveloping presence in The Congo near the CAR. But as one of my all-time favorite journalists, New York Times reporter Jeffrey Gettleman explains in his March essay in the New York Review of Books, Kony is involved in only one of “dozens of small-scale, dirty wars” that while absolutely terrible doesn’t begin to achieve the magnitude of murder and destruction Kony leveled on Uganda in the 1990s.

But if IC owns up to the facts it might kill the golden goose.

The warehouse of emotion that IC has harvested from an unwitting American population, much less its cash charity, corrodes to the core the intention of every good person donating to it.

IC is especially being denounced in Uganda, where it all began. Ugandans are proud that they’ve routed Kony, so when the video was shown there last month it nearly caused a riot.

The excellent blog, Upworthy, tells a more sinister fiscal tale about IC in the recent post, “Share This Instead of the New Kony Video”:

IC recently accepted $750,000 from the National Christian Foundation (NCF). The NCF designed then funded the campaign in Uganda to pass a “Kill the Gays Bill” about which I and so many others have written. NCF gives other big sums of money to “The Call” which sends youthful missionaries into “dominions of darkness” like San Francisco to retrieve gays from their purgatory.

Also on NCF’s big recipient list with IC is the Family Research Council and The Fellowship. These mega right-wing organizations are well known and so dangerous, not just to Uganda but America. Just spend a few minutes on Google to build your Darth Vader tome.

This is the recipient pool that IC shares. And its message, methods and racist causes are also the same.

Weep when you watch the video. But let the tears dry before besmirching a check. You’ll realize that your clenched fist is packaged for IC not Kony.

Volunteerism Not Always Good

Volunteerism Not Always Good

by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

I often receive requests by sincere travelers who want to volunteer in Africa. The latest is from an enthusiastic woman who wants to help the mountain gorillas. She doesn’t want to pay “some tourist company thousands and not directly help.” Like many well meaning people, she’s got it very wrong.

Particularly with regards to the mountain gorillas, it’s my opinion that tourists doing nothing more than “paying thousands to tour companies” do as much if not more to help the mountain gorillas than scientists.

Read In the Kingdom of the Gorillas by Bill Weber and Amy Vedder, the two scientists who began the mountain gorilla project in the 1970s. From that book alone (and there are many more) you’ll see that without tourists paying the huge fee to the Rwandan government just for the privilege of seeing the gorillas, plus the funds paid local transporters and hoteliers, it is likely there would be no mountain gorillas left.

The sentiment to volunteer is a hopeful one, to be sure, and shared by many enthusiastic conservationists. And it is typical of caring travelers and crosses well beyond animal conservation into all areas of volunteerism.

Volunteerism can be good, please don’t mistake me. But there are several negative sides to it which send up serious red flags to the organizations involved.

Casual volunteers usually cause more difficulties than they expect. The most important one is time. Unless you have a half year to dedicate to some project, it’s unlikely you’ll be invited to assist. This is as true for mountain gorilla research at Kinigi as it is for AIDS education in Soweto.

Someone coming for just a month, for example, causes tremendous housekeeping problems such as food and housing (which you cannot try to do yourself).

Integrating the skills of a new team member into the team is as hard for an experienced field researcher as a casual volunteer. It takes careful analysis and if done wrong can compromise the goals of the entire project.

Analyzing your skills by a potential project takes time and money. Mistaking your capabilities, or inappropriately allocating your skills, will cost the project even more time and money. And today, time and money are scarcer than ever.

The mountain gorilla project in particular is not your down-the-street food bank. The people who work there are highly educated, generally postdocs, in highly specific fields. Of course any organization can use someone to paint the walls, but doing that robs part of the high intentions of the project: it takes those types of jobs away from Rwandans.

Remember that a principal goal of practically any aid project, whether it be animal conservation or public health, is to ultimately turn that project over to locals. The first stage of this implementation is turning over the least skilled jobs, something that is almost always the rating of a casual volunteer.

And finally, there is a negative side that is extremely important to me personally that people must try to understand. Volunteering in any sense can coopt one’s support for the grander projects that carry real potential. Projects that are government to government, or foreign aid support of organizations like the Mountain Gorilla Project.

Our first and foremost responsibility as true conservationists and sincere volunteers is to support politics at home that will continue to fund the organizations we support. If you were able to expend energy, for example, in making sure that your political representatives supported USAid projects of the Mountain Gorilla Project, and you and others were successful, you will have achieved a much greater goal in helping the gorillas than anything you could do personally in a short time there.

I am happy and willing to link anyone with trained skills appropriate to projects in Africa with any of a number of organizations, provided you have a half year or more available. Let me know! Otherwise, recognize that it is we paean tourists who have done the greatest good for the mountain gorillas, just by going there and “paying thousands” to the local government and local businesses!

Student Do-Gooders Beware

Student Do-Gooders Beware

by Arusha ♥ 4 Comments

The right way: Cottonwood Institute's many student programs.
Summer is coming and throngs of young people are getting ready to screw up the world. That’s the effect of most volunteer tourism. Here’s why, along with a few stellar exceptions.

During the last fifty years of America’s descent into conservative misery, America’s philanthropy has increased substantially. There’s a good reason for this, and a bad reason for this, and they impact tourism as we never expected they would.

The good reason was because community compassion developed as funding for good social programs was withdrawn. What else could we do? Institutions like museums and zoos, which should be a part of the public domain, became privatized for budgetary reasons. Today we even see public funds withdrawn from any type of arts (and often recreation) programs in public schools!

Fiscal concerns in America trump virtually every other concern except to wage war (in the guise of security). After we bought our ten billionth gun, there just wasn’t any money left for public aid.

We are now ailing as result.

Education is a mess.

In virtually every category America has declined. The most talked about one is health but health and everything else in life declines first and foremost because education declines first. America is now 33rd in the world. The education accomplishments of countries like Russia, Mexico and Brasil outperform us.

The need to do something in the face of government suppression of public services became overwhelming. And public response in terms of charity was good. What was bad was that charity was often not charity, just a ruse and self-disguise. And one of the principal tools for accomplishing that self-deception was tourism.

Frankly, I have serious doubts about philanthropy in general and have written about this before. The current controversy with Three Cups of Tea stands as a perfect example.

The bad effects of so-called voluntourism are acute when it involves children. I love guiding kids on safari, because I love watching their minds open to the vast mysterious of places far away and lifestyles never imagined. But I cringe terribly when they try to plan this in advance.

The number of requests I personally get by misguided parents who want to spend “a day or maybe three depending” on charitable activities when they go on safari drives me insane. It’s counterproductive. It’s a blatant indication of how badly their children are being raised.

One of the world’s finest social psychologists says it much better than me:

IN a research paper specifically addressing youth tourism programs for specially young AIDS orphanages in Africa Prof Linda Richter writes, “Programmes which encourage or allow short-term tourists to take on primary care-giving roles … are misguided for a number of reasons.”

1. They end up costing the orphanage more than the benefits received.
2. The volunteers generally perform badly.
3. Low-skilled volunteers squeeze out local and indigenous workers who not only need the work but could create a long-term benefit to the community since they don’t disappear after a few days.

But the zinger is indelible, long-lasting:

“The formation and dissolution of attachment bonds with successive volunteers is likely to be especially damaging to young children. Unstable attachments and losses experienced by young children with changing caregivers leaves them very vulnerable, and puts them at greatly increased risk for psychosocial problems…”

This is no old tour guide’s biased balderdash.

Professor Linda Richter (PhD) is a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Human Sciences Research Council in South Africa. She’s an Honorary Professor in Psychology and an elected Fellow of the University of KwaZulu-Natal; an Honorary Professor in the Department of Pediatrics and Child Health at the University of the Witwatersrand; a Research Associate in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Oxford (UK) and has been a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University USA) and Visiting Researcher at the University of Melbourne. That’s only the beginning of her resume.

Prof Richter concludes:

– “Children out of parental care have a right to protection… In particular, they have a right to be protected against repeated broken attachments … exacerbated by care provided by short term volunteers.
-“Welfare authorities must act against voluntourism companies … that exploit misguided international sympathies to make profits at the extent of children’s well-being.
-“Lastly, well-meaning young people should be made aware of the potential consequences of their own involvement in these care settings, be discouraged from taking part in such tourist expeditions…”

It is impossible to provide meaningful assistance FOR ANYTHING in a day “or maybe even three”. You can learn. You can become aware that it is unmeaningful, but you can’t MAKE A DIFFERENCE.

Yet again and again I have parents calling me about the spring break or summer safari, and they want to make sure their kids volunteer for a “day or maybe three.”

This is an unexpected further decline in America’s descent into greed and lack of real community compassion. It’s a way of “feeling good” without really doing anything meaningful. It’s believing you can do something meaningful when it’s impossible to do so.

You go on vacation for R&R and to expand your world view. You help the world afterwards, with that expanded world view. You help the world by getting deeply involved at home, not abroad. You personally have to suffer or benefit from the accomplishments or mistakes that you, yourself, make. That becomes increasingly difficult the further your charity is placed from home.

There are excellent student groups – (important: all not-for-profit and in never linked to commercial tour companies) – that do great work. Note that it is mostly local, and I believe that’s how it should be.

The Cottonwood Institute and Students Today Leaders Forever especially impress me. I bet there are dozens, but the point is there is no way to approach even a modicum of these organizations’ accomplishments on a commercial vacation.

And for adults Earthwatch rules the planet. It’s so good, in fact, that there really aren’t any viable competitors.

In all three cases, and I’m sure many more, volunteerism is not the point. It may be used, and when used creates real benefits as much for the individual (without jeopardizing the situation because of that individuals’ lack of skills) as for the situation itself.

That ultimately, is the only test. And if that standard can’t be met, then the self-styled “volunteer” does more harm to the situation than any benefits that might accrue. Voluntourism does more harm than good. And significantly to the voluntourist him/herself.

Do-Gooders, don’t get on the plane.

U.S. Kids Duped / Africa Disparaged

U.S. Kids Duped / Africa Disparaged

by Arusha ♥ 19 Comments

The International Club of Windsor High School, Colorado.

Here’s a perfect picture of what’s wrong with part of America: Kids, yes kids, duped by charity.

No one doubts the generosity of Americans. But charity must be researched first. And that’s what so many Americans just don’t do.

It would bother me less if it weren’t adults misleading kids. And I wouldn’t be quite so enraged if a series of subsequent adults didn’t affirm the original lie.

According to the Windsor, Colorado newspaper, The Beacon, Windsor High School students in northern Colorado are holding a big fund-raiser November 3 to help children fleeing a war zone in Africa.

The problem is, there is no war zone.

I don’t know if the lead teacher, Jackie Doman-Peoples, believes this. I tried to find out by calling her school and sending her an email, but she didn’t respond. So I don’t know if she just went onto the website of Invisible Children and didn’t dig deeply enough into their pages for the “current history” of Uganda and just got spell-bound by the movie about Invisible Children which no longer applies.

I don’t know if she then just decided, wow, that looks good, just like thousands of American idiots read a Sharron Angle’s poster and decide, wow, that looks good.

Doman-Peoples could have set me and lots of people in Uganda straight, but she didn’t. And I worry that she is leading her students to believe that their hard earned donations would be used to build a school to welcome recent escapees who had been kidnapped and turned into child soldiers by the notorious Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA).

The LRA hasn’t been active in Uganda for at least two years, maybe longer.

According to Human Rights Watch, the LRA was “pushed out of northern Uganda in 2005 [and] now operates in the remote border area between southern Sudan, Congo, and the Central African Republic.”

So there aren’t any children fleeing an army that no longer exists in a war zone that isn’t.

The Beacon fed into the online version of a major Ft. Collins newspaper, the Coloradoan, where it reappeared.

So, we know the Beacon didn’t fact-check, and we know the Coloradoan didn’t fact-check the Beacon, and we know that Doman-Peoples didn’t take the opportunity to tell me that she didn’t believe what was reported about her.

Now to be sure, the LRA is still a force to be reckoned with, but not in northern Uganda. This weekend the leaders of a number of African nations met in Bangui, Central African Republic (CAR), to plan a strategy to finally wipe them out.

This is because the LRA was defeated in northern Uganda, southern Sudan more than two years ago by a proactive Ugandan military mixed with adroit international diplomacy.

The African leaders met in Bangui to discuss the LRA, because that’s the country in which the LRA is now most active. The renegade leader, Joseph Kony, fled northern Uganda when his dwindling forces were being routed and is probably in a hold-up in Darfur, much closer to the CAR than Uganda.

LRA is now active in a place that’s as far from northern Uganda as Windsor is from Las Vegas or St. Louis. The displaced kids from this new war zone can’t be helped in northern Uganda. And unfortunately, these new war zone areas are far too unstable for schools of any kind at the moment.

My irritation is certainly not with the generous souls of those kids in the high school, or even with the good intentions of someone like Donam-Peoples. There are plenty of children still in northern Uganda who still need assistance from the war which ended two years or more ago. They will likely need assistance the rest of their lives.

But I’m mad as hell that the implication is that the war continues, there! It doesn’t! Or that innocent kids are still being displaced, there. They aren’t!

This is also a story of what happens to NGOs when they become unnecessary. They won’t admit it. According to Mark Jordhal, whose wonderful Ugandan blog first broke this story, Invisible Children doesn’t deny that fund-raisers are still using their materials, particularly the film, which claims that the war in Uganda continues.

Their website, under the page “History of the War”, has recently updated the facts. But their promotional materials remain steeped in the past, and it is that pitch, that kids are being kidnapped and escaping into Invisible Children’s welcoming arms in northern Uganda, which is a serious outright lie.

So if Donam-Peoples checked with Invisible Children, a charity which has accomplished a lot of good work in northern Uganda, she could have been misled from the getgo, because that’s what their site does. And good gracious me, why on earth would we question a good American charity?!

It’s so important to the peoples in northern Uganda/southern Sudan – and particularly their children – that we recognize their victory. Claiming that a war still exists trashes their victory and discounts their noble hopes for the future.

There is no excuse for this.

Even though Invisible Children is still showing their film literally to this day to raise money. A film which claims the war continues.

The film was shown Tuesday on the Main Campus of Temple University. Perhaps at the end of the showing the presenter explained it was no longer happening in Uganda, I don’t know. But this once good charity, having run out of its main justification for income, can’t seem to move on. There’s a lot of good charity work left in northern Uganda. This aspect to this story is a story in itself.

But I can’t get over the fact that children are being misled. You don’t muster the power of kids without knowing the Truth, the Whole Truth and Nothing but the Truth. It’s called:

Fact-Checking!

Katherine Popowski who wrote for the Beacon didn’t. And then David Persons, the editor of the Beacon didn’t. And by the time that the senior editor of the Coloradoan, Robert Moore, didn’t, it almost seems… true. And Doman-Peoples didn’t let me know if she did or not.

I held the publication of this post for two days to give all the above a chance to comment. I made phone calls to the school, sent emails to the teacher, the newspapers, the on-line reporter. Not one response. Not one email in reply.

They aren’t alone.

This may be the biggest problem in America, today. Not Knowing the Truth, The Whole Truth, and Nothing But The Truth. But more importantly, not caring. Standing by your lie.

Thanks to Mark Jordahl in Kampala for bringing this to my attention. Take a look at his excellent blog, Conserve Uganda.

Best Conservation Charities

Best Conservation Charities

by Arusha ♥ 4 Comments

I am constantly asked what good charity to support for wildlife conservation in East Africa. Here’s a start.

I’ve compiled basic information from ten wildlife charities that is described for you, below, which I personally feel are the best of many good ones.

But first I must restate my theoretical opposition to all charities in East Africa, whether they be for wildlife conservation or poverty eradication. I’ve been around long enough to know things aren’t getting better; they’re getting worse.

A half century of charities has not improved the situation in East Africa. It certainly has helped to reduce the decline, but to improve overall situations we need government to government action. Nothing less.

When governments were aggressively assisting East Africa in the 1970s and early 1980s (for strictly strategic reasons: the Cold War), things began to improve. When the Cold War ended, aggressive assistance ended, and things started to get worse.

Not all the charities in the world combined even begin to approach the impact of a single western government aid agency.

So before you choose a charity to support, look carefully at how you can support your various government agencies if you really want to help improve the situations in East Africa.

Charities provide a critical role in lobbying and focusing government action. They’re often the first responders to emergencies that are not catastrophic but still devastating, and probably most of all, they relieve our guilt: A guilt that I fervently believe we should cultivate until we fully grasp its meaning.

The ten charities are all licensed American not-for-profits, because those are the most likely to generate a tax deduction and the ones which you’ll be able to best research. Yet there are a number of non-American, mostly smaller charities, which are very active in East Africa, as well as a number of stellar individuals. You can find references to those at the bottom of this blog.

One of the immediate things I think you’ll notice is that American zoos are quickly becoming the significant force in wildlife conservation in East Africa. Over the last several decades, zoos in general have begun to adopt the international conservation practices that only a few, like the Bronx, did in the past.

Four of my ten recommendations are American zoos. And what this means is that it is quite likely that your own zoo, although not quite in the league of these, undertakes wildlife conservation activities worthy of your support.

How did I pick these ten?

Mostly from experience. And then through some basic analysis discussed below. But I began with my own encounters with these organizations in East Africa, and I like what they’re doing.

What I don’t like about them, almost every one, is the guarded way that they work independent of one another. As charities achieve success they tend to become exclusive. They covet their data as they covet their donors, and what this means is that resources are wasted and studies unnecessarily duplicated.

The zoos, in fact, are the least offenders. They’re more transparent and open with their data, and they’re most willing to engage in cooperative efforts.

My pick of ten (in alphabetical order) are the African Wildlife Foundation (AWF), the Chicago Zoological Society (ChiZooSociety), the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International (DianFossey), the Jane Goodall Institute (Jane Goodall)
, the Lincoln Park Zoo (LPZ), the Morris Animal Foundation (Morris), the Safari Club International Foundation (SCI Fnd), the Wildlife Conservation Society of the Bronx Zoo (WCS), the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), and the Zoological Society of San Diego (ZooSocSAN).

SCI Fnd is supported by hunters. I am not a hunter and do not understand why anyone hunts, but the work that SCI Fnd does, like Ducks Unlimited at home, is worth considering.

Dian Fossey and Jane Goodall were horrible researchers and very bad people. But their success in sensitizing the American public to primate issues in East Africa is unquestionable, and their foundations are now doing the good work that they didn’t do as individuals.

Three organizations work almost exclusively with primates: Jane Goodall, DianFossey and Morris. But I’ve chosen them not for that reason, but because their work extends significantly into the human/animal conflicts that apply to all areas of wildlife conservation.

And finally, WWF. I have a lot of concerns with WWF, most importantly its exclusiveness and real reticence to share data and projects. But WWF is so big (see below) and so experienced that it is by its very definition the default organization. If nothing else tweaks your interest, if you don’t have the time to do some research, a donation to WWF will be well spent.

To show organizational size. Not all funds, of course, go to East Africa conservation.

SO how to choose among these ten?

You should have some simple set of objectives: such as certain animals, or environmental or climate concerns, to guide your research and speed your analysis. After that here are two general parameters you need to put into your mix, that I have obtained from Charity Navigator where you can obtain a wealth of additional information about all the charities discussed.

The actual amount of your donation which really gets into the field I believe is critical to vetting the charity’s honesty and real intentions. This is a significant factor, and all the charities discussed have very good ratings.

(All figures shown are for the calendar year ending 2008.)

This shows the organization's efficiency in getting resources to the field.

You can look at this another way: how much isn’t spent on administration and fund-raising?

From best to worst, but all are pretty good.

And finally, there is no starker region of the world to demonstrate the injustice of the growing divide between the haves and have-nots as Africa. So I think it fitting to review with a lot of skepticism the compensation that the executive in charge of these organizations receives.

With practically all of them, it’s too much. It’s not sufficient for me to be told that they are simply “responding to the market” to get good people, or that the “private sector gives much more.”

We know the private sector gives much more: it gives way too much more! And I think that organizations founded on altruism, nonprofitism, ought to practice what they preach.

Consider both the raw dollars and the percentage a CEO's salary is of overall expenses.

There are two charities which I really like but are still too young and small to have a track record like those mentioned above. But they might still be worthy of your consideration. Take a look at The International Rhino Foundation, and the Wildlife Conservation Network.

All the above have a worldwide scope; even the primate charities support projects as distant away as Borneo. If you can overlook the tax deduction issues, here are much smaller charities (many in Kenya) with a scope mostly focused on just African wildlife:

Save the Elephants is the foundation set up by the legendary elephant researcher, Ian-Douglas Hamilton, with his wife, Oria. There could hardly be two more selfless individuals in a cause for animal protection.

The Daphne Sheldrick Wildlife Trust is another good organization in Kenya dedicated mostly to elephant conservation.

Wildlife Direct is the brain child of Richard Leakey, a young organization that is growing by leaps and bounds and shows incredible promise.

The William Holden Wildlife Foundation is known mostly by its Animal Orphanage at the Mt. Kenya Safari Club, but in fact is much more critical for financing Kenyan school children’s environmental “camps”, which actually gets young Kenyans into game parks.

Cynthia Moss’ Amboseli Trust for Elephants is one of the most proactive forces in East Africa.

The Tusk Trust is currently the darling of Prince William, a British conservation charity with near 95% pass-through of its funds into direct projects in East Africa.

Finally, there are several researchers in East Africa which I think are doing as much if not more important work than entire charities! They are independent and not associated with any single organization.

Anna Estes and Charles Foley working on elephants and human/animal conflicts, and Bruce Patterson working on predators.

I hope this helps. But remember, whatever you give, your donation is essentially limited by the size of all these organizations, whose optimum performance (even in consortium) falls far below the threshold of being able to create real, good change in East Africa.

And we need real, good change in East Africa. For that vote Democratic and support progressive international causes by your government and its agencies!

The Monkey & The Fish

The Monkey & The Fish

by Arusha ♥ 2 Comments

I’ve always been skeptical about almost any type of individual charity for Africa, but billionaire do-gooders are an absolute pain in the ass.

A very close friend asked me to comment on the New Yorker’s December article by Philip Gourevitch, “The Monkey and The Fish.” It’s about Prodigy billionaire Greg Carr who according to the article is single-handedly reclaiming Mozambique’s near destroyed Gorongosa wilderness.

He is not the first untrained rich man to come to Africa to save it. Whether it is King Leopold, Sir Richard Burton or more recently, Paul Tudor Jones, I think it usually ends in disaster for Africa. There are much better ways that rich men who truly care about Africa can help it.

Bill Gates is the best example. And sorry to set the bar so high, as I realize Gates’ wealth is much greater than Carr’s. But my point is that Gates does it the right way: through a carefully created foundation that uses science, business management, and works closely with governments and long established NGO’s.

Carr is not doing such. He and renegades like Paul Tudor Jones make a bunch of money then fall passionately in love with Africa and decide they’ll go out and make everything right. Usually, everything goes terribly wrong.

As it should, frankly. What I find particularly upsetting is that the people who know better than me, scientists and managers at places like the World Wildlife Fund and Frankfurt Zoological Society, are all cowered into complacency, because they want these guys’ money. If they didn’t need it, they’d send them packing.

I have a good example of what they should do, even if they aren’t as rich as Gates.

A man as rich in his time as either Paul Tudor Jones or Greg Carr are today was New Yorker Howard Gilman. He was a good man who had to stay under the radar for a number of reasons: he was gay, he ran an international paper company that, of course, cut down trees, and he had a bickering family.

But he supplied more than 1,000 jobs to people in the Carolinas, was a responsible paper company executive, adopted Mikhail Baryshnikov when he defected from the Soviet Union and was a reliable patron of the arts.

And just as much as Jones or Carr, today, he loved Africa and he loved wildlife.

So he carefully and systematically built up a foundation which today has earned an exemplary reputation of helping Africa and wildlife.

He hired John Lukas from the Bronx Zoo years ago. John built up the White Oak Conservation Center with endowments from the Gilman foundations. John has spent more than twenty years carefully and expertly creating an organization that includes a huge conservancy on the border of Georgia and Florida, an outpost and oasis of wildlife prestige in the belabored Congo, and in the course of his career has done more for animals and Africa than Jones or Carr will ever do in a thousand life times.

Untrained, rich men, aren’t good for Africa. Africa needs outside scientists doing careful baseline research, government-to-government alliances and exchanges of aid, and mature interaction between experienced NGOs like the White Oak center.

Howard Gilman might never have felt the rush that Jones or Carr feel when a big magazine displays them as the saviors of Africa. But I can also assure you that if the next generation even finds their names in any African monograph it will be because of something horrible they did.

But the next generation will know of the Gates Foundation and the Gilman Foundation and White Oak Conservation Center, because what they’ve done, and how they’ve done it, and what will be built on top of their accomplishments will have helped Africa. It already has.

Rhinowash

Rhinowash

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

This week’s arrival in Kenya of one of the most endangered animals left on earth was not the cute Christmas present the world media reported.

In fact, the relocation of 4 of the remaining 8 northern white rhino in existence, into a country where poaching is becoming epidemic, may be one of the most stupid moves the conservation world has ever engineered.

The four northern white rhino (Ceratotherium simum cottoni) came from a zoo in the Czech Republic. The only other place that this subspecies of rhino survives is in the San Diego Wild Animal Park. There are none in the wild.

Eight life forms is statistically impossible to propagate. What is hoped is that some of the genes of this subspecies will get preserved if the four animals breed with other rhino subspecies. It is known, for example, that this highly endangered animal is immune to tse-tse fly transmitted diseases, whereas its less endangered cousins in Africa are not.

“It makes no sense to move them at this point .. It’s way too little, too late,” said Randy Rieches, curator of mammals for the San Diego Wild Animal Park, which has two northern whites.

Rieches and a host of other scientists have been fighting this move for months. Lately the argument has been a financial one, with proponents claiming that the quarter million dollar cost of the move is insignificant compared to the chance they might breed, and critics claiming the cost of the move is being grossly underestimated and is diverting resources from other much needed conservation efforts.

Funds were raised from just a handful of individuals, including the vice chairman of Goldman Sachs of Australia and Berry White, a controversial animal activist nicknamed the “rhino whisperer.” The effort was coordinated by Rob Brett, the director of Fauna and Flora International.

This is stupid.

There has been some reluctance to embrace Rieches’ many astute and scientific criticisms for fear this is not a scientific but a PR question, and that San Diego lost out to the Czech zoo. This is rhinowash.

The four animals transported to Kenya haven’t bred in 30 years. While they are being transported into a private reserve (Ol Pejeta) which has a good record of captive rhino maintenance, it is still in Kenya, and even better reserves near Ol Pejeta like Solio have had poaching incidents.

As I’ve often written poaching isn’t just a Darth Vader pastime. It increases in times of economic stress, and need we be reminded of the current times?

Rhino are one of the easiest animals on the African veld to poach. And the horn is worth more than its weight in gold.

So I consider the risk ridiculous. And as for preserving the gene pool of this subspecies, there are more conservative ways that are much less expensive, such as DNA deep-freeze. There is little research on cloning rhino, but the chances (the “statistical” chance) of one day cloning a rhino from its preserved DNA is astronomically greater than hoping these four animals will breed into existing populations.

In fact zoos are one of the best places to breed rhinos, not a private tourist game ranch.

And much more DNA research needs to be done on rhinos, to move towards a genome that will specifically show the differences between the 8 world subspecies which are now mostly presumed from taxonomical differences. I fear that money is directing research, here, as individuals who probably spent less time reading the monographs on the controversy wrote checks to get their names emblazoned round the world as animal rescuers.

We just don’t seem to have the attention to read very far down the page. If there is some real value to saving these rhinos’ gene pool, flying them to Kenya is absolutely not the way to do it.

Heifer Charities

Heifer Charities

by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

Heifer may be one of the better charity-direct not-for-profits for Africa, and then again, it might not be.

I am often asked for recommendations of charities serving Africa, and I am often asked specifically about Heifer.  There are actually two “Heifers”, and here are my thoughts and some background.

The Heifer Project International (“Heifer”) was founded in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1944 by an Arkansan who had just returned from the Spanish Civil War.  Dan West was deeply religious and had been deeply impacted by the terrible and mostly pointless war in Spain.  He grasped upon a Christian biblical maxim that it is better to teach a man to fish, than simply to give him a fish to eat.

Today Heifer is one of the more prominent aid organizations in Africa.  It is on the Forbes Ten Best Charities list and recently received a generous contribution from the Gates Foundation, which is probably the lead NGO in Africa.

For relatively small contributions, the organization buys livestock (sometimes trees and other plants) and gives them to individuals mostly in Africa.  The bulk of the purchases are dairy cows.  The idea is that the individual receiving the gift will learn to tend the animal, harvest its milk, and hopefully breed it.

Because a cow today in Africa averages only $120, the charity has especially appealed to school groups where children are able to actively participate.

The Heifer idea has few direct critics, mostly animal rights groups.  From my point of view, its basic idea is a sound one.

So what’s the problem?  As usual, it’s in the administration of the idea, rather than the idea.

Towards the end of the 1980s Heifer found itself in serious difficulty.  It began requesting upwards of $250 for a cow that then cost about $80.  The problem was with the Arkansas administration and it was remedied, more or less, fairly quickly.

One of the ways the organization remedied the “cost drift” was to start a second organization, the Heifer International Foundation (the “Foundation”).  By separating the actual project funds from the growing needs at administration, Heifer was able to maintain good ratings.

Today, Heifer gets 3 out of 4 stars from the reputable Charity Navigator, similar to the American Red Cross.  More precisely, Navigator rates Heifer at 55.25, the American Red Cross at 54.6.  This is pretty good on the slightly mediocre side.

But the Foundation is another matter.  Navigator rates that as only two stars, a numerical rating of 46.7.  Almost a third of all the funds going into the foundation are used for administrative expenses including salaries.  By then taking on some of the otherwise administrative expenses that would be required to run Heifer, the Foundation takes the hit and lets Heifer get another star.

This is clever, and deceptive.  It should be a warning to those who give that the organization is unable on its own merits to attain what it feels is an acceptable level of accreditation.

Heifer is a very secretive organization, held very tightly.  That’s probably one of the reasons that Forbes and the Gates Foundation like it.

On May 21 of this year, the CEO of Heifer resigned amid a scandal that even until today has not been revealed.  The details are still with a sealed grand jury in Arkansas.  The rumors are that then CEO Janet K. Ginn was forced out of her position by the Heifer board for some sort of plagiarism. That’s all we know as reported in Little Rock newspapers, and it remains an unsubstantiated rumor.  But the Heifer Board has refused to deny it and Ginn’s attorneys are refusing to let her say anything.

It could be something really unrelated to the mission or work of Heifer, but that we won’t know until it goes to trial.  And if Ginn settles, we might never know.

Personally, I come down very hard on attempted charities for Africa.  I have worked and lived there for too long to have come to any conclusion except that things are getting worse in Africa.  So whatever the world has been doing has not been right, or mattered.

What is “right” is a much more complicated issue, but it begins not with a small donation and a checkbook, but with government to government actions.

Governments, ultimately, are accountable.  Heifer seems to be trying to avoid accountability.

HeiferRatings

Don’t Bring Gifts

Don’t Bring Gifts

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

This is not the way to help.

One of the most frequent questions I get from clients preparing to go on safari is, What can I bring as a present?

My answer is, Nothing.

This blog is a more sensitive explanation of this, and it’s not as easy as the curt reply above might suggest. There are two basic reasons that I discourage arriving safari clients from attempting small acts of charity.

The first is that single acts of giving can be dangerously counter-productive, producing exactly the long-term effect it intends to alleviate.

I will never forget pulling out of a gas station at Karatu, just south of Ngorongoro Crater, with another company’s Landrover just ahead of us. No one was going very fast, because we were just starting out. But before we knew it, we had hit a young boy who had run onto the road in front of us, seemingly for no good reason. We really couldn’t figure it out, and fortunately, we were going so slowly that he didn’t seem to be hurt very much. In fact, he was screaming that we let him go as we tried to examine him for injuries.

The minute he pulled away from us, he ran back to where he had been hit, and scooped up several small paper wrapped hard candies. Candies, apparently, that someone in the car ahead of us had thrown carelessly out the window.

From that day on, I realized that it could be physically dangerous for clients to try to dispense anything at all. Had that traveler alternatively tried to hand it out to a small group of needy children who gather around the cars as they’re being filled with gas, he or she might have sustained the injury instead of the child! There is usually very little decorum among a group of kids in need. That presumption may have motived that traveler to throw the candy out the window as his car began to move away.

This happened years ago, but for me it was an epiphany. It provoked me to examine very carefully my long-held reluctance to assist clients with any charity whatever. It helped me put into focus an intuition which I believe is very, very correct.

A single instance of dispersing a gift can be not just miserly, but deadly. First, candy is about the worst thing you can give children who are under nourished. It destroys their already fragile GI system, it makes them even more hyper and irrational, and produces none of the expected “happiness” I presume clients want to achieve. Even a high energy granola bar might be bad, depending upon what that poor child has been eating and is capable of digesting. And if the two foregoing concerns don’t apply, then the kid certainly doesn’t need candy for the same reasons most kids don’t need candy.

But the more important point is that it really doesn’t matter if it’s candy or a Laptop. What I have tried to explain, over and over again, is that regardless of the contextual need – poverty, hunger, bad water, illiteracy – single acts of giving are usually more destructive than no giving at all. It can be dangerous to raise expectations that can change behavior. If a child in Karatu expects to get a bandana or tennis ball every so often from a tourist vehicle stopping to get gas, it is likely he will skip school to do so. And if he misses school, he won’t improve his station in life, and he will never emerge from his cycle of dependency.

The cycle of dependency is a dangerous situation. Unfortunately, it has morphed from the single incident of a child missing school in the hopes of getting a present, to entire Third World economies failing to plan properly as they expect packages of co-optive aid that never totally reaches their needs. Nobel Laureate, Muhammad Yunus, the founder of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, puts it this way in an interview in Ode Magazine:

“What all these pop stars and politicians want is the usual recipe: charity. But charity is not the way to help people in need; it is not a healthy basis for a relationship between people. If you want to solve poverty, you have to put people in a position to build their own life…

“The approach [many take] to poverty is thwarted by our fixed convictions: Poor people are helpless, unhealthy, illiterate and thus stupid, they have nothing, they know nothing, we must take care of them, we must give them food… It is completely wrong to think like this. I am convinced that poor people are just as human as anyone else. They have just as much potential as anyone…”

So is there nothing that you can bring on your trip, to give as a present, to help?

No. The least damaging attempt which I tolerated for a few years was collections of school supplies that could be given to a school directly. But even that is probably a bad idea. What is so misunderstood, is that everything that a traveler might wish to give can have such extraordinary value in the bush, that it rarely gets used as it’s intended: Rather, it will be traded, and when in the hands of a child, generally traded for something that has more immediate value, like candy, or glue to sniff, or some other instantaneous gratification. A box of school supplies given out piecemeal to children is about as productive as sowing your garden from a hot air balloon.

And even more ironically, if it is used as intended and successfully so, then when it’s gone it’s considered indispensable! Even when accepted with gracious pomp from a responsible school official, it might still have a bad long-term effect. What happens once that box of supplies is used up? Often the answer is depressing. Not only the children, but the teachers as well, sit on their hands until a new box arrives. If it doesn’t, learning stops.

There is a second more philosophical, and perhaps more important reason. I go back to my old mentor, Herbert Marcuse, whose theory of co-optive liberation can be as exactly applied to this discussion as to macro social politics: Marcuse.org. With apologies for likely destroying his greater ideas with this reduction, let me try to summarize Marcuse in terms of a traveler coming to Africa who wants to give something away:

(1) The need the traveler presumes exists in Africa exists right at his home. Poverty, hunger, ignorance – most of us can find it pretty close to our residential address, certainly closer to us than Africa. Yes, it may exist to a greater extent in Africa, but certainly the small act of charity the traveler has in mind would have no greater impact in Africa than in the slum in the city nearest his home, right? So why wait for Africa to affect this generosity? Are the poor kids in Watts less needy than in Karatu?

(2) All the combined charity in the world has actually not stopped the slippage into greater poverty and hunger. It keeps getting worse. So all our combined efforts, individual and aggregate, aren’t working. The sums are documented in numerous places:
John Hopkins Univ.
Indiana Univ.
Boston College

So why do we continue? We do so, because it makes us feel good. Invariably I field the argument, “But at least it helped that one school for a day.” As I tried to point out above, you can’t reduce the problem to individual immediate incidents without compromising the more important long-term. It may have helped that school for the day, but it probably really hurt that school for the term. It doesn’t take a lot of thought to understand this. And yet there is this dogmatic individual certainty that giving is good in all cases. It is good, as Marcuse would point out, for ourselves, and by so doing it relieves us of the very natural human instinct to help one another. So we co-opt the visceral intuition to help, by doing something that in the larger perspective doesn’t help at all except to relieve ourselves of the feeling that we need to help.

(3) Basically, the problems we would like to solve have become so enormous that there is no hope of solving them through individual or even collective charity. When a remedy occurs, it will undoubtedly rely on individual initiative, but it will be overseen and vastly underwritten by governments to governments. Only governments are big enough to tackle these urgent problems. In 2007, total worldwide charity approached $400 billion. But the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a UN agency) has time and again affirmed its “10-15″ prescription necessary for making (only) black Africa self-sufficient: 10-15% of the developed world’s budget given as directed aid to Africa for 10-15 years. 10-15% of the developed world’s budget is at least 25-50 times total worldwide charity, and much of that world-wide charity would do nothing for black Africa. Africa is only part of the needy world. And this is a prescription that must continue for 10-15 years! Just for Africa!

Marcuse argues so well that individual initiative often co-opts that citizen’s necessary ascension to his government’s need to act. There’s a feeling – so deadly wrong and especially in America – that individuals, and not governments, are the answer.

People are beginning to realize this. One easy-read explanation is by Tim Harford, a Financial Times columnist, in his recent book, The Logic of Life (available at Amazon.com). I think, though, that a thumbnail sketch of his themes has been better reduced by Slate.com.

Charity, especially again in America, has become selfish, because it has been so personally internalized and individual. The world is just too complex. The tiny piece of candy you might wish to give a child in Africa, might just end up killing him. The box of school supplies you’d like to leave with the Headmaster may doom all 40 children in his class to poverty for the rest of their lives. Rather, help those in need at home and help your government work better so that it can help the world.