Crisis Commons is holding a global CrisisCamp day on September 25, with events happening in London (UK), Washington, D.C., Toronto, and Calgary. The events are free and open to all. If you’re not in Toronto or Calgary, it’s still possible to participate online. You can sign up through EventBrite for Toronto and Calgary.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

This certainly rings true in the world of health policy: there’s a lot of talk, and the idea of change or reform is nice to think about, regardless of whether it ever happens. Recently, it seems that absolutely nothing is changing at all. Because for some reason we’re still debating about the needs of women in developing countries —and in particular we’re trying to decide if those women deserve access to safe and law-abiding abortions.

For just one second, lets forget the fact that Canadian women have this right and have had it for more than 40 years. Lets forget that it is, in itself, ridiculous for our government to have any say whatsoever over what happens in other countries, other than by providing advice and guidance through our own trial and error.

The Harper government was not saying, this week, that they would debate the legality of abortion. But by insisting that leaders at the G8 summit in Halifax remain silent on abortion while discussing other women’s health issues in developing countries, they placed a gag order on the issue.

This is indicative of not only of our foreign presence and international ideology, but of how the Conservatives in particularly see women in Canada, and especially in their own party. Watching Bev Oda take a strong stance against yet another women’s rights issue is becoming tiring. Last month it was debated if birth control would be talked during the meeting at all. Harper quickly jumped in the ring after protests took off.

I’d hate to say that women in the Conservative party are there as demographic placeholders, but it can often seem that way. With scandals surrounding former Conservative MPs Belinda Stronach and Rona Ambrose, I know more about the personal lives of our female MPs more than their politics—especially those politics pertaining gender issues.

And, as if Helena Geurgis needed more attention, the Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women sent out a press release yesterday stating they’d like a review of the funding handed out under Ms. Guergis as Minister of the Status of Women. According to CRIAW President Judy White, many women’s advocacy groups were denied previously delegated funding this year:

“SWC has turned down a growing list of women’s groups this year, that they previously funded. Some are afraid they will lose more government funding if they speak out.”

“This is deeper than the government’s decision to eliminate funding for advocacy, lobbying and most research when they changed the SWC funding mandate 4 years ago… What could be more important than a project to ensure that all women can access shelters when they need refuge from oppressive and violent relationships?”

Through all this I’m left wondering: What are our women in government here for?

One would hope one part of their role would be to champion women’s health—and all that brings along. In a meeting drawing leaders from around the world to Canada with a focus on maternal health, I would have hoped those women elected to office (not to mention the men!) would have pushed harder for discussion and debate.

With today’s edition of Verbatim, we’ve got This Magazine associate editor Nick Taylor-Vaisey in conversation with Liberal Party critic for International Cooperation Glen Pearson. You can hear the original podcast of this conversation, as always, on the podcast blog.

Nick and Glen discuss Canada’s humanitarian commitments past, present, and future, ranging from Darfur to Afghanistan to Haiti and Latin America. With the Afghanistan mission scheduled to end in 2011, Canada’s international development priorities are up for discussion again, but there appears to be little agreement in parliament about where exactly Canadian resources—attention, aid, military support—ought to go.

Q&A

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: Let’s talk about, first, the aftermath in Afghanistan, when the Canadian combat mission in Kandahar ends in 2011. What happens next?

Glen Pearson: I think it’s a great time to ask that question because up until two weeks ago I was pretty sure I knew what was going to happen. Peter McKay the defence minister and I, we’re friends, but we discussed often, and I traveled to some of the NATO meetings with him in opposition, we talk about these things. He would say “Glen, pretty soon we’re wrapping up in Afghanistan, in 2011, and we need to consider where we go next.”

So he was thinking of three places in Africa, one was to maybe Darfur, which is a traditional one that people have looked at, one was maybe Somalia and one was maybe the Congo because of the UN declarations there.

So he’s asked me to do some thinking about it, and then I went off to Darfur and I just got back a couple of days ago. What happened between then and now is obviously Haiti. What you’re seeing with the Conservative government, and I’m not trying to be partisan, but they have tended to look at Africa as a Liberal construct and I’ve spoken to many people on the other side, on the Conservative side, and they want to find their own place where they can leave their own legacy and that will be in Latin and South America.

So as a result we’re opening up all these new lines of free-trade zones right there in Bolivia and Columbia and all those other things. As far as aid goes CIDA has now pulled out of eight African countries, mostly for its long-term development, and moved those funds over to places like Colombia, Haiti and other places. So that leaves defence, it seems to me that the Prime Minister and others over there wish to move the focus out of Africa—and I think Africa was the default position for two reasons: one is that it’s obviously the hardest pressed area in the world, and it’s kind of been a legacy here. Even with the Mulroney Government and the Diefenbaker government Africa mattered.

I think now that has begun to change. Now, it still was a default position and I think because of that Canada has made long-term commitments. We have donor nations who have agreed with Canada—United States, European Union and others—that Africa is the big thing.

So there’s the Millennial Development Goals and everything else. So I think I naturally assumed the default position would be Africa. But I’ve come to understand pretty well how the Conservatives think on things like aid and other things. I think right now there are more troops moving into Haiti then there are in Afghanistan at present. So I think if they ever wanted to make a move militarily to put some of their troops in various places, and I don’t mean battle type of things, but keeping security, peacekeeping, doing humanitarian aid, helping with various projects, now would be their time if they wanted to switch, because Haiti has given them the opportunity to capture the public’s attention and move them over.

It’s not like with Afghanistan, where that was a whole bunch of elites deciding that that’s where they were going to go. The public is already well ahead of the game about Haiti, so I think you’ll probably see the debate beginning to grow that the place for the troops to go will not be Africa. It will probably be a much larger enforcement group within Haiti and maybe in other countries, as well militarily.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: How would that discussion happen? How would that commitment come about?

Glen Pearson: Well, probably secretly. I mean, this is one of the things that has bothered me a lot. These issues are so important that they should be part of parliament having a discussion, because our troops are sent by parliament, they’re not sent by their general or even by the Prime Minister. These kinds of things have to be passed by an act of parliament for anything that’s major. One would hope that they would sit down and come to their counterparts. The Liberals and the Conservatives have a vested interest in both Haiti and Afghanistan, it was the Liberals that first went into Haiti for instance and it was also the Liberals who first went into Afghanistan.

So we have a vested interest in cooperating together as parties, but we’re not being consulted. I think what you’ll see, it (the decision to move troops out of Africa, to Haiti and South America) will be by stealth. So you’ll suddenly realize the troop deployment in Haiti is now 3000, and then it might be 4000 and we’ve established and airbase. It won’t be, I don’t believe, by some big announcement that we’ve decided to move the construct as to where we’re going to go because that would fly directly in the face of most of the NGOs that do international development. It will also fly in the face of the commitments you have made to the G8, G20 and others that you would pursue the millennial development goal in Africa.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: I wonder, would any commitment to Haiti militarily in terms of development hurt the Canadian commitment to Africa, which was made just a few years ago by the Liberals primarily? Is Africa going to be a forgotten continent again?

Glen Pearson: I think it’s very quickly on its way to becoming that within Canada. But I just finished meeting Mr. Obama’s key guy for U.S. Aid, his new person who he’s just appointed. They’re totally committed to Africa and they’re going to double their aid to Africa.

Gordon Brown, whom I’ve met and discussed things with, and also his assistant, they’ve just announced they’re going to reach their 0.7  percent  aid development target and that they’re going to do that in Africa. You’ve got places like China and Japan and others who are investing in Africa, not just in aid, but also in business and development. The European Union has a huge history in Africa, so obviously you’re not going to be able to wrench them away from it. So I think it’s going to be Canada that decides to now align itself with American foreign policy primarily. While Americans might be doubling their aid to Africa, their real interest is in the Americas. That’s where they want to be, for trade reasons and for other reasons, because there are lots of goods down there. I think it’s going to be difficult. My personal view is that it’s going to isolate us more from the world—just like Copenhagen did. You know, the formula we were supposed to follow and we never did and that was a Liberal problem and also a Conservative problem. But at the end of the day we’ve been isolated from the world environmentally. Now we’re going to be isolated from the world in the areas of Global Millennial development goals, which are supposed to be for the poorest of the poor. You can only measure them when you go to the poorest countries. Well, we just left those countries.

Now Conservatives will tell you: “No, we stayed in Africa.” But it’s emergency funding—it’s like Haiti funding. It’s not the long-term development goals that end up making the difference. That’s what’s gone wrong in Haiti; all this has become an aid economy. It’s an NGO-driven welfare state in Haiti because people didn’t really do development, they just kept doing aid every time a new natural disaster happened. There’s no long-term future in that. We need to get back to development and I just think that’s not going to happen and Canada will be isolated from the European Union and other nations.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: What would you do if you were in charge?

Glen Pearson: Paul Martin and I do a lot of work together. Paul is helping to lead the African development bank. I just talked with him a couple days ago and he’s pulling together what he calls the African common market. It’s much like the E.U., he’s getting all these countries that now have certain benefits and certain growth patterns to begin to cooperate together to get world wide investment. He and I often get into fights about it because I’ll say: “Well that doesn’t help me in Darfur with the people who are trying to get water.”

He has agreed to that, so he and I are trying to put together a kind of plan that’s sky high for him and the people that he’s going with, but also how do we get markets and things like that to grow in places like Darfur or Nigeria or whatever. So I think what has happened in the last four or five years is that people have begun to realize that many countries in Africa have rounded the corner, but it comes after 50 years of investment and people are tired of it. So just as we are there, we’re suddenly moving on and I really fear that.

Haiti has been through that process as well, just as we’re getting somewhere we kind of pull out and it fell back to where it was. The biggest problem that I see in that is not the aid that would be going to Africa but environmental refugees. We’re told probably 160 million refugees will be coming from Africa, especially the coastal regions, over the course of the next decade. Where we are in Darfur, the rains came last year, but they didn’t come this year. So those people will move to the places resources can be. And they won’t move within Darfur, they’ll move into Chad, which then becomes an international nightmare.

Immigration legislation, refugee legislation, no country has anything to handle environmental refugees. You’re a refugee if you’re being persecuted. But what happens if you’re being persecuted by our own pollution.

I’m concerned about that and the second thing is I think Africa has huge resources. Not just natural, but people resources. Paul Martin has picked that up along with many in the World Bank, IMF and other and just as they see Africa now has the potential to also drive its own growth and it’s own interest we’re in the process of pulling out; that really worries me.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: So we’ve talked a lot now about Haiti and about Africa, what about Afghanistan? What do we do after the troops largely vacate Kandahar, how do we make sure that Afghanistan isn’t forgotten?

Glen Pearson: It’s just going to happen. I mean, I hate it, I hate telling you this, but it’s what we seem to do in the west. Like also, we have a tsunami so we pour a billion bucks into the place and so on and so forth, and it wasn’t invested well, it was wasted, projects were wasted and it’s because we moved on, we didn’t maintain our interest.

Already the public has moved on from Afghanistan and now I’m starting to notice politically—I’m one of the people in the Liberal party, and I’m one of the few, who feels we should stay on in Afghanistan militarily. I think we have to re-jig the mission somewhat to provide protection for development, but mine is not a popular view. But as a development person, all the work that I’ve been doing in Africa for the last 15 years, if all of a sudden you pulled out the security from those areas all the work that we’ve done over the years will just be run over. The leaders will be killed; the women’s leaders will be killed. And it’s going to happen in Afghanistan, the Taliban will remember who was helping to work with the Canadian projects, and who allowed the Canadian military to provide protection of their village and once we leave these forces will come in.

I think that’s a really major thing, it’s like bringing up a child, you can’t have a baby and just think it’s absolutely wonderful and when the baby is five you’re kind of tired of it and you move on. You can’t do that, development is not like that, development is a long time and a long-term waltz, very, very complicated. It takes a lot of compassion and you can’t just look to the public to give you the directions on where you should go because today it might be Darfur, tomorrow it might be Haiti. You have to have good policy that says where the neediest places in the world are, and says lets donate a half a century, a century to those places to help them grow.

So it’s interesting hearing the Prime Minister say yesterday that if we’re going to do anything we’re going to have to spend 10 years in Haiti, that’s very unlike him. He would rather do a temporary thing for a year and move on. Because his interest is in Central and South America, he’s willing to give them the 10 years, but he’s willing to pull out of Africa, it worries me.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: It seems like you’re talking about a long-term plan. That doesn’t’ really exist here in Canada, we seem to go from country to country, problem to problem. How can that be changed?

Glen Pearson: I think it needs to be changed at the government level by smart thinking. I don’t think you can expect the public to know all of those things, but I hosted a dinner here last June at the parliamentary restaurant for all the former foreign affairs ministers of the Liberal party. There were eight of them that came and it was a great session, but every single one of them admitted they never had a foreign policy. Canada has never had one, it’s not like Israel where it’s fighting for its survival and therefore has to have a policy because its survival is at stake. Canada is very much protected by that, we have access to trade and other things and so therefore a policy isn’t so important.

The difficulty for them as they said, we inherited the policy was from the people before us, they just went on and did that. I think we need to have a foreign policy that says: “Here are our interests.” They might involve trade, you know business corporate, those things; it might involve environment; it might involve women; it might involve development and micro enterprises; it might involve the poorest of the poor in education. You know we have to have a policy that says wherever Canada goes in the world; these are the five things that Canada looks at.

So we can go to China and go ahead and do business with that and that’s fine. But, we’ll also look to a place like Africa and realize since our major responsibility is to help the poorest of the poor, that’s where we’ll be. But without somebody setting up that agenda, the Liberals will pick up where the Conservatives left off.

Let’s say I was chosen as a minister in the government, lets say I was chosen as CIDA minister. What do I do now? Do I go the Haiti and Bolivia and Columbia and say, “It’s been swell, but we’re gone because my personal preference is back to Africa.” So all these deals that have been signed from CIDA and all these things is it right for me to come along because I have a personal preference for Africa? To roll up the carpet from Columbia and head back over to Sudan? That’s no way to do foreign policy. So I think we need to have a bipartisan effort, a multi-partisan effort of determining what are our values that are sacrosanct to us and then our foreign policy will reflect that and very much as part of that will be international development.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: People like priorities though, they like to know that Canada is committed to Afghanistan, or Canada is committed to Haiti and if you try to spread troops or foreign aid around to much people will say “Canada has no priorities.” How do you balance that?

Glen Pearson: That’s why you need the policy, if the policy said “look we’re not just going to follow the Americans wherever they want us to go,” we’re a United Nations country, we’ve always believed in that. So if the United Nations has something, that’s part of our policy, we will go where they want us to go. But our policy should also be “If security is at stake and we regard that that is important, the public might want us to leave Afghanistan, but we don’t believe that that is the right thing to do because our European partners don’t want us to do it, the Americans don’t want us to do it, the UN doesn’t want us to do it, and definitely the Afghans don’t want us to do it.”

But then that’s the problem with democracy, it becomes an unpopular war because some 60 Canadian soldiers have been killed and when I go to an election I’ve got to try to sell people on the fact I’ve got to stay. People are going to say screw off; it’s not going to happen. People will vote us out of office.

So a much deeper amount of work needs to be done on how we preserve institutional arrangements and longevity of policy that can be better for any party so that we’re not at the whim of whatever is politically popular. Because if that is the case, we’ll always be in Haiti three months and then gone to the next one. It’s how we work.

Because we have everything here, we don’t understand about development and what it requires. So we just move on. The problem is not international development and the problem is not Haiti or Sudan, the problem is democracy. We have a citizenry that has probably everything that it wants, right? I realize there are sectors of the society that are really struggling, but overall we’re doing very well so we don’t have a development temperament. We don’t. As a result the Canadian image is going to continue to suffer.

We were in Cypress for something like 50 years, we’ve been in Africa since the end of World War II, and we’ve been in Haiti for something like 18 years. These things are important, it’s where our legacy came from that everybody respects and now we’re going to pull out of a bunch of those places. I think people are not going to respect that, it’s a problem, but the problem is democratic.

I’ll give you an example, I got $3 million out of the Prime Minister to build these women’s centres and also water centres for these refugees that came out of Darfur. That was two years ago, it was my first speech in the house. I spoke directly to the Prime Minister. I asked for the money, to my shock he gave it. It was given to the International Organization of Migration with us kind of parlaying that. This time when we went back in January we took a team of 15 people with us and we went in and they saw we had 130,000 refugees last year come out of Darfur into our area where we had been working for 10 years. Swamping over the area and we realized something had to be done. So that $3 million was given, it was given to the IOM and just four months ago they finished all their projects so we arrived a couple of weeks ago and I’ll tell you, I was blown away. I’ve never seen anything like it.

Here’s the Canadian flag on water towers, water systems, women’s micro-enterprises, this is Darfur I’m talking about and now we’re building a high school there for Darfur refugees. You tell me a person in Darfur who ever thought they would get a high school education. All of these things are happening because it’s government money. It’s not the little NGO that my wife and I lead; it would take us 50 years to raise that kind of money.

When government decides to act it makes a massive difference if it’s invested wisely. So the team all sat around with me, and they’ve known me for years, they said “Glen, we just think it’s awesome you got that $3 million, it made a big difference, we got to keep it going.” And I told them the way you keep these things going is you should help me in the next election, like you should get involved politically. I don’t care which party it is, but if you believe Darfur is important or people like that are, you need to get involved politically and make sure that politicians keep focus on these things that matter to you. And every single one of them said; “nah, politics is a nasty business.”

We’ve so much turned people off of politics that the idea that the public would keep our minds set on the things that we believe in, I’m not saying the public couldn’t, it just doesn’t care. It just doesn’t think that we as politicians anymore are worth it. So we get 59 percent voter turn out in the last election. It’s terrible.

How can Africa remain a priority, or Haiti, I don’t care what it is: any kind of foreign policy. How can it remain a priority when the vast majority of people who need to vote to keep that priority in mind and hold governments accountable will not vote? That’s the big issue, the big issue is not priorities over development, the big issue is the expansion of the franchise of democracy and we’re doing a pitsy job of it as politicians, its abysmal.

A sunset in Elongatuas, Masai Mara, Kenya (2009). Photo by Siena Anstis.

[Editor’s Note: Siena Anstis, who has served as our Africa correspondent on the blog over the past few months, is moving on to new projects. She’ll continue to contribute to the blog, but wanted to pass on some of the things she’s learned during her time working and reporting in Uganda, Kenya, and elsewhere for other young Western journalists looking to work abroad.]

I will be packing my bags next week and leaving Nairobi after an 8-month fellowship with the Aga Khan Foundation (East Africa) and freelance work under the Journalism & Development Scholarship funded by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA). Of course, the idea of leaving and juggling with new choices is both exhausting and exhilarating.

On that note, I know I am privileged to have traveled this much over the past few years (with a lot more to come). I regularly think back on how important the guidance and opportunities I received have been (parents are probably the biggest asset in this department). So, if you are interested in entering international development, I figured I would share a few other tips, after the jump:

Develop a specialty: Whether I want to work in journalism or not, having the skills and training of a journalist is a big asset. Getting into international development is no walk in the park – entry level positions often ask for 5 or more years of experience. However, if you have something that makes you versatile – in my case, photography, design and writing – you might make the cut.

Studying International Development: You do NOT need to study International Development to enter the field. An undergraduate degree (Social Sciences or Humanities) in any discipline is what you make of it and is equally as relevant. Also, grades matter. You will need to do a Master’s at some point to climb the ladder and high grades are key.

Study both applied and research: Instead, combine your undergraduate. For example, do a major in a research degree and another major in an applied degree. You might not have time to do an Honors in the research section, but you will have a lot more skills when you graduate. Plus, no Honors will not stop you from getting into Canadian or UK graduate schools (I can guarantee you this). Applied degrees can be anything from journalism to graphic design and marketing. All applied skills are valuable when you start an internship or a new job in international development. The applied degree will always add that extra edge to your applications – and be your emergency money-maker down the line.

Apply your “applied skills” now: I started freelancing the moment I entered journalism school. A lot of it was unpaid work with minimal exposure, but it taught me the difficult ropes of freelancing. I also wrote regularly for the school newspaper and did a stint as a news editor. I continue to do a mix of free and paid work, using all of it as an opportunity to market myself online. This also applies to other degree. For example, if you are a graphic design and political science major (maybe a strange – but interesting – mix), try volunteering/working for some local NGOs.

Start early. Get “involved” now: Being involved can mean anything from attending lectures and seminars you would not usually bother with to helping at the soup kitchen and assisting with the Amnesty Chapter at your university. I would suggest a mix of the obscure and the obvious. Having UN-related organizations on your CV is fantastic, but remember that you will probably get more experience working with that small local organization that really needs extra hands. Getting involved takes some determination: many organizations are too disorganized or busy to streamline volunteers. Harass them persistently.

Travel with purpose: Wherever you travel, analyze the conditions around you. From racism in Denmark to tourism in Zanzibar, there is a story in every surrounding. Recognize these stories, write a blog, use social media to disseminate your stories (namely Twitter). Show that you are engaged in your environment. If anything, this will help you discover more about yourself and the world around you.

Internships: There is a point where you get to say “no more work for free.” However, the time between now and then is getting longer and longer, particularly with the job market in disarray. Some people spend several years after university working for next to nothing or free and getting their foot in the door. So, beat them to it. Do internships abroad every summer. Use some of your student loans and savings. Don’t wait until you’ve graduated. For example, I spent the the second and third summers of university working in Uganda. I then did an exchange for 6 months to Europe and threw in some freelancing in Kosovo. I started a non-profit (and basically surrendered myself to no-income for a year). And now I’m finishing a costs-covered (but no profit) 8-month fellowship. Yes, I had to take out some extra bank loans, but it’s worth it.

Look outside the box: Instead of applying for those mainstream and hard to get internships that everyone applies to, contact an organization you would like to work for directly. Say you are moving to where they are based and want to volunteer for free for several months. Getting an internship is not hard, making the most of it is. And sometimes these internships change you whole perspective. For example, I started working for Women of Uganda Network because a friend heard the organization occasionally took foreign interns and referred me. WOUGNET introduced me to a whole other area in development, information and communication for development (ICT4D) in broad terms, which is now my thesis focus and has helped me get accepted to top schools in the UK.

Prepare for your internship: Like I said, making the most of an internship is hard. Many are office-based and involve little field-work. You’ll find yourself editing documents and writing tired Facebook messages. Unless, of course, you bring some ideas of your own. Spend the first few weeks recognizing gaps in the organization and, once people are comfortable with you, suggest a particular project you would like to work on or pitch your own idea. When I was working with the Women of Uganda Network, in Kampala, Uganda, the first few weeks were slow – until I stumbled across their citizen journalism initiative and asked to design and facilitate a workshop for local non-governmental organizations.

Award/Internships: There are a few good organization and awards you should be applying to while in university or after graduation. This applies primarily to Canadians and is based on some of my previous work experience. There are dozens more – if you know them, post in the comments section!

The Aga Khan Foundation Fellowship (8 months, costs covered): This fellowship has funded my current position. There are position all around the world, from Tajikistan to the white beaches of Zanzibar. Applications are generally due in December. They take university graduates with a preference for Masters students (however, there were plenty non-Masters in my cohort).

Insight Collaborative (1-year, costs covered): This fellowship is for people with a bit more experience (several international internships under their belt – whether summer or longer-term).  Training is primarily in conflict resolution, with the opportunity to organize internship placements anywhere in the world.

Forces Avenir: For students studying in Quebec, this competition is a fantastic way to gain more exposure for yourself or your project.

Concordia Volunteer Abroad Program (summer, unpaid): If you are at Concordia University, this is a great way to get your first field experience. It is the most basic introduction to international development you can get while being cared for.

McGill Internship Program (summer, bursaries available): If you are at McGill, you can look into this highly competitive program. A friend of mine used to work in their offices, feel free to contact me for more details.

CIDA Internships (5-6 months, costs covered): These internships are good for people on their first or second work experience abroad. They are getting increasingly competitive, I presume, as the job market stalls.

Women of Kireka (rolling, unpaid): A bit of self-promotion, but the organization I started with Project Diaspora in Kampala, Uganda, is looking for interns. You can read more about the positions here.

Participants in London's Africa Gathering event. Photo courtesy TMS Ruge (TMSruge.com)

The Hub King’s Cross café in London is buzzing today with a new breed of tech geek: consumed not by robots or video games, but African development. This group, about 100-strong, are meeting at the tri-annual Africa Gathering event. And together, through what they call Information and Communication Technologies for Development, or the unwieldy acronym ICT4D, they aim to radically reshape the political and social fabric of Africa.

Traditionally, development has been hampered by the notion that since the West is richer—at least in terms of GDP—we must hold the keys for others to succeed as well. For the better of humanity, the logic goes, we must impose that knowledge on the “developing world.” But this is a twisted vision: reality shows that African communities have created sustainable survival systems that are as valid as our own. Despite what Western aid might dictate, these local systems must be given room to flourish.

By helping develop technology infrastructure in sub-Saharan Africa, there is the opportunity to ensure that those people directly targeted by aid and development make the tools and decisions they need for a better lifestyle. Cheap, adaptable and flexible technologies are key to reaching this new status. For example, African farmers have taken ordinary mobile phones and turned them into tools to check market prices to find the best bid for their products, ensuring better prices and improving their standard of living.

Building on this flexibility, organizations like Appfrica Labs invest in and support Ugandan programmers. By building on already existing technologies—primarily the radio, the cellphone and the internet—individuals bring forth programming and software ideas which can help improve the communication capacity, and in turn the livelihoods, of Ugandan communities. Status.ug, for example, is a mobile gateway for Ugandans to interact with their Facebook accounts using cheap text messages, instead of expensive mobile internet bandwidth. OhmSMS, another Appfrica initiative, alerts small business owners when their power goes back on after an outage. As CEO and founder of Appfrica Labs John Gossier explains, businesses in the Ugandan capital Kampala, where the power goes out frequently and unpredictably, lose an average of five work hours per week. With OhmSMS, instead of idly waiting for the power to come back, workers can go and run errands during the blackout.

While locally developed software is key to the African tech scene, individuals like U.K.-based Ken Banks are also creating new software with the goal of ensuring their flexibility and feasibility in areas with spotty infrastructure. His project, FrontlineSMS, is a free, open-source software platform that enables large-scale, two-way text messaging using only a laptop, a GSM modem, and inexpensive cellphones. One important use of the software so far is FrontlineSMS:Medic, a system that lightens the load on strained medical systems in Malawi and Uganda by helping doctors stay in contact with community workers by mobile phone. A hospital in Malawi using FrontlineSMS:Medic cut back transport costs by $3,500 in the first six months. Doctors no longer need to visit rural communities as often and get more time with hospitalized patients; community health workers in rural areas receive quick treatment instructions over the web.

Out of Africa’s 900 million people, only 67 million are currently online. Many people see that as a weakness, but for this group of techies, it’s the sign of a continent full of potential geeky creativity set to explode.

Slumdog Millionaire Child star Azharuddin Ismail plays in his shanty on May 30, 2009 in Mumbai, India. Ismail's family faced evicition from their dwelling in spring 2009. Photo by Getty.

It can be an eye-opening experience that helps everyone involved move towards greater understanding….

It’s been happening in Rio’s famous favelas for some time. Now slum tourism—which turns a real-life ghetto into a “hot” tourist destination—has spread to Johannesburg, Manila, Cairo, and, in the wake of the blistering success of Slumdog Millionaire, Mumbai. But it’s controversial wherever it goes.

Shelley Seale, author of The Weight of Silence: Invisible Children of India, thinks slum tourism (also known as “poorism”) can be positive for both visitors and locals, but only if it’s done right. Seale toured the Dharavi slum in Mumbai, Asia’s largest slum and the setting for Slumdog, with Deepa Krishnan of Mumbai Magic, a socially responsible tour operator who donates a portion of her profits to local NGOs.

“Dharavi gave me a resounding rebuttal to the myth that poverty is the result of laziness,” Seale says. “I have never seen people work so hard. The place abounded with an industry and entrepreneurship such as I have not ever witnessed anywhere else. “It was an amazing experience, and I believe that things like this can do a lot to eradicate cultural bias and misunderstandings, and also the images of poverty that many of us have.”

…but it can also be exploitative and tarnishing to India’s global image

Indians tend to be very sensitive about their country’s identity. Many didn’t embrace the feel-goodism of Slumdog because they felt the film portrayed their country in a negative light, without offering explanations or solutions for the living conditions in the slum.

Likewise, Indian tourism professionals tend to be wary of slum tourism. They feel it can be exploitative, turning people’s lives into sideshow spectacle and obliterating both the slum dwellers’ humanity and the underlying issues, like India’s unrelenting rural to urban migration.

There are also justifiable concerns about who conducts the tours, and how. Ronjon Lahiri, director of India Tourism in Toronto, says that many of the so-called slum tourism operators are only looking to make a buck and don’t educate tourists on Dharavi and its residents.

He says that many people live there because Mumbai’s property prices are among the highest in the world. Even when residents make money, many don’t leave because Dharavi has become their home, their community.

For Lahiri, “Slum tourism is not to be encouraged. It is not good for India and not good for the people living there.”

As soon as we tore our eyes and ears away from the news on Jan. 12, those of us who could donate to Haiti quickly did so. Indeed, the aftermath of the Haitian quake has been marked by one of the fastest and largest fundraising campaigns in modern history.

But as world leaders meet in Montreal to talk about strategies to rebuild Haiti, many of those on the ground are only cautiously optimistic about the untold millions of dollars now pouring into the country.

Haitian researcher and aid worker Tim Schwartz, who has spent a number of years in Haiti, recently wrote in Now Magazine about how the delivery of aid has gone so wrong. Schwartz explained how “piyay,” which he described as foreign goods “habitually distributed  … with little or no accountability or control”, has hurt Haitians more than it’s helped them.

“Piyay from foreign missionaries and aid agencies with the best of intentions but little understanding of the culture they are working in too often turns the village sociopath or criminal into the wealthiest member of the community,” lamented Schwartz.

In the middle of the mess, a small group of Canadians are trying to buck the trend. I recently interviewed Scott Gilmore on our re-launched podcast. Gilmore is the executive director of Peace Dividend Trust, an organization based in a handful of troubled spots around the world.

He explained to us that over twenty staffers from that organization were in Port-au-Prince when the quake hit.

“They were all in the office when the earthquake hit,” Gilmore said of the staff, some of whom were sent from New York and Ottawa to open a new project office the Friday following the earthquake.

After getting initial word from the Haitian team that they were all safe, no one heard from them for 24 hours. Gilmore was in New York at the time, and he had shortly made plans to get to the airport, fly to the Dominican Republic in the middle of the night, and drive overland to Port-au-Prince in a waiting truck.

On the way to the airport, though, Gilmore got word from Haiti that the team had survived the earthquake relatively unscathed.

“Some of our people have lost their houses and are actually living in tents on our compound, but everyone is safe and within about 48 hours we were back to work,” he said.

Gilmore explained how PDT is working to reverse the trend illustrated by Schwartz. He said that the group is now undertaking projects similar in nature to its work in Afghanistan. With millions of dollars being spent on the relief effort, Gilmore wants Haitian businesses and suppliers to benefit – not their foreign donors.

Although Haitians are reeling in the aftermath of a life-shattering disaster, Gilmore estimated that about 30 percent of businesses in the country are up and running. He said they are able to supply bottled water, clothing and food to those who need it most.

PDT has a list of 200 businesses based in Haiti that are able to deliver relief, and they are working to direct aid to those organizations. It’s very similar to their work in Afghanistan that Gilmore spoke about in that earlier podcast.

“In Afghanistan, we found that the vast majority of the aid money wasn’t actually entering the local economy. Stuff was being bought overseas and flown in, and that was billions and billions of dollars of missed opportunity,” he said.

“So we put a team of people on the ground whose job it is, is to make it as easy as possible for the laziest procurement officer to buy local, to find an Afghan entrepreneur to provide him with the wheat or water or tires as opposed to finding it in Dubai or Italy. And so far it’s redirected over $370 million of new spending in the Afghan economy. It’s created thousands of jobs, and because of its success, the U.S. government, the British government, NATO and the UN have all changed their procurement policies globally, recognizing one of the fastest and healthiest ways for them to help local economies is to buy local.”

Gilmore hopes that the same strategy can have a similar effect on Haitian rehabilitation efforts. He added that more PDT staff will travel to Haiti in the coming months.

[Editor’s note: today we launch “Verbatim,” which will be a regular feature where we provide a transcript of our new podcast series, Listen to This. We’ll put these up on the blog shortly after each podcast goes online.]

In the first installation of our new, relaunched podcast series (Oh! And we’re now on iTunes!) Nick Taylor-Vaisey interviewed Scott Gilmore of Peace Dividend Trust, a development NGO based in Ottawa and New York, with projects currently underway in Afghanistan, East Timor, and Haiti. PDT promotes a buy-local strategy for international development, helping connect international aid agencies with local suppliers in the countries where they work. By directing funds to local businesses, PDT believes they see faster, more stable economic recovery in post-conflict zones, with lower overhead costs for funders and higher incomes for local businesspeople.

Listen now at this.org/podcast, or subscribe on iTunes for new interviews every second Monday.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: Tell me about Peace Dividend Trust, where it came from, the first moment of its life.

Scott Gilmore: You know, I think this was a baby that was born twice. The first time I was working in East Timor for the UN and was paying $500 a month to a Timorese fellow who had lost everything in the Indonesian fighting and had lost his company and lost his house, and what he had done is basically put a tin roof on the remains of his house, white-washed the walls and charged me $500 to rent the top two floors, because there was no housing there at the time. And one day I saw him hauling into the yard of the house, the burnt-out wreckage of a bus and I thought nothing of it. The next month, right after I gave him my next rent cheque, he had bought tires for it and he had bought a new engine. The next month and after the next rent cheque he was repainting it and in about three months he had a working bus. After about a year an half, he had a fleet of working busses, and had gone from being virtually homeless and jobless with no money, to becoming one of the most successful businessmen in that neighbourhood, employing the most people in that neighbourhood and becoming the seed of recovery in that particular part of town, and it was all because of my rent cheques. So the light bulb went off one day. The international community had arrived, the aid money was going nowhere, (it had not touched the ground), and yet this man had suddenly become a major employer simply on the backs of my rent cheque, and I thought, “Wow, that’s an interesting phenomenon.”

The second moment came when every night after work, myself and some other people that used to work for the UN, would get together for drinks at a grass hut on the beach and complain about our jobs, and complain about how things like the aid money wasn’t arriving, or that the UN jeeps weren’t getting out into the districts because they were missing license plate holders, (even though there were no licenses to put in them), but UN regulations said you had to have a license plate holder so these jeeps sat on the wharf until somebody brought these in from Italy. And we began saying, “there must be a better way to do things”, and one of us suggested that there are a lot of good ideas out here about how to fix peacekeeping and how to improve aid, we should try doing something about it. And that’s where it began about 10 years ago.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: Let’s talk a bit about you, let’s go back. You were in East Timor hanging out with some UN associates, how did you get there, what was your route to that route?

Scott Gilmore: It was sheer luck, I had joined the foreign service and was looking for my first posting and Indonesia was falling apart, and I thought, “that would be an interesting place to be.” The government was collapsing, Suharto, the dictator, had resigned, and so I volunteered for it and was sent out to Jakarta. And because I was a low man in the embassy I was given the crap files and one of them was East Timor, because at that time it was a forgotten conflict, there was nobody on the ground, the UN wasn’t there. The only foreigners anywhere near it were nuns and the Red Cross.

So I would go out every couple of months to silently bear witness, to talk to the nuns very furtively, to find out what the latest atrocity was, (or human rights abuse), to record what was actually happening on the ground and report that back up to Ottawa and our permanent mission in New York. It was very depressing and very upsetting, and a very futile exercise as a junior diplomat.

What happened was that, bizarrely, one day, the new Indonesian president just announced he was going to hold a referendum for independence for the Timorese. And suddenly what became a lost cause became the cause celebre. The UN arrived and the donors arrived and the media arrived, and there was only about two or three of us at the time, Western diplomats: somebody for the US embassy, somebody from the Australian embassy and myself, who actually had been paying any attention, who knew any of the Timorese, who could speak the local language, who knew how to get a hold of the guerrillas. So we had very valuable skills for a short period of time and so it wasn’t long going from that to working for the UN because, frankly, there weren’t very many Timorese experts. And even those who had been very, very active on university campuses in Canada and amongst human rights NGOs, who were very big Timor proponents, had no Timor experience, and so we were rare commodities. That’s how I ended up working with the UN.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: So what was your role then, you were the expert in the area?

Scott Gilmore: I had a very strange job. It was a very unique UN mission because it was one of the first times the UN actually ran the country, as opposed to just trying to broker peace or maintain peace. The UN was running everything from the health department to creating the East Timorese defense force and I landed in an office called the National Security Advisory office, where myself and a colleague who I had actually known from grad school, found ourselves sitting across a desk from each other at a very young age, doing things like designing with the defence agency for what East Timor should look like, or with the intelligence agency for what East Timor’s supposed to look like, and actually trying to create these things on behalf of the Timorese.

Pretty preposterous actually, given the fact that as a Canadian diplomat, you are by definition a generalist and what I knew about creating a department of defence or intelligence agency can fit an 8-by-10 piece of paper.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: So then at that point, you started talking to your colleagues and looking at some problems that existed within this project to rebuild Timor —

Scott Gilmore: That’s right. What happened was there were a lot of us in these preposterous positions, people that were in charge of human rights, people that were in charge of procurement, logistics, police, who were all facing the same challenges. We had a very small amount of time to take a war-torn country and put it on its feet. And whether that meant trying to set up food distribution networks, or a police system, or an intelligence agency, we were all facing very similar problems, which were things like: being able to get paperwork to move through the UN, being able to hire the right people in a quick time, being able to move around the country.

These were nuts and bolts problems–logistical problems. We spend so much time in Western universities and elsewhere debating these grand problems like, what is universal human rights? You know, what are the normative features of democratic reform? How does gender empowerment affect the bureaucratic structure of a third world country? But once you get on the ground, none of that really matters. What matters is, how do you get power into your office? How do you find some local staff? How do you train them? How do you get pens? How do you get from the national capital or the provincial capital if there’s no vehicles?

Nobody pays any attention to these really important nuts and bolts things and Peace Dividend Trust was created to try and pay some attention to some of these things and fix some of these things.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: So how long has Peace Dividend Trust been around?

Scott Gilmore: We’re young. The idea started around 1999 or 2000. I quit my day job in 2004, so PDT’s been around for about five or six years. We’ve operated in about 12 different countries so far. We currently have permanent offices in Afghanistan, Haiti, Timor, and we’ve got a project office in the Solomon Islands. And of course, our headquarters is in New York. And in 2010 we will likely be opening an office in Africa.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: What kind of work do you do in these countries? You saw problems when you were in Timor, and you weren’t the only one, so how do you fix these problems?

Scott Gilmore: If you take a lot of the type of work we do, it seems very diverse on the surface. Everything from trying to improve procurement systems, to economic research, to creating wikis for the United Nations. What the common strand is, is that we find and test and implement new ideas for making peace and humanitarian operations work better. So we only do projects that are new projects, in the sense that they’re new ideas.

To give an example, we will never go out and do a microfinance project or build wells in Africa; however, if somebody comes to us and they say, “We have a new idea for building a better well,” or “We think that there’s a better way to manage and target microfinance projects”, then we’ll do that. So we only test new ideas, which is why some people refer to us as a do-tank.

We’ll only do projects that focus on the nuts and bolts; the management, the operations of aid and peacekeeping. We feel this is really the neglected sweet-spot for trying to improve the impact of places like Afghanistan and Haiti. So what do we do? In Afghanistan, we found that the vast majority of the aid money wasn’t actually entering the local economy. Stuff was being bought overseas and flown in, and that was billions and billions of dollars of missed opportunity.

So we put a team of people on the ground whose job it is, is to make it as easy as possible for the laziest procurement officer to buy local, to find an Afghan entrepreneur to provide him with the wheat or water or tires as opposed to finding it in Dubai or Italy. And so far it’s redirected over $370 million of new spending in the Afghan economy. It’s created thousands of jobs, and because of its success, the U.S. government, the British government, NATO and the UN have all changed their procurement policies globally, recognizing one of the fastest and healthiest ways for them to help local economies is to buy local.

In New York, we have a team of people that have been working on this problem that the UN has done 50 peacekeeping missions and they’ve actually never figured out how to do it, they’ve never mapped it out, they’ve never put together a procedural manual on how to launch a peacekeeping mission. So we did that for them. We sat and put our people in their offices in New York and we figured out, okay, what’s a peacekeeping mission supposed to look like? What are you supposed to do in the first ten days? When do you set up your fuel depot? When do you fly in your secretaries? What type of forms are your secretaries supposed to use? And it’s now a pocket-sized baby blue manual called the Mission Start-up Field Guide, which is what every UN manager uses around the world.

So we do very diverse things, but they’re all focused on the nuts and bolts and they’re all new ideas.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: Now, it seems like your friends in the West probably love what you do because essentially you make their lives easier, I mean you create a pocket-sized handbook about how to start a peacekeeping mission, but I’m wondering, as helpful as you are to those people on that side, do you find that you are still a foreign voice, you’re still foreign people in foreign lands. What about the local people in Afghanistan and East Timor? How do they react to your presence?

Scott Gilmore: Frankly, they’re more positive, and supportive, and helpful than internationals are. The nationals recognize, whether they’re Afghans or Timorese or Solomon Islanders, that there’s an incredible amount of money being spent on these missions and there’s a lot of foreigners that are being flown in, but that the change on the ground is not as dramatic as everyone expected. You know, they’re not seeing the jobs being created, they’re not seeing roads being improved. And one of the reasons they like PDT and why the local governments and local people are so supportive of PDT is that they recognize that we’re actively trying to change this, that we’re trying to drive money into the local economy, and we’re doing it.

One of the frustrations that I found as a diplomat and now as somebody who’s in the aid industry, is that you pull a random project proposal or project description, from something that’s funded by an international agency in a place like Afghanistan or Somalia and read it, and it will says things like, “This project will seek to support the creation of conditions that will facilitate empowerment of locals to improve this, this, this and this.” But it doesn’t actually do anything. It doesn’t actually say anything. It talks about setting in place processes and holding workshops and this and that, whereas what we’re doing is very simple, we’re pushing money into the economy, we’re making sure Afghan businessmen will get more money and create jobs, and so it’s very tangible, and so they see it.

Compare that to the internationals, they’re not always as supportive because our mere presence implicitly criticizes the aid industry. We’re basically saying that things aren’t working, things are incredibly inefficient. There are so many problems in the way that the international community does its job, whether it’s in Rwanda or Afghanistan, that we’re only having a fraction of the impact we should be having.

When we go to the UN and say, “Listen, we’re going to help you create a Mission Start-up Field Guide,” what we’re also saying implicitly is, “Oh my God, it’s been 50 years of peacekeeping and you still haven’t created a Mission Start-up Field Guide”. So while we’re not that overtly critical, we’re implicitly critical and we don’t get this sort of open-arm support form the internationals anyways.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: Is anyone else doing what you’re doing?

Scott Gilmore: No.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: And why is that?

Scott Gilmore: Well, because it’s not sexy. It’s not sexy, for example, with the donors. The donors, frankly, are much more likely to look at supporting a conference on gender empowerment in Afghanistan, or a workshop that supports capacity building for empowering Afghan government officials because that checks off all the boxes. They’re less likely to get behind something that does something as dull as fixing a logistic system or a communication system, or fixing the way that the UN hires, or the way that the donors plan because it’s just not sexy.

So we don’t have any competitors, but that’s changing because we’ve been remarkably successful. In five years, the impact that we’ve had on peacekeeping, the impact that we’ve had on the way aid is spent has been pretty significant, and now in these difficult economic times a lot of agencies, a lot of Canadian NGOs in particular, are really suffering because money is being cut back, whereas with us we’ve doubled every year. We’ve gotten twice as much donor money every year than the year before and so people begin to realize, “wait a second, these guys are attracting attention and they’re doing good work”, and so we’re now seeing some agencies trying to replicate what we’re doing.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: The reason I ask is because there’s no shortage of people who are critical of development in a broad sense, you know, this idea that Western countries are imposing their solutions to other countries’ problems with just a broad stroke, but you don’t do that.

Scott Gilmore: You know, I find in Canada and in New York, every week there is a conference, or seminar, or brown bag lunch being hosted by agencies, you know the usual suspects of Montreal or Ottawa, to talk about these issues. The neo-imperialism of aid trying to impose these evil World Bank policies on these poor unsuspecting aid recipients.

I frankly have no time for them because the vast majority of the people that are attending these conferences are academics who have had no experience on the ground. They’re espousing positions on behalf of Kenyans or Afghans or others without having actually spent too much time in those places, and they’re using theoretical arguments and ridiculous jargon to make these positions. And when you go in the ground you have to dig pretty hard, for example in Kabul, to find an Afghan who says the international community should pull out here, who says it’s worse now than it was before, you have to dig pretty hard. But you can find one or two of them, and the one and two you can find, get flown to Canada, they get put on the talk shows and they get moved around to universities and they stand up at these conferences and, quite frankly, it’s ridiculous.

I can tell you that the Afghans that I know roll their eyes at these arguments because what they’re more concerned about right now is the fact that their girls can now go to school. Or that fact that the infant mortality rate in Afghanistan has dropped, from 2001 to now, so significantly that every year 30,000 babies survive to their first year who wouldn’t have otherwise under the Taliban. That’s more than all the children in Ottawa under the age of five. So it’s very easy for an academic to stand up and say, “Oh, it’s worse now, we’re trying to impose these Western ideals on a culture that doesn’t want them,” but it’s pretty hard to do that when there’s 30,000 kids looking at you.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: I’m wondering about then, what works and what should be avoided because, no matter the social change that has been sparked by the regime change in Afghanistan, there’s still a pretty brutal war going on, and there’s a lot of combat and Canadians know all about it. What about that strategy?

Scott Gilmore: Well listen, Afghanistan’s a mess, there’s no denying it. And the war, I hesitate to comment too explicitly on what Canada’s doing in Afghanistan right now and what’s working and what’s not, but it is a horrible, horrible mess. And in many ways and many places or parts of Afghanistan, things are worse now than they were ten years ago, there’s no denying it.

But here’s the moral dilemma that I face as a Canadian voter, as somebody whose spent a lot of time in Afghanistan, as somebody whose has worked in Afghanistan; it’s that it’s going to be very, very difficult for them to be happy ending in Afghanistan, but if we were to pull out now, whether it’s pull out Canada’s military, or reduce our aid or withdraw our efforts to just urban centres, it will reduce the moral angst that we have to deal with here in Canada, it will make it easier for Canada politicians, but people will be suffering on the ground.

If one were to do the thought experiment to say, ok let’s say, you can’t pass a Canadian campus without seeing all the posters about “Stop Bush’s war, pull out now”, so let’s imagine, let’s just do that thought experiment, let’s pull out. Let’s pull out all the troops, pull out all of the Canadian forces, what’s going to happen?

Well, let’s say we try to keep our aid there. We’ll only be able to keep our aid there for a handful of months. People forget that before September 11th, the Taliban had kicked out every Western aid agency, and in fact in the days before September 11th, they’d even kicked out the last few Doctors Without Borders that were there. So that would happen again because we would also have to accept that the Taliban will be able to push out the fledging Afghan military and Afghan government.

So the aid’s gone now, the military’s gone, what’s going to happen to the Afghan people? Well, there won’t be any clusterbombs, that’s for sure. There won’t be any collateral damage anymore, but you will go back to the beheadings in the markets and in the stadiums, you will go back to things like the typical way (pre-2001) for Afghan prisoners to be executed, which was to put them into a shipping container and do one of two things; leave it in the sun until the people inside it literally cooked to death, or if you were merciful you threw in a couple grenades.

I will never forget in 2002 when I first entered Kabul, there was all of these shipping containers lined along the side of the road that had been blown up from the inside and I couldn’t figure out how they were damaged this way, and that’s what it was from. The Taliban, or the other warlords would push their enemies into these shipping containers, throw in a grenade, and that was the end of it.

So when you do a thought experiment about us pulling out of Afghanistan and just accepting defeat now, it’s a pretty miserable place that you end up with. None of the girls would be going to school, the infant mortality rate would go back up, the women would be pushed out of civil service, and so this is the dilemma I struggle with. Where things are going well, but the international community is not doing a very good job, frankly, but if we throw in the towel the alternative is pretty nasty.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: So does that mean sticking with Afghanistan until it’s helicopters on the roof of the US embassy?

Scott Gilmore: Yeah, see that’s the struggle. You know, if your neighbour’s house is on fire and there’s kids on the upper floor who are screaming for help, how long do you try saving them even when you know that the house is going to burn down? And I don’t know the answer to that. It’s a decision I’m glad I don’t have to make. But it’s a debate that’s not being had in Canada, unfortunately, because both sides are being disingenuous.

On the side of those who are for keeping us in Afghanistan, one of the things that’s frustrating me is they’ve continually changed the reasons why as we get worse and worse at it. Originally we were in Afghanistan to get rid of Al Qaeda, and then we went into Afghanistan to cut poppies and opium, and then it was for women, and then it was for economic development, and then it was for AfPak. And as each reason becomes less and less likely to succeed, they change the reasons, so they skew the debate.

The other side, those that want us to pull out, they skew the debate as well because they talk about well, you know, we could be doing so much more in Sudan, that’s a usual, you know, the Canadian military should pull out of there and we should go back to being peacekeepers in Sudan. Well there are two problems with that. Canada has almost never been a peacekeeping nation. No one’s asking for Canadian peacekeepers anywhere, and surely they’re not asking for them in Sudan. The Sudanese government would never allow Canadian peacekeepers in Sudan. And the situation with Sudan is just as messy and just as complicated, but we don’t know about it because there are very few people reporting on south Sudan and Darfur.

It’s a very poor debate that we’re having in Canada and it’s a very, very difficult moral dilemma, and I’m glad I’ve got a day job that doesn’t force me to resolve either one of them.

Women in the Dadaab, Kenya refugee camp receiving training to work with Samasource, a web company that outsources computer jobs to women, youth, refugees, and internally displaced people living in poverty. Photo courtesy Samasource.

This coming week I will be covering the 6th UNESCO Youth Forum in Paris. In preparation for the event, youth delegates have been participating in an online forum and discussing a variety of issues which affect youth during this global economic (and social) crisis.

Naturally, one of my preferred topics is along the lines of information and communication technology (ICT) and social media. As I discussed last week, ICT and social media, slowly, but surely, are allowing people to reverse the dominance of Western information. As tools are developed to allow active translation of English websites into even the most obscure dialects, those with basic education are tapping a source of previous privileged wealth.

Social and economic investment via ICT (such as the internet and mobile phones) is another key purpose. However, while the Internet is bringing us together, there remains the contentious “digital divide.” As Sylvia Namukasa, a UNESCO youth delegate from Uganda comments, “In Uganda, ICT only favors the urban youth who can access computers, unlike their rural counterparts, many of whom have never had a chance to look at a computer.”

We need to actively work against this disparity. Instead of pouring our hard-earned savings into charities, which continue to laud free goods on people who have no need or want for them, Canadian youth, in particular, should consider investing in their technologically able and inventive counterparts.

Across the ocean, people in the “developing world” are turning technology into an economic revolution with life-altering effects for the poor. Technology allows “us”—Westerners saturated by the stereotypical images of starving Africa—to circumvent the popular aid mantra and go for the real deal: delivering solid work into the arms of people who need it, or assisting those in acquiring the necessary knowledge to build the structures of a functional economy.

One excellent example of just how ingenious we can be with our money is exemplified in Samasource. The organization, founded by an Indian woman living in California, delivers small bits of computer-based work to women, youth and refugees living in poverty. TMS Ruge, the Ugandan co-founder of Project Diaspora, inspired by the need to invest back in his home country, has jumped on board. He currently has a team of web developers assisting with US-based contracts. While simplifying his own work, he delivers added income to individuals without the opportunity to join the formal work sector. I can guarantee this has a deeper impact than free malaria nets or second-hand clothing, both which eventually sneak out of the household and find their way into the informal economy anyway.

Txteagle is another example of how outsourcing via ICT can be revolutionary to people in poorer countries. From translation to conducting surveys, households confined to rural areas of Kenya have the opportunity to increase their livelihoods with tasks that integrate well into their daily lives—like taking care of livestock and doing domestic work.

For those of us who are not at the point of having work to outsource, there exist organizations that develop ICT in areas generally considered unreachable. For example, in Northern Uganda, I stumbled across a humble organization called Battery Operated Systems for Community Outreach, or BOSCO. By connecting up internally displaced persons to the internet, BOSCO has initiated a new means for refugees to acquire funding for locally-initiated development projects. For example, getting the necessary resources for solar-power in a town that had only, until then, functioned by costly paraffin lamps.

Or take AppAfrica. East African tech entrepreneurs and innovators develop software that allows huge changes to those isolated in rural Uganda with only cell phone access (and yes, almost everyone has a cell phone). One example, Question Box, is a means to democratize information, which further fosters economic development. People call in with all types of questions, such as “How can we control soil erosion in our village?” or “Can a mother pass HIV on to her child?”

As I gear up for this UNESCO Youth Forum, I want to encourage young people to consider the “snowball” effect of investing in work opportunities via ICT or technology itself. One woman making a dollar or two extra a day via Txteagle can now afford to buy malaria nets (stimulating the local economy) and send her children to secondary school. Her children, in turn, will grow up in the atmosphere that we have all come to understand and which secures, in part, democracy and government accountability: hard work pays off; we are accountable to the decisions we make.