I recently rewatched Renee Bach’s controversial interview from 2019. Bach ran a charity in Uganda called “Serving His Children” and atleast 105 children died in the charity’s. She was accused of treating malnourished children without any formal medical training. A lawsuit was brought against her in Ugandan civil court and activists launched a #NoWhiteSaviors campaign on social media claiming it to be a textbook case of privileged white people trying to “save” Africa. In 2020, an agreement was reached and Bach agreed to pay $9,500 each to the mothers, with no admission of liability.

A few days later, I came across an article about Oxfam facing new allegations of sexual exploitation in the DRC. It brought me back to Oxfam’s 2018 scandal where several employees, including the Country Director were accused of hiring prostitutes while working in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake. The multi-million-dollar organization didn’t simply cover up the Haiti investigations but allowed the Director (who was also accused of heading the 2006 operations in Chad where similar incidents occurred) to simply resign before the investigations concluded. Later, WHO came under fire for failing to prevent and tackle widespread sexual abuse during the Ebola response.

As someone actively involved in this sector and belonging to a country which continues to be a hotbed for aid activities, these incidents trouble me deeply. Aid organizations/charities/philanthropies are failing to live up to core human values that they espouse. What makes it worse is that the staff, who are in-charge of materializing these values through their work, are often caught perpetrating these crimes. But why? Clearly there are deeper issues at play, because “bad apples” cannot account for the scale or frequency of such horrific indents.

I have 2 hunches. The first is the rather obvious and well-acknowledged fact that aid structures are often discriminatory, privilege western institutions and people while producing chronic outcomes for people of color worldwide. In this context is the growing call to “decolonize aid”, which is critical for any meaningful reform.

My second hunch takes this idea a bit deeper into the realm of “intentions”. Now, most aid workers enter the sector with the best intentions. Afterall, the workhours are unforgiving, personal sacrifices are monumental, and depending on the location, there is intense stress and trauma that one must deal with. But do good intentions also imply non-racist intentions? I can be a good person who wants to better the world and still view participants of an aid intervention that I’m leading in say South Sudan as somehow “lesser”. The aid sector currently does not distinguish (or even acknowledge) this distinction between “my intent to help” and “my intent to help because I know/am better”. In my opinion, this is the colossal ideological battle that aid organizations are up against.

But what can be done? Instead of scrambling to fix actions of astray staff, I think it might be smarter for aid organizations to simply hire better (I.e don’t hire racists, bigots, people who have limited sense of their privilege and/or show predisposition to exploit). Again, how do we do that? We can’t simply ask jargon-loving, social science graduates whether or not they are paternalistic…

Some preliminary suggestions (for aid organizations) include:

• Institutionalize implicit bias testing during the interview processes
• Try to gauge how individuals would react in tough situations by mimicking on-the-job dilemmas of aid workers
• Transition from network-driven hiring to merit driven processes by following through on open calls for applications
• Do not fall prey to tokenistic gestures of diversity (just hiring some people of color won’t automatically translate to diversity in thought, more steps are needed…)
• Have a higher threshold for who can volunteer and/or join the aid sector. This need not be an entry criteria purely based on educational accomplishments or past experience, but it needs to be deeper (while I’m not sure what this finished criteria could look like, it’s an interesting thought experiment!)
• Most importantly, where jobs can be carried out by local staff, do not bring in “expats” or “external experts”

While being critical of the pitfalls of the aid system, I must acknowledge that I have benefited enormously from the very same structures. Maybe there exist even deeper layers of “intent” to unveil….