A Beautiful Brochure

At a recent Development Assistance Committee meeting in Paris, I sat through two plenary sessions on “rewiring aid.”

Not once was there a reference to how effectively aid actually reaches the grassroots, where hunger takes its toll.

Two round table discussions followed.

Same result.

I raised a simple point: while the room debated shifting aid priorities to suit the geopolitical interests of the North, 35,000 to 40,000 people were dying of starvation that day, and every day. In both sessions, the chair thanked me and moved to the next question.

Nobody wanted to discuss starvation in the room. But afterwards, several people pulled me aside to thank me for raising it. One was a young woman who had worked on a famine prevention project in West Africa.

She handed me a brochure, bilingual, beautifully designed, six folds, each one opening onto an elegant graph. The production values were flawless.

It laid out an emergency escalation chain in careful detail: local agency to government, government to sub-regional hub, hub to a ministerial sub-committee.

Clean. Logical.

The kind of document that gets approved in a room full of nodding heads. It was the product of years of meetings, backed by the Club of Sahel, backed in turn by the OECD.

And it had nothing to say about how a starving farmer would ever hear about any of it.

No mention of agricultural extension officers.

No mention of local radio in the vernacular languages people actually speak.

No mention of government commitments to build food reserves, or train communities to manage them, or have emergency plans ready before the crisis, not after.

The brochure describes a perfect chain of command between institutions. It says nothing about the people the institutions exist to serve.

I have seen this brochure before, in different covers, for fifty years. It is what happens when an entire industry of researchers, consultants and think tanks builds its reputation on producing documents that other people in the same industry will read, cite and file.

Beautifully written. Extremely well funded. Almost entirely disconnected from the reality of a family with no food.

This is not a story about one brochure.

It is the standard product of an industry, including think tanks like the Overseas Development Institute in London and the Institute of Development Studies in Sussex, funded by eye watering sums from the British government and, in the World Bank’s case, from governments across the world.

The money goes into studies that a handful of colleagues will read and nobody outside the industry will ever act on.

Here is what I would rather see funded.

Take a small number of real cases: a country that received aid money and pursued policies that actively harmed its own citizens.

Study exactly how that happened, who benefited, and who paid the price.

Follow the money instead of describing the meeting structure. That kind of study might actually change something.

I keep asking myself why this does not happen more.

Is it that the answers are already known, and uncomfortable?

Is there a version of self-preservation at work, where an industry avoids the one question that would put its own value under scrutiny?

We already know what reduces starvation. Food produced and stored at the local level, reaching people before the crisis, not after.

Everything else, however beautifully bound, is preaching to the desert.

What do you think?

Have you seen this pattern too?

If you have worked inside the aid or development sector, I would like to hear it: does this brochure sound familiar?

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