Comments

Yes I love those ideas - to my knowledge there has been very little thought put into avoiding highly qualified national staff taking up admin / translator positions, but that would be fascinating to think about. CAFOD have been doing quite a lot of thinking in this space so I can follow up with them to see if they have any further info.

Hi Diane, many thanks for your comment and I am so pleased that you found it practical. I am looking forward to trying to work out how we can create momentum for piloting the approach. I look forward to reading your book - we have a larger research stream on localisation so imagine it will be really useful. Kate

This was by far the most original of the 3 minute aid pitches and should have won. Very interesting idea.

Great piece Kate, this is an important issue. Has there been thought of international orgs putting some mechanism in place to avoid doctors and engineers leaving the country's workforce to be admin assistant type jobs for internationals just because they can speak English? Maybe a salary cap on national staffing so that host nation governments/ hospitals etc can remain competitive? Should ethical international orgs publish salaries of all staff?

Kate, This is a terrific article. Very much to the point, practical and positive. The analogy with football is easy to follow, even for football nongs like me. In our book on community resilience in natural disasters Anouk Ride and I argued that more respect should be given to local ways of doing things and local accomplishments in self help. But we did not go the extra step that you are taking to outline specific positive policies which would help international agencies implement a "fair go" with smaller agencies and more appropriate help. Di. Ride, A and Bretherton, D. (Eds) (2011) Community Resilience in Natural Disasters. USA: Palgrave MacMillan.

Paying compensation to LNGOs when they lose key staff is a great idea Kate. And to take another lesson from the AFL, which subsidised expansionist clubs so they could offer competitive salaries to top players, why not subsidise the LNGOs so they could RETAIN those key staff? It makes sense, especially with all the rhetoric (in the 2016 Grand Bargain and elsewhere) about 'localisation'.

Thank you Maree for those thoughtful comments!

Hi Roden, Thanks for your comment. I gave just a few examples of the 'spectrum' of bad behaviour in this piece. Some of them are from my personal experience, some are cited from other people's research. Nancy Cook's book has been published by a highly prestigious publisher in the US, and the research she did on women development workers in Gilgit is widely appreciated. Coming to the specific instance of women dancing with other girls: I think you have misunderstood the quote. The point here is not about 'with whom', but the fact of 'dancing' itself, to the tune of bee gees, seeing this as a way to import a bit of 'normalcy' in life that seemed extremely hard for them.

Hi Sally, Thank you so much for those kind words and the thoughtful comments. I am amazed at the wonderful way you are always able to be insightful and self-reflexive. I see that you have raised an age-old issue here with sex-work: no one does it voluntarily. Indeed, one could say that about many other kinds of work, particularly those that are bunched together in the descriptive term of 'dirty work', grave digging, sweage cleaning and so on. experts who deal with sex-work have wtitten volumes on it and you must be aware of that literature (which has now matured beyond the early binary of 'good' and 'bad'), so I won't go into that broad field. What is important here, beyond the use of terms such as 'prostitutes' to describe vulnerable - and perhaps traumatised women - is the manner in which the situation is being described: as a purely masculine thing. Instead of a knee-jerk reaction such as this, we as development workers should try to go to the 'source of the evil', which remains a gross power inequity between the 'giver' and the 'taker'. We need to focus on power issues here, not gender. I was amused to hear some women development workers comment on how this is a male affliction, how men behave badly when 'on mission', thus putting themselves above all questions.

Thank you Tony for that observation. Indeed, a significant part of donor funding actually goes to benefit donor country 'specialists' of various sorts, through the procurement of services. I was not focussing so much on the goods, but yes, that too is a matter of concern.

The opinions must be very subjective, tainted by personal experiences.

We, all like-minded Papua New Guineans had this view that Professor Howes has now shared. Indeed a sad moment PNG! And for Albert Schram, we citizens know that the arm(s) of government have lost touch with reality!