Get your goat
Images of cute, cuddly animals have replaced sad-eyed children in the latest campaigns to market charitable giving to Africa. But what does it really mean to buy a village a goat?
Claire Ward
Photography by ISTOCKPHOTO: Eric Isselée
In the 1970s and ’80s, Sally Struthers hysterically wept over African children with big, sad eyes in TV ads for the Christian Children’s Fund. Last year, Helena Bonham Carter held up a singing fish toy in an Oxfam ad and, turning the cliché on its head, pouted with equally big, sad eyes about the number of junky gifts that rich Westerners give one another.
International aid charities have changed their marketing over the years to try to guilt, cajole and otherwise persuade Westerners to donate to the world’s neediest. One of the largest changes in the industry over the last decade has been the rise of “animals for Africa” programs such as the ones pioneered by Farm Africa, Christian Aid, World Vision and Heifer International. These programs allow donors to buy individual animals that will help improve the lives of poor people by helping them achieve self-sufficiency, or at least a leg up.
Oxfam’s Unwrapped campaign is the latest such program, launched in Canada in October 2006. The television ads for Unwrapped are fast-paced and upbeat: “Buy me!” bleats a cheerful donkey; mugging for the camera, an animated goat makes a soft and cuddly sell.
Oxfam’s campaign has been enormously successful worldwide; it recently broke winter sales records in Australia with an astonishing $4 million raised. In Canada, Unwrapped has raised roughly $870,000 in the two cycles since its launch. Its catalogue, while heavily promoted in the Christmas months, is available year-round. Oxfam’s offer is appealing: instead of giving your sister-in-law another potted plant for her birthday, spend the money—in her name—on, say, a goat that will do an impoverished African family some good.
But are you really buying a goat? Not quite, as it turns out. Oxfam’s website explains that your $58 will not literally purchase a goat, but instead go toward the program that the purchase represents. In the case of farm animals, donations will support the work of Oxfam’s livelihoods programs. This can mean that the money might go toward vaccinations, health and market awareness training, and more. Oxfam asks for this flexibility so that the communities it works with can decide what sort of aid will make the biggest difference to them.
So while the Unwrapped program doesn’t literally give away livestock on a goat-per-cheque basis, animals are still part of its aid work. This is true for most of the big NGOs—World Vision and Heifer aren’t deploying bunnies to villages either, but using the funds for corresponding programs.
A small handful of catalogues, such as the Save the Children Wishlist and Good Gifts, do actually transform your dollars into the chickens and donkeys you picked out. But what does it mean to give a goat—literal or figurative—anyway? On a continent plagued by war, famine, disease and poverty, is a goat or a cow really going to have a positive impact?
Ceri Dingle, director of U.K.-based WorldWrite, doesn’t think so. “Many NGOs are cashing in on the anti-consumption vogue in the West in order to provide small-scale solutions for poor people in the developing world, regardless of the aspirations of the poor,” she says. WorldWrite’s mandate is to challenge prejudices and stereotypes by organizing foreign youth exchange programs, producing documentary films and participating in charitable conferences. In December 2007, the group examined African charitable aid on the ground in its documentary Keeping Africa Small.
The film travels to Ghana to talk with charitable workers from various aid organizations and their respective beneficiaries. “It’s not that we want people to be stagnant,” says Dorte Jorgensen in the film. Jorgensen works with School for Life, a Danish-run project in Northern Ghana. “But what is wrong with that? What is wrong with their lives here? Why don’t we get people to appreciate the rural life?”
The bitterness felt by some of the Ghanaians featured is unmistakable.
“NGOs are interested in their own programs that they think will benefit the people, and that’s where they are always mistaken,” says Abraham Godbless Ashie, a youth and community worker.
“What we really want is that the NGOs put those things aside and begin to provide accommodations and better facilities that can enhance our lives,” says De Roy Kwesi Andrew, a translator and schoolteacher from Accra. “And jobs,” adds his soft-spoken companion, Wofa Owusu Ansah.
Plenty of Africans, in other words, don’t want any more goats. More precisely, they don’t want Westerners deciding what form charitable aid should take. “We shouldn’t expect poor people to smile and be grateful for paltry, patronizing gifts; or, as these campaigns would have us believe, that this is somehow meeting their aspirations,” says Dingle.
Dingle argues that the Western perception of what Africa “needs” misleads Western aid organizations. This faulty perception, she explains, bases relief efforts on the assumption that Africans are content to remain subsistence farmers—that they are content to stay “small.” Forty percent of Africa is urbanized, she says. Urban populations want industry that will create jobs; they want progress. More importantly, they want to decide for themselves what “progress” will actually mean in their struggling economies. In other words, choosing what form of aid to send is condescending. Like saying, “You can’t handle the cash—here’s a goat.”
Dingle proposes that we should, in fact, simply hand over the cash. But what about the “Give a man a fish …” argument? “Give a man major investment and a factory would change lives,” she says. “It’s not considered chic, cool or acceptable, but it’s the truth.” While there are plenty of Africans who agree (some of them interviewed in WorldWrite’s documentaries), others believe that Dingle’s view swings the pendulum too far to the other side.
“The most important wealth is knowledge; then people can choose for themselves,” says Jacob Deng, a 26-year-old Sudanese refugee who now lives in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. Deng was seven years old when he fled from Southern Sudan with tens of thousands of other young boys, now known as the Lost Boys of Sudan. He struggled for years in refugee camps, but was determined to get an education. The cost of attending a Kenyan boarding school? Five goats.
Now in his second year in business and management at Acadia University, Deng argues that a gesture that inspires resourcefulness—such as raising livestock for trade and food— is one that also helps people to begin to value their own lives.
He directs his own small charity in Halifax, called Wadeng Wings of Hope. One of its central initiatives is its own goat campaign, which delivers goats to the people of Deng’s hometown of Duk Padiet, Sudan. Deng made a trip home to Sudan this past April to personally buy goats with the donations his organization has collected over the winter months. “What they need,” he asserts, “are the tools to take charge of their own lives.”
Deng and Dingle’s views represent two very different perspectives in a complicated debate, but it seems they aren’t so opposed as they might at first appear. Both want to give Africans aid that will help them develop their own solutions. Whether that means sending cash or goats—or even better, both—the key is cultivating education and resourcefulness.
