Recently I came across this new video from Tearfund, a UK based Christian charity ‘which partners with churches in more than 50 of the world’s poorest countries tackling poverty and injustice through sustainable development, by responding to disasters and challenging injustice.’

As a little bit of background, I was privileged to have spent a year working for Tearfund in Burundi (where this video was filmed) serving on their Disaster Response Teams and our programme was (re)building schools, latrines, water systems in the late 1990s. It’s a country that I’m familiar with, care about and still support in a variety of small ways.

I’m also hugely supportive of the attempt to reframe the people of Burundi as people with agency, skills, resources, dignity, capabilities and that they are the people who know best what the priorities and needs of their own communities are. And this philosophy isn’t new, it was very much how Tearfund trained us to think. As part of our Burundi programme we ran a primary health care programme and that was crucial in determining sustainability, empowering local communities to use properly & maintain the water & simple sanitary facilities.

I guess what is new though is the presentation of the sassy Burundians telling this pesky narrator what’s what. It makes the people of Burundi the centre of the story and not the donor and that’s all well and good.

But I think the film didn’t quite hit the bullseye and here’s why. The first character is a woman carrying a bucket on her head. The narrator, not unreasonably assumes it is water, the woman corrects him and tells him either to mind his own business or possibly that it’s her business (either or both are possible). It sort of implies that women don’t go and fetch water with buckets on their head which is, as far as I’m aware still all too true. True we don’t need to reinforce that stereotype, but I’d bet your house that there are plenty of women who would prefer a water source a lot closer to where they live. So should showing their daily reality be an issue?

Then we see a school that the narrator says ‘your donations built’ but is corrected by a lad who tells him that’s not true, his parents built it. As if both things couldn’t be true at the same time.

And apparently Tearfund didn’t help build a health centre or a community centre either. But they did do training.

Training is good. Training is necessary. But in one of the poorest countries in the world when they want to build a community centre, health centre or whatever it is the community decide they need, they are still very much likely to need someone to help them buy some bricks. And cement. And equipment.

I don’t really know what is new here because nearly thirty years ago Tearfund was working through local partners and churches, even then they knew that the best people to decide the priorities of development was the community themselves (even in crisis situations they tried to work with local people wherever possible).

Remember, I’m for showing the Burundians as people with agency & ability (they’re amazing people) and against stereotyping them but this doesn’t need to be done at the expense of donors (who they still very much want) somehow being the ones at fault here. If anything they should have made themselves the scapegoat after all it’s them (and other aid agencies) who have been running the campaigns all these years. I think they may have tried a bit but the narrator seems to be speaking on behalf of the donor and not the middleman because of course Tearfund has always been doing wonderful work, it’s just not what you think it was, silly old-fashioned supporter you!

As I said in this response to Andy McCullough, if there is a needed reframing of western thinking around their giving it needs to be a two-way reframing and poking people in the eye for being generous is not the right way to go about it.