I get it. So it's just like working for a Khmer owned company in the private sector then !!Jacked Camry wrote:
What most people outside of the industry don't understand is that aid is about the hardest thing one can successfully do. You're essentially selecting the hardest group of people and conditions with which to achieve a positive outcome and given several handicaps (, poorly paid counterpart staff, lack of education and capacity at all levels, horrible bureaucracy ) then told to go out and completely change things but from within, while attaining a series of ridiculous goals within an absurd timeframe and insufficient budget and infrastructure. It's not a wonder that it seldom succeeds,
Cynical NGO advertising from Sunrise Cambodia
Rated R for Ricecakes
While the route taken may vary (you say professionals without experience, I say professionals that are jaded) the destination/result is the same - funds are not allocated to the places and projects where they are actually, truly required. If a country's elite is acting like twats, that country should not be receiving western aid ("but the poor will suffer" etc etc people say. Indeed, but so many dollars of aid simply support the political staus quo - and in any case, these poor people are the same idiots who actually voted for those in power after receiving a free T shirt, bag of rice and/or parcel of ex white-owned land), while if a project is plain daft it should never commence. But this does not happen. And so ,despite taking power for the Xth time (and imprisoning his opponent - African politics is so tediously predictable), Darling Museveni - the Savour of Africa - will continue getting his aid; as will the project to ensure gender equality in bamboo cooperatives in Cambodia (presumably to increase male involvement, given that most small businesses here already appear to be run by women). Meanwhile millions of people in Europe (the source of much of the funds.....) continue to live in plastic bags awaiting processing, while half of Belarus' youth might soon contract AIDS due to drugs and needle-sharing (an off-the-cuff example - who knows, maybe the place is full of Western-financed needle replacement projects....). This may be due to Young Bloods following the latest PC project trends, or to Global Fund and other fly-ins whose only real experience of poverty is the waiter serving them a G&T at night after a day of exhausting meetings during their Third World visit. Whatever, it is one of the reasons the industry has such a poor reputation.Jacked Camry wrote:I completely disagree with your assertion. In fact, the opposite is true.RBD wrote:The fact that there are so many 'professionals' in the industry is part of the problem. Young professional in the Aid Industry can be bright, enthusiastic and adventurous. Older professionals don't want to live in Sudan or Congo anymore - they have a (local? - from somewhere along the way) spouse, kids and a bellyful of 'exotic' places. Like most older people they want stability and security. Unfortunately the core of their job generally involves going to, and living in, the arse-hole of the planet. Instead they want to stay rooted in a reasonably comfortable destination (eg Cambodia) and hence dream up/authorise/apply daft projects to keep them there ("Gender equality in a Bamboo co-operative"/ "Story-boarding educational literature to ensure gender equality in minority tribes" etc. - all life-changing stuff). Perhaps the retirement age in the Aid Industry for those not working in head-office should be 40. And perhaps those in head office should have the balls to send the donor funds to places where it is actually required.Jacked Camry wrote:I see. So you think, for example, water and sanitation programmes are much better designed, implemented and administrated by amateurs without any technical or socio-economic training rather than by engineers and community development specialists? You think that agriculture programmes are best implemented by Peace Corps volunteers who prior to joining had been History B.A. grads who had never been on a farm in their lives? Give me examples of where well-intentioned (or otherwise) amateurs are better than trained professionals to do work in development aid.Mr Lovejuice wrote:I would have used plumbers, electricians or car mechanics as analogies myself. Trouble is, in nearly all other fields you would be correct, but not in the aid industry. It sometimes seems that the bigger the budget NGO's or even GO's have, the more they seem to mis-pend it. I could post quite a few examples but don't feel motivated to do so at this time.
You haven't the slightest idea what you're talking about.
Right now we're starting to see the impacts of the overall reduction in enthusiasm for and availability of suitable entry level positions for young professionals who might want to become development aid industry workers. As the older professionals start to retire or have moved on to the more comfortable positions there is very little left to replace them with. In the past, the old core group provided invaluable team leadership and mentoring for the younger staff, who would eventually follow a similar career path until they were the old pros. Now the aid industry is going through one of its regular phases where the bright young Ivy League Economist MAs are de riguer, and their common characteristics include complete lack of on-the-ground experience at village level or implementing actual aid projects and a belief that they're smarter than anyone else, particularly those old fools who've been running around in the dust for all those years. After all, if they were smart they'd be cloistered in the same august halls they hang out in, wouldn't they?
In addition, the aid agencies themselves, prodded by the governments who want to cut Technical Assistance costs and who don't really give a shit about the aid and just want easier access to the funds, are continuously cutting the number of man-months available (but not the TORs) and the costs so that it's becoming increasingly unattractive to the better staff who up until now have basically been keeping the whole travesty together with chewing gum and baling wire. So many of my friends from the old days have just said "fuck it" and retired recently, I've lost count and I'm starting to look at them with envy, something I'd not thought I'd ever do.
As to your assertion that it's the old boys and girls who dream up these projects, you should be aware that the big decisions are made by the fly-ins, based on the latest bullshit served them by the government and some vague but trendy ideas that might be floating around the halls of Bretton Woods and Manila. Consultants have no power, they simply are served plates of shit and told to make a gourmet meal out of it.
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- Jumped Up Little Oik
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After watching her speech at Fearless (http://lucyperry.com.au) you may well have a point. Then again it could be that she believes Sunrise is doing good work and so she doesn't need to be careful. In the vid she says she was told to pull-back her tweet on the whole of the speakers at an aid event being male or she would be reprimanded. She said she re-tweeted it instead and will be entitling a new campaign Sausage Fest after the #sausagefest tag from that thread. She is obviously confrontational and she says it's because when she has researched her subject throughly, she has "truth". She sounds like a typical aid careerist to me with an obvious feminist slant.shitegeist wrote:Haha, “woman-splaining”, what a telling comment. The core of the problem here is that she is a radical feminist fanatic, and fanatics are basically immune to logic, reason and criticism because any input they receive is just filtered through the lens of their particular world view.
Lindsay’s articles in the SMH are not Pulitzer material or anything, but neither are they "click-bait" nor hatchet-jobs on Sunrise. Nonetheless, she just parses any critique of her management style in the way you’d expect a fanatic to do: it’s not her at all, it’s just part of a great patriarchal conspiracy to decide how and when women should speak out, and [insert undergraduate gender studies rant here]. Further criticism = further validation of the conspiracy.
As a manager, I think the most bewildering thing about all of this is that it could have been put to bed weeks ago with a single tweet along the lines of “Criticism well noted and taken on board, we will review our future campaigns”.
But oh no, that won’t do for an egomaniac and a narcissist: she just has to keep on digging deeper and deeper, continuing to generate negative national media attention -- right in the heart of her donor-base.
Lucy Perry is not a leader or a communicator, she’s a fucking train wreck, and I can’t help but be fascinated about watching it all unfold in slow-motion. I wonder when Sunrise will finally decide to staunch the bleeding.
Does anyone remember that Greenpeace founding member, the one in the inflatable going across the path of the whaler and the whale, who resigned many years ago because, he said, Greenpeace had become all about fund-raising and not protecting wildlife anymore. That's an obvious danger when you combine charity workers with heart and financial business people with a heart but also a wallet for all the good work they have done. What you get in the end is perhaps Lucy Perrys. BTW she is also "helping" someone set up an on-line sex shop.
Last edited by Mr Lovejuice on Tue Jun 07, 2016 11:40 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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- Jumped Up Little Oik
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I think those are fair points in some ways. It's a shame so many people see easy money in aid programs though. I guess you don't like/ believe what that book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man has to say? It's debatable just how much good gets done in the world of aid when you consider the horrendous fuck-ups and even wily intent that have knock on effects for many years to come on large populations of people. Brazil and Indonesia spring to mind as just two examples.Jacked Camry wrote:Who's cynical? You seem to be despite your undisputable complete cluelessness about pretty much everything aid industry related.Mr Lovejuice wrote:Ah! The old ten bullet point plan.Jacked Camry wrote:
As to your assertion that it's the old boys and girls who dream up these projects, you should be aware that the big decisions are made by the fly-ins, based on the latest bullshit served them by the government and some vague but trendy ideas that might be floating around the halls of Bretton Woods and Manila. Consultants have no power, they simply are served plates of shit and told to make a gourmet meal out of it.
It takes one who has worked in the industry, as you quite rightly put it, to be truly cynical about it.
It would be cynical to shrug your shoulders and just say "nothing I can do about it" and continue to suck up contracts to do things you don't believe in, take the money and run. I don't do that, but to get in that position has neither been easy nor without significant sacrifice. It is what is increasingly behind my many friends' decisions to quit early having become disillusioned. It would be cynical for them to just keep going until their pension is fully paid up and kids are through university but often now they're quitting before that point to try different things or just retire earlier.
What most people outside of the industry don't understand is that aid is about the hardest thing one can successfully do. You're essentially selecting the hardest group of people and conditions with which to achieve a positive outcome and given several handicaps (required partnership with government, poorly paid counterpart staff, lack of education and capacity at all levels, horrible bureaucracy to get anything done, locations where private sector is disinterested because there's no market, etc.) then told to go out and completely change things but from within, while attaining a series of ridiculous goals within an absurd timeframe and insufficient budget and infrastructure. It's not a wonder that it seldom succeeds, but this is ignored and the same process of massive TORs, small budgets and inappropriate design continues. Outsiders not surprisingly wonder why, but the bottom line is that the reason aid exists is that nobody else wants to go there and do something, and if they do, it's almost always highly exploitive to the locals and they end up losing their land and livelihoods as a result.
Aid, essentially, is a stopgap to keep things on the boil while we await the economic conditions in the country to improve such that development aid and NGOs become irrelevant other than to support the locals against continued exploitation. The major benefits are stability and income in the places they work, and the capacity they build that remains after they're gone. Most projects never achieve anything like they're supposed to, but we all know that and knew it when the project was designed. But if there were no development aid projects, there would be nothing.
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- Wun Gwo Pee
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Sunrise fell $150,000 short of their funding target and are doubling down on their efforts. I wonder how much the fallout from the poverty porn crisis had to do with that? Interestingly, the appeal below seems to have taken on board some of the criticisms, focusing on success stories rather than dishevelled, dirty faced kids posing as sex workers.
http://sunrisecambodia.org.au/sin-long-chef/
http://sunrisecambodia.org.au/sin-long-chef/
- Khmerhamster
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Wow, that's quite a change in strategy.
Seems like the comments didn't fall on deaf ears after all.
If they were going down this road a mea culpa statement a couple of months ago would have killed the firestorm. But she chose to defiantly fight it - what are the odds on the CEO admitting that she 'lost' (for want of a better word).
Seems like the comments didn't fall on deaf ears after all.
If they were going down this road a mea culpa statement a couple of months ago would have killed the firestorm. But she chose to defiantly fight it - what are the odds on the CEO admitting that she 'lost' (for want of a better word).
Good on them for choosing a more ethical strategy.
It dawned on me this morning that I hadn't seen much of Lucy Perry on Twitter lately. I just checked why. She's blocked K440 from seeing her tweets.
She blocked LTO also. Because she blocks abusive trolls.
Bless
Bless
- LTO
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When she blocked me back during the original debate, and a couple of tweeters brought it up to her, she said she only blocks "abusers and trolls," which I take to mean anybody who raises an issue that she is unequipped to answer, or worse, that causes her to stick her foot in her mouth. Anyway, welcome to the club.scobienz wrote:It dawned on me this morning that I hadn't seen much of Lucy Perry on Twitter lately. I just checked why. She's blocked K440 from seeing her tweets.
Yeah, that's me in a nutshell.Alexandra wrote:She blocked LTO also. Because she blocks abusive trolls.
Bless
- Khmerhamster
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I haven't been blocked either. Maybe it's a personality thing...
Playboy and I could maybe provide some coaching to all you abusive trolls.
Playboy and I could maybe provide some coaching to all you abusive trolls.
Sunrise are still in fighty mood. I retweeted their new ad campaign and said it was good they were responding to the criticism of a few weeks ago. Sunrise replied and said 'success stories are a part of the campaign, and always had been'.
Perhaps Lucy Perry as CEO wasn't aware of that when she said this about success stories recently:
Perhaps Lucy Perry as CEO wasn't aware of that when she said this about success stories recently:
- Khmerhamster
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How weird - and unnecessary.
Perhaps being an abusive troll you should have expected them to fight back.
I should tweet them to see how they respond to me.
Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
Perhaps being an abusive troll you should have expected them to fight back.
I should tweet them to see how they respond to me.
Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
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