By Patricia Sanders
Guest Contributor
Over the past several years, countries within the Greater Horn of Africa have faced ongoing conflict, food insecurity, and in some cases, famine. By March of 2017 nearly 23 million people in four of those countries —Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia and South Sudan— were impacted (Hudson, D., VanHeerde-Hudson, J., & Morini, P., 2018). A report from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs highlighted the resulting internal and external displacement of families; a screening of Kenyan children revealed that 55% of those under the age of 5 years old were malnourished; and local bureaucratic and security constraints complicate the availability and timeliness of aid response efforts (ReliefWeb, 2017). The situation was dire.
In response to this growing humanitarian crisis, the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) launched its East Africa appeal on March 15, 2017. The DEC is a committee of 13 leading United Kingdom (UK) aid charities that unite during times of crisis to create and launch fundraising appeals and then allocate the resources to identified crisis relief responding to the emergency situation. The leading visual communication piece in the March 2017 emergency appeal was a campaign poster, depicting a young African child crying in agony in the arms of a seemingly helpless mother with the caption, “DON’T DELAY, DONATE”
This visual communication piece is widely recognized as “poverty porn.” Aid Thoughts defines poverty porn as “…any type of media, be it written, photographed or filmed, which exploits the poor’s condition in order to generate the necessary sympathy for selling newspapers or increasing charitable donations or support for a given cause. Poverty porn is typically associated with black, poverty-stricken Africans, but can be found elsewhere” (Aid Thoughts, 2009). Similarly, a Danish aid worker named Jorgen Lissner wrote that, “the starving child image is seen as unethical, because it comes dangerously close to being pornographic…it exhibits the human body and soul in all its nakedness, without any respect for the person involved” (Lissner, 1981).
In this report, I will make the argument that, while effective, this visual communication piece and the use of poverty porn as a fundraising tactic implies “a mindset of superiority [of the West] and inferiority [of the rest],” and is dehumanizing, thus making it an unethical approach to communications (Higgins, 2018).
Do the Ends Justify the Means?
The opposing side to this argument is that the campaign as a visual communication tool, regardless of the means, was extremely effective in raising funds to help millions of people in desperate need. The DEC campaign raised over £12 million in the first day. Within six months the donations reached £65 million which was used to provide critical support to nearly 2.5 million people. £5 million of the total income was contributed through matching funds from UK Aid Match to the campaign (Hudson, D., VanHeerde-Hudson, J., & Morini, P., 2018). The DEC, along with likeminded international aid organizations “helped avert a full-blown famine in East Africa in 2017. According to a report by United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the combined fundraising efforts raised nearly $1.3 billion for famine prevention in Somalia which meant that over three million people were reached per month with life-saving assistance” (Higgins, 2018). This campaign was not unique in its success —data shows that poverty porn is extremely effective (Schaffer, 2016).
The DEC Design Was Effective
Poverty porn is certainly an effective, immediate tool to raise funds for a cause. Ethics aside, the DEC’s March campaign poster was a well-produced design. The designers utilized rhetorical analysis in the form of narrative criticism in order to convey a message of urgency. Narrative criticism relies on the incorporation and use of a story. According to Sonja K. Foss these stories, or narratives, are characterized by four key features: the discourse in question contains at least two events, to the end that the world presented in the story undergoes a change of state; these two or more events are organized by time order; there is a causal or contributing relationship between the events; and the events involve a unified subject (Foss, 2018, p. 320-321).
The DEC poster meets all of these criteria:
- Two or more events organized by time order: in the DEC poster there is a clear series of events —the donor makes a contribution; UK Aid matches the donation; a malnourished child receives a month’s supply of life-saving peanut paste.
- Causal or contributing relationship between the events: in the DEC poster each event is a result of the previous one.
- Unified Subject: in the DEC poster there is a present theme of malnourishment and pending famine. This unified subject is present both in the image and text of the narrative.
In addition to the appropriate use of narrative criticism, the campaign poster incorporated appealing design principles including alignment, classical conditioning, cognitive dissonance, and color.
- Alignment: there was clear, intentional alignment of all elements in the design. The text, information, and call to action were all left-justified creating an appropriate alignment cue and area alignment was properly used to offset the text and the main focus of the background image (Lidwell, Holden, Butler, 2010, p. 24).
- Classical Conditioning: the poster associated a stimulus with an unconscious emotional response about malnourishment. The designer highlighted a starving child and effectively associates the strong negative emotional reaction evoked by the situation that caused the child’s condition (Lidwell, Holden, Butler, 2010, p. 42).
- Cognitive Dissonance: the designer created cognitive dissonance in the viewers who encountered the poster and donated – dissonance between the emotions that people feel when they see a starving child and the pressure to alleviate their guilt or discomfort associated with the confrontation of white privilege (Lidwell, Holden, Butler, 2010, p. 46).
- Color: the use of color was conservative, with less than five colors for the written messages (white, red, and black). The designer strategically used color combinations with the warmer (red) colors in the foreground and cooler (green, blue, brown) colors in the background. The red call to action message was saturated and called attention to the urgency of the poster (Lidwell, Holden, Butler, 2010, p. 48).
The cost of success
Although the DEC campaign poster was an effective piece of visual communication, the use of poverty porn is unethical and dehumanizing. The campaign poster was created at the expense of the African people, the global conversation around famine, and international development. The narrative, classical conditioning, and cognitive dissonance in the DEC’s poster perpetuates stereotypes about poor Africans; jeopardizes the ability to be effective in solving the problem in the long run; and simplifies complex issues of national instability, famine, and poverty:
- The dehumanizing image of the African mother helplessly holding a suffering child perpetuates a stereotype that the developing world is unable to help itself and that it relies on western aid in order to overcome a crisis when in reality, there is a long history of unrest and western intervention that created cycles of poverty and oppression in these individuals’ lives. This is damaging to the African people because it shows only one piece of the picture; in this case, one in which the subjects portrayed have no agency, independence, or appearance of consent. The inherently dependent theme of this image perpetuates the savior mentality which is offensive to individuals in developing countries who do not need to rely on “the western world” to save them.
- The design of this campaign also arguably jeopardizes the ability of a donor (or anyone) to make a difference. The design implies a very transactional solution: the donor sends funds and the problem is solved. However, when those donors receive similar requests for funding in the coming years, “they may stop believing in their ability — in anybody’s ability — to make a difference” (Higgins, 2018). Using a design to imply that donations will solve a systemic issue is misleading. The funds to supply the “life-saving peanut paste” may in fact save the child from starvation that month, but it will not protect them against the systems that lead to their situation in the first place. When donors continue to receive appeals centered around these same systemic issues it will desensitize the audience from believe that any one campaign has any lasting impact.
- The message simplifies extremely complex issues in a misleading way. David Hudson, Professor of international development at the University of Birmingham, notes “it’s a little bit disingenuous that you’re telling people that the problems of poverty, of deprivation, of global inequity, are relatively easy to solve — if you give money. They turn around in ten or twenty years and they’re like, ‘I’ve given all this money to a problem so that it can be fixed and it hasn’t been’” (Higgins, 2018). This is problematic for the ongoing efforts to combat the root causes of food scarcity, famine, and displacement. Funding in crisis situations is critical, but it does not prevent the underlying corrupt and conflict-driven systems of bureaucracy from repeating themselves and creating a new crisis.
Conclusion
Visual communication should be ethical. I am not suggesting that aid organizations abandon fundraising appeals; this would threaten the successful implementation of life-saving programs and services. However, by avoiding poverty porn and not pitying the subject, it opens the door for designers to create visual communications like this video by Mama Hope that break down stereotypes and avoid dehumanizing the subject.
On April 25, 2012 the organization Mama Hope published this video on youtube, along with the following comment:
Wouldn’t it be better if African men weren’t always depicted as warlords or victims?
Gabriel, Benard, Brian and Derrik (the Kenyan men in this video) told us they wanted to make [a video] that pokes fun at the way African men are portrayed in Hollywood films. They said, “If people believed only what they saw in movies, they would think we are all warlords who love violence.” They, like Mama Hope, are tired of the over-sensationalized, one-dimensional depictions of African men and the white savior messaging that permeates our media. They wanted to tell their own stories instead, so we handed them the mic and they made this video.
The video features these four young Kenyan men (Gabriel, Benard, Brian, and Derrik) who comically combat the western stereotypes often associated with African men: aggressive, dominate, war-driven men who inflict child slavery and brutality on communities; thus rendering them in need of the “white savior.” After the exaggerated Hollywood clips commence they laughingly ask, “but you don’t really think of us like that, do you? We are likeable and friendly guys. And we are even on Facebook! We are more than a stereotype. Let’s change the perception.” The video goes on to depict the young men playing soccer while being identified instead as students pursuing” clinical medicine and human resource management, with a donation call to action to support education costs with the closing quote “stop the pity, unlock the potential.”
This video represents an alternative avenue to ethically raise funds for a worthy cause. Rather than relying on the dehumanizing stereotypes that stir negative emotions, the video piece illuminated similarities between distant cultures and identified the unifying need for education; a concept that everyone can understand. In his paper, An experimental approach to comparing similarity- and guilt-based charitable appeals, Van Rijn identified that fundraising campaigns that highlight the similarities between donors and recipients can also prompt donations (Van Rijn, 2017).
Ultimately, design elements such as classical conditioning, and cognitive dissonance can use the consumer’s emotions in a more ethical way that connects them to empowerment and the journey of a complex problem, rather than a dehumanizing oversimplified immediate transaction. This shift in visual communication would continue to raise critical funding for emergency situations, without degrading those who need aid.
References
Aid Thoughts. (2009, July 1). What is ‘poverty porn’ and why does it matter for development? Retrieved from https://aidthoughts.org/2009/07/01/what-is-poverty-porn-and-why-does-it-matter-for-development/
Foss, S.K. (2018). Rhetorical Criticism: Exploration and Practice. Long Grove, IL: Waveland.
Higgins, A. (2018, May 10). Is Poverty Porn A Necessary Evil? Retrieved from https://brightthemag.com/is-poverty-porn-necessary-evil-aid-charity-humanitarian-donor-donation-c96739a1f311
Horn of Africa: Humanitarian Impacts of Drought – Issue 1 (as of 31 March 2017). (2017, March 31). Retrieved from https://reliefweb.int/report/somalia/horn-africa-humanitarian-impacts-drought-issue-1-31-march-2017
Hudson, D., VanHeerde-Hudson, J., & Morini, P. (2018, April 16). The fundraising dilemma: Raising money but depressing hope? Retrieved from https://devcommslab.org/blog/the-fundraising-dilemma-raising-money-but-depressing-hope/
Lidwell, W., Holden, K., & Butler, J. (2010). Universal Principals of Design. Beverly, MA: Rockport Publishers.
Lissner, J. (1981, June 1). Merchants of misery. Retrieved from https://newint.org/features/1981/06/01/merchants-of-misery/
Schaffer, J. (2016, June 10). Poverty Porn: Do the Means Justify the Ends? Retrieved from https://nonprofitquarterly.org/2016/06/10/poverty-porn-do-the-means-justify-the-ends/
Van Rijn, J. (2017, June). An experimental approach to comparing similarity- and guilt-based charitable appeals. Retrieved from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214804317300241
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Patricia Sanders has worked locally and internationally with community-based organization fundraising and communication efforts and she studied human rights law in Mexico City. As the Director of Development and Communications at HCM of Utah, she currently collaborates with a team of attorneys, educators, and community health workers to advocate for and respond to the underserved community’s need for health and well-being.