Reckless Warhorse Dishes: The "Africans Must be Taught to Repair"

war·horse  ˈwôrˌhôrs (noun) (in historical contexts) a large, powerful horse ridden in battle.

1. • informala soldier, politician, or sports player who has fought many campaigns or contests.
   • informala musical, theatrical, or literary work that has been heard or performed repeatedly.

     "that old warhorse Liszt's “Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2.”"

I've got a messy blog here (apology for posting before editing, this is take 2).  I should write it up as a real article, though.  It parallels conversations I've had over beers with many colleagues in the ICT world over the decades.  And maybe it explains why I left multi-million dollar UN and WTO and IMF funded "AID Projects" and enjoy private investment outside the #charitableindustrialcomplex.  And the reason I should write it up more professionally is that it appears "WASTE AID" and "RECYCLING DEVELOPMENT AID" is about to go down the same learning curve, without a helmet as they rush to be first to submit projects for funding.

Inexperience, Bad People Management, Lack of Accounting Skills, Spotty Customer Service, Sub Par (food) Quality.  Let's compare the "5 frequent reasons" that restaurants in the USA and EU fail with the explanations offered by the Aid for Africa complex.  Does a 60% failure rate prove Africa's incapable? Or does Africa's enormous and steady growth demonstrate an unhealthy attraction of Western Aid workers to projects lacking business fundamentals?

"Reckless" Korean War warhorse honored by medal and statue @ National Museum of the Marine Corps, Quantico, Virginia

The myth is that "nothing is getting better".  I call this the "restaurant crisis".

The logic of AID and Enforcement in Africa seems built on "failure needs more help".  If 60% of new USA restaurants fail in the first year, and 80% fail in 5 years, then Governments should fund professional Restaurant Aid Workers to save Restaurateurs.  Charity needs to save the failing restaurants.  Compare that to the free market, which invests based on past success.

And beeeliiiiiieeevvee me, I could get you some restaurant worker photos that would send you skeedaddling from emerging market restaurants to burn wires in Agbogbloshie in a heartbeat (and genuine "child labor" to boot).   Maybe even some with FIRE pictures for the photojournalists.

If you have seen Awal M. Basit (2nd left) burn wire, you know this amount of gasoline flame is "shiny object for reporter"

Lessons from ICT Battlefield (Information Communications Technology) 

I ran across an ICT blog yesterday which brought me back to that battlefield. The tone is a bit "warhorsey", and I can relate to that. I started out, after Mass DEP, in the ICT realm.  The idea (like World Computer Exchange) was to take surplus computers and use them to develop school tech rooms and internet cafes in Africa.  Millions of WTO and UNGAID dollars were going to these countries to "connect them to the web", and thousands of western Aid Workers, volunteers, etc., were carpetbagging to Africa to play a positive role, and earn a living, saving Africa from darkness.  (Fair Trade Recycling's 2016 EWaste Trading program is derivative).

Another "Poverty Porn" Parody

These are coming out so quickly now.   I think this is a movement.  As the NPR article reports, the reactions against "poverty porn", "parasites of the poor", "accidental racism" and "boycotts of geeks of color" are not something I'm making up.

I have heard the frustrating cries from the technicians in Asia, Africa, and South America for over a decade.

This video parody shows Africans coming together, a la "We are the World", to donate radiators to poor freezing Norwegian children.   The way Norway is presented does have a grain of truth... it is indeed cold there, and the cold is something that would really seem frightening to Africans.  But they hit the out-of-context, Onion-esque, clueless notes that anti-export organizations don't seem aware of...



At FastCoExist.com, Ariel Schwartz and Nathaniel Whittenmore describe some of the same lessons I thought we learned in the 1960s, about "poster child syndrome" (the UNICEF campaign).  From Ariel's article:

"Guilt-tripping is still a commonly used tactic in trying to get people to donate money for the impoverished, though it is slowly being replaced by more hopeful messages from organizations like Mama Hope and Pencils of Promise. Nathaniel Whittemore explains in a Co.Exist post from earlier this year that this is strategic: "It supposes that after decades of being battered over the head by relief organizations flaunting horror images, there’s not much left but table scraps in the guilt bucket," he writes.

Fair Trade Recycling is a movement to recognize the crazy good things about repair and trade and even recycling in the emerging markets.   I could never have predicted the animosity directed towards technicians and recyclers in emerging markets, promoted by the very people I hung out with in college.  Remember the "boycott" of Fair Trade Cotton at Victoria's secret?

E-Waste Poster Children are everywhere.

I'm still working on the individual examples for the "legal malpractice" case.  It's just something I want to be very careful with, something that has to be done right.

More from the NPR article about the video, below.

"The video is humorous, but there is a serious message.  The point is that images of helpless Africans are just as inaccurate as the idea of helpless freezing Norwegians.   A lot of Africans cannot relate to the patronizing videos and development initiatives."
"The organization says it has certain goals with the video. "
"Among them that fundraising "should not be based on exploiting stereotypes" and that media should have more respect in portraying suffering children."

Another Rich Story Ends: Yadji Moussa

Yadji Moussa was a man I met in Cameroon.  He became my most trusted friend there.  We spent many mornings speaking philosophy, over a cup of sugared tea into which I'd dip the fresh local bread. I trusted him to give it to me straight if I wanted to know the "African Street".  He kept me under his wing.


He told me he had problems in the past, that he had been at "rock bottom", and described those tough times in detail, with humor, making me laugh.  


During the 30 months I lived there, he only seemed to do better and better.  I have written about times that he was a hero in the town of Ngaoundal in Adamawa Province.  He had a way of being covertly confrontational, leaving friends and authorities to puzzle whether he was religiously passive, or feigning self-effacement, or ready to cut to the chase with a direct challenge.

He continued to do better and better after I left Cameroon, and Renee, my peace corps volunteer replacement, agreed he was something special.   They married and had two kids, Innah and Adamou, and returned to the USA to live in Michigan, around 1989 or 1990 I think.


He revisited rock bottom a few times, and the marriage broke up in 2000.   I owed him a lot from my time in Cameroon, and brought him to Vermont to start a business with me.  Yadji worked with me for 12 years in Middlebury.  

Yadji drowned June 21, while I was celebrating my twins birthdays in Arkansas.  I got a lot of calls in the spotty coverage of the Ozarks.  I wrote most of the blog while sitting in my parents living room in Searcy County, trying to decide whether to take my kids canoeing on the Buffalo River.  We decided to return and assist with the arrangements for Yadji, who for many years I described as my best friend, and for many times I was furious with, as only a brother can be.  I've decided to give this rewrite, to give the record another shot, because Yadji Moussa deserves the best.

Student Aid Increases Tuition?

Interrupted by articles this week in Bloomberg and Wall Street Journal, on the cost of college and the federal Pell Grant program.   I wrote an editorial for the Carleton College newspaper in 1983 which made the point that we shouldn't blame Reagan for cutting the Pell Grant program, we should blame the colleges, whose tuition increased NOT in proportion to any inflation, but in DIRECT proportion to the federal grant dollars.

When the same point is made, 25 years later, and no one has done anything about it, it makes me wonder about "playing the system".

• College is expensive.
• Federal dollars offset expense.
• Colleges mark up tuition.

• People are told to "eat local"
• Supermarkets see demand for local goods increase.
• Supermarkets mark up local products.

It still makes sense to use consumer demand to improve the sustainability of production which we consume.  I'm not against advocating for environmentally sustainable purchasing, and still stand behind the boycott of countries which won't sign treaties protecting whales.

But entering my 4th decade of environmental activism, I'm really impatient with the way corporations play the  system.  I'm not anti-corporation... I think that it's human beings inside the corporation who make decisions to play the system.

If low-carb diets look promising, someone will sell you "low carb version" of mineral water.  That doesn't mean it's bad mineral water.  But it means that if we are willing to be stupid, people will sell to us as if we are stupid.

Will the call for ethical recycling make recycling better?  I hope so.  But just saying that another company is bad comes quite naturally to many competitors, and if there is a way to say it through an NGO, expect sponsorship dollars to flow that way.

Time Out: Big Picture Environmentalism

I'm on my way to vacation, followed by a trip to our fair trade recycling plant in Sonora, Mexico, then a presentation at the CES in Las Vegas.    I'll probably write more than ever on the road.  But even my haiku is too long.

If there were an Abstract for prospective readers of this blog, it might be:

The author [Robin Ingenthron] is a former environmental regulator with a degree in international relations, and experience in "third world" and "second world" development programs.  Using MBA skills and a business as a background, he writes about how environmentalism can make more efficient choices, trimming policies which do not benefit the earth ecology, with particular emphasis on environmental protocals which have been "hijacked" or influenced by greed.