How to ‘Do Good’
A Perspective on the Ethics of Charity
Interview by Caitlin Gray
Charities play an important role in providing much needed services and aid to vulnerable communities. With the recent mass media critique on our positions of power and privilege, every sector has been assessed under the public microscope - and the charity sector whilst altruistic in nature, should also be prepared to review its own role in reinforcing power structures.
Lakshmi Iyer takes us through her journey and role in international development and her more recent work at Prospect Burma. Prospect Burma focuses on higher education for Myanmar providing opportunities for young people to access higher education. After the 1988 uprising, universities were shut down for 30 years by the government. This suppressed new ideas and had a massive negative impact on the standard of higher education across the country. Lakshmi reflects on herself and the approach of the charity in their efforts to align with the local community, enable access to higher education and how we can ‘do good’ responsibly.
Why did you want to work in the charity sector?
I have been in international development over the past 12 - 15 years, largely focusing on rural livelihood development and agriculture in the developing world. The reason I wanted to go into development in particular is actually because I'm in a position of privilege - coming from an ‘educated’ background (even though university costs were high I still had the opportunity to go!). I had this desire to give back and do service for other people. My parents are from India and I found it so inspiring visiting India growing up and having the chance to see how others live.
This year we have been really encouraged to analyse our positions of power and privilege, and how we play a role in exacerbating inequalities. Do you think that the media push this year has been positive for motivating individuals to give back to society?
The media has been really responsive to protests this year. Whether it's been the Black Lives Matter movement or other protests around the world, there does need to be more motivation to check biases and check assumptions. When it comes to the charity world, I don't necessarily see that the media has played a large role in helping individuals understand that checking assumptions and biases needs to be a standard.
We can think, for example, about the way we portray low income settings. There's a large charity in the UK that received a lot of media attention because of the way they portrayed celebrities going abroad and meeting individuals in various low income settings. Some people may need to understand what those settings look like because they've never been exposed in the past. On the other hand there are of course people who have been exposed to this a lot and they find that certain portrayals are really politically incorrect or that they portray low income households in the developing world as ‘needy’ or as waiting for the ‘Western World’ to swoop in and save them.
We have to keep questioning everything and that unravelling process is a very difficult and often traumatic one for people to undergo. Just speaking about how important it is to check our privileges isn’t enough, we need guidance, we need formats, we need to know what questions to be asking.
Do you think your own social status continues to inform your choices in life?
I am an individual working in international development, I have been educated in the West, I was born in the US and I got essentially a pedigree university degree. All of this plays a huge role in determining how I work and what I think about. There are also certain assumptions that I make as a development worker about what can and can't be done. I really believe (after my years of experience) that development has to come from within a country, which is why I really wanted to work for Prospect Burma that I work for now. They have this very strong notion that change in Myanmar is not going to come from the outside world. It's going to have to come from the inside and the way you create that inside world is really by and through education and affording individuals the same kinds of privileges that we have in the West.
It informed a shift in career for me because you can work in the livelihood sector for years and years as I have done, and on a lot of programmes, especially from large donor agencies, but many of the activities remain top-down. Of course not completely top-down as the activities are aimed at community development, but the way that my organisation operates is much more in tune with what scholars and students require on a regular basis. It also helps when you're dealing with one country instead of multiple countries, because you really get to know that country and you really come to understand the individuals being impacted by the programmes very well.
A lot of development workers have this mid-life crisis and think, ‘What am I doing, am I really going into a country to change the country to the way that I envision growth?' We’re all taught different models of growth in our university years. Harvesting those ideas and understanding where these scholars and students in Myanmar are coming from helps us understand what they want to do for their own country. That's a huge part of development that the Western world can play because we're so connected and can help connect individuals elsewhere. To understand what the ideas are, connect individuals with other individuals who have similar ideas, provide resources and be a guide, I think that's really what I envision myself doing.
Can you tell us about the people that you work with on the ground?
It was really important for us as a charity to have boots on the ground, to have individuals who are from the country rather than being a solely UK based charity with a few trips a year trying to understand what our scholars need. It's been transformative to have our Myanmar team, their understanding of what our scholars are going through and how to help mould and nurture our programmes. The impact that we're having is so much greater than before.
We started a programme, we've rolled it out for the last two years now, called the Bridging Programme. It selects 20 students who are interested in studying abroad but who don't have the resources to take their English level qualification, and we provide them with the opportunity to take those classes in Yangon. These are 20 students that come from all different regions and states of the country. Many have never stepped foot out of their locales, and so this experience of being together with students from across their country is new. They have various speakers, usually alumni, who come and speak with them about various things that they'll be exposed to through
university life including subject matter that they could be studying while there. The students study together, they cook together, they learn together and they really help each other pass the exam. Along the way they go on excursions to various religious sites in Yangon - not only a Buddhist pagoda but to a Hindu temple, a mosque, a church and they even go to the synagogue. They really are exposed to a wide variety of religious and cultural differences, so they have the ability to explore each other’s diversity through food, through conversations. What we have found from speaking with students is that many are interested in learning about the rich diversity of their own country - this is critical at this point for Myanmar.
Can you tell us a bit about what Myanmar is like and why education is so key for the country?
The education system in Myanmar largely revolves around rote learning so students aren’t really able to question what they're being taught. It's very much: ‘repeat after me’, in a classroom setting. A lot of students don't speak Burmese and it’s very difficult when they go into the high school or university phase because everything is taught in Burmese. Learning chemistry or physics or any STEM subject in another language would be really difficult.
A lot of these students in rural areas who don’t speak Burmese, and even in cities, also just don't have the role models to help them decide what subject to take at university. They see a lot of teachers or nurses, maybe. In Myanmar, to enter a specific profession, you need a specific GPA (grade point average). If you have a lower GPA they essentially slot you into another profession. If you're really good at memorisation and you have the Burmese language skills, you can probably ace your exam, and get slotted into a spot at a university that will take you down a path towards becoming a doctor. Becoming a doctor is the most lucrative career profession as it is the most highly rewarded and culturally is looked at as the ‘best’. That's the trajectory, essentially. It also means that the arts suffer, it means that sports suffer. Any of these subjects that we take for granted in the West.
Can you tell us more about your Change in the Community programme and how it emphasises change at a local level?
It’s our newest programme and has really come about because the charity strongly believes in change agents - what we do is provide scholarships to students to enable them to become agents of change for their own countries. It’s really a bottom-up and transformational change coming from within the country itself.
The programme builds smaller networks in various localised regions of Myanmar - called ARCHs - Alumni Regional Cluster Hubs - so that there are networking opportunities for the scholars who return. They all really want to be change agents in their communities. It's a chance for them to get together and determine how they can make that happen together. We're there to support, guide and give them resources to do that. We look at providing grants for different proposals that they might have.
The first Change in the Community hub that we created was in Yangon. The scholars that came together decided that they wanted to provide support to low income households in Yangon who would suffer without it during the country’s Covid-19 lockdown. They provided food like rice and chickpeas for the families prior to Thingyan, a water festival, the biggest festival of the year. It really shows the depth of what these students want to do. They want to go the extra mile and make a difference, and providing them with the opportunity to do that is going to be a really rewarding part of the programmes that we are operating.
As people who don’t work in the charity sector, how can we decide who to give our money to and make sure we’re exercising our own privilege correctly?
I think it's really important for someone who doesn't work in the charity sector who wants to give to really look at a subject matter that they're passionate about. Can they get behind that charity's ethos, their vision, what they're trying to achieve? Because things change, programmes change, everything needs to be thought through in a data driven fashion. There are things that are changing quite quickly with programmes. If someone is passionate about a particular subject or topic, they need to ask themselves whether they are interested in giving to that charity as a whole.
At an international level, what do you think is the role of development and aid for emerging economies? What are the cultural aspects we need to be sensitive to, to ensure we are 'doing good' in a productive and non-destructive way?
I really do want to point back to Prospect Burma on this question because I think that the model of providing a catalyst, which in this case is education, which enables individuals or a group of individuals who know the country really well, to generate change, is so sustainable.
If aid agencies can see what's happening on the ground and put together programmes that will really benefit the longer term, that's really the key, isn't it? And education is really only one example of that. But it could be done across a myriad of subjects, even agriculture. How can you make sure that farmers are more resilient, for example, to the effects of climate change? Or when it comes to medicine, how can you make sure that individuals have the infrastructure needed to support hospitals? There are so many examples of resilience and sustainability and I think the aid community has slowly been creating programmes that are associated with longer term effects by looking inwards, and having individuals on the ground inform their vision.