Why don't aid agencies like to hire local talent? | Hacker News Reader

Why don't aid agencies like to hire local talent?

karmacolonialism.org

30 pointsfilleduchaos15 comments

Development agencies actually hire lots of local people. for USAID/State Department, they're called FSNs, and its pretty easy to find stories about them and the work that they do. According to one Document I found around 55k/75k state department employees were Foreign Nationals (aka local hires). [1] Foreign nationals don't run these agencies because these agencies are responsible to their respective governments and have missions and goals that extend beyond simple development. This post seems incredibly uninformed given that the extent of their research seems to be looking at the citation of the photographs/videos.

[1] https://diplopundit.net/2017/05/08/statedeptusaid-staffing-c...

> Development agencies actually hire lots of local people.

"Aid agencies typically hire local staff only for low- and mid-level positions. That’s an important story, but a different one."

- from TFA

> In the case of photography, there’s simply no good excuse. Every country has photographers able to produce excellent work… and they’ll charge less than a globe-trotting Westerner. Why does the aid industry give so many assignments to Westerners?

I wager that the author doesn't know very much about professional photography.

Is your knowledge of professional photography that there are no professional photographers in non-Western countries?

Is your knowledge of 4 year creative professional trade schools that they are prevalent and of reliably high quality in non-western countries?

In the last decade I've hired about a dozen graphic design, media, and photography freelancers, and it's extremely difficult to build trust with a new hire without having prior experience with that person. What "trust" is to me is not the ability to make great things, but the inability to make bad things. The only way I can know that a photographer has a >98% success rate on projects is if I do 50 projects with them and only one is a catastrophic failure. If I hired one remote photographer for each job, I'd have to brief them for 1-3 days on the brand, my standards, my target audience, familiarity prior media created for the brand, etc. and they still will have a high chance of their work being unusable to me. Or I could just use my favorite photographer/designer for the job and not worry about training or the risk of their work being a miss. I suppose the same exact logic makes sense for aid agencies.

> I suppose the same exact logic makes sense for aid agencies.

Are you/do you run a non-profit organisation that operates in a foreign country?

Nope. But working with designers/photographers will be a similar experience regardless of what organization you are.

I wouldn't have thought it necessary to explain how what's acceptable for a local, profit-focused business differs from what's acceptable for an international NGO, a military organization or even a multinational corporation, but here we are.

Do freelancers magically become 100% reliable and trustworthy when they work with certain organizations? No, they behave virtually the same regardless of who they're working for.

I have access to a lot of UN staffers, mostly high ranked (UNDP). Answer is: corruption. Basically UNDPs role is to give away money in most effective way. Problem is that most countries where funds can be distributed to aid the most have some insane levels of corruption. Hiring folks outside of the system is mostly to prevent just giving money to cronies of local appointees. This is a giant tradeoff, because locals would know how to improve situation the best, but folks who have access to UN staff is most likely to be very corrupt.

I think a large motivation is that the media they create at these locations are vital to the organizations survival. It’s not meant to accurately capture the ground experience, and certainly not meant to improve the local economy. It’s used for fundraising.

Yup. The point of the photographer is to showcase whatever they are doing for consumption by 1st world audiences. A first world photographer is going to have a better idea of what those audiences want to see so that's the kind they hire. The Australian, or whatever, has a leg up on the locals long before you even consider the other potential biases.

Yep, charity has an enormous gap between "people who pay" and "people who use the product" so market forces provide little to no accountability compared to typical businesses. Strategies like "spend first on advertising, second on administration, third on the actual task" are viable and successful to an even greater degree than one is accustomed to in business.

Why Bill de Blasio does not allow homeless people to camp in Gracie Hall?

Why Sadiq Khan does not take TFL to the office?

Why Barack Obama bought a mansion in posh Martha's Vineyard?

Why Bill Gates only flies private jets?

I'm sure we all can keep the list going.

Oh, how easy it is to love all the people in the world when you can afford to never mingle with them.

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