Speaker 1: I love the idea of foreign aid, don't you? You see, I see it as an opportunity to practice the virtues of compassion and generosity to help others, especially in times of war and conflict. Aid workers do some great work. They build schools, they provide access to clean water, health care, they deliver emergency food aid to people who are suffering. But good intentions aside, on a much, much larger scale, foreign aid has not improved the lives and living conditions of the world's most poorest and vulnerable people. It just hasn't. And this is despite an international aid apparatus that has been set up with thousands of organizations and institutions that distribute billions of dollars of aid to every corner of the world over the past 50 years. You see, the gap between the world's richest and poorest countries is tremendous and it's increasing. In my own work researching war-affected states, I can tell you that aid has not achieved desirable results in places like Angola, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq. And what's worse is that the international aid community keeps making the same mistakes over and over and over again and they keep getting away with it. Oh, it's all too complicated, they'll tell you. But what if it's not? What if giving aid to the world's poorest communities are just stories we tell each other to feel good about ourselves as a nation, but that the infrastructure of third-world aid is set up in such a way that we, living in the richest part of the world, have been benefiting from it all along? I can pull out the facts that indicate that for every dollar of aid rich countries give to poor countries, they receive between seven to ten dollars back through debt repayment, profits, trade, etc. And if you add that up each year, according to the UN Conference on Trade and Development, there is a net transfer of wealth that moves from the poorest countries of the world to the richest countries in the amount of two hundred billion dollars a year. Wow, are poor countries subsidizing the wealth of rich countries? In any case, we have a serious problem and to fix the problem we can't rely on the same structures and paradigms that created it in the first place. What we need is an ethical and a conscientious pause. As a consultant and a researcher on Afghanistan, I am painfully aware that billions of dollars of aid did not reach the majority of Afghans. And this is devastating, considering after the US-led invasion of Afghanistan there was a genuine sense in the international community to help Afghans and Afghan women, especially because they suffered tremendously from decades of war and living under the repressive regime of the Taliban. At around this time, 2002, I was working with an Afghan women's organization based here in Toronto that for many years was supporting local women's groups across Afghanistan. These groups were doing some important work. They were educating girls and providing basic support and services to countless women under the Taliban regime. Well, we approached this network of women. We circulated a needs assessment survey asking them, how can we as a Canadian NGO help you? We received an overwhelming response. They wanted access to basic health care. So I wrote a project proposal for a mobile health clinic with a very modest budget and I went knocking at the door of the Canadian government and they politely refused. They said for us to come back, this time with a brand new proposal, we can double the budget so long as we provided a human rights training program for Afghan women. So that's exactly what we did. We went to Afghanistan and we implemented a training program. And do you know what I noticed when we got there? That our training program was one of several similar training programs offered that week by different agencies. Not a single mobile health clinic in sight. I realized that the priority to offer human rights training over basic health care was determined by us, the aid establishment, and not by Afghans. There's something else that I was amazed at when I was in Kabul. You see, for centuries Afghanistan was known as the hermit kingdom. It was impenetrable to foreign influence and meddling. But it was just as if overnight, after 2001, the country was flooded by foreign nationals from different countries, but especially from Europe and North America. Hundreds of NGO staff, consultants, advisors, construction workers. They, like us, we arrived in the country very easily. And while we were there, I noticed that as soon as we landed in the country, we were pretty much in charge of running the country. Every sector. Health, the private sector, government, civil society, media. You see, we had authority and decision-making power without having to know anything about the local context. We didn't have to learn the local languages of Dari or Pashto. We didn't have to know the political history of Afghanistan, the complexity of the war, the warring factions. We didn't have to know the role of religion, customs, tradition, the ethnic diversity of the land. You see, when the international community entered Afghanistan, Afghanistan was rendered empty. A blank slate. A tabula rasa, if you will. And we, as the foreign experts, poured into this empty land our goals for the country, our visions for the country, our approaches for the country. In effect, we became the architects of their future. We imagined, created, designed, implemented, and supervised all of the major programs in the country. And then, we went ahead and evaluated ourselves. We restructured the entire government from the security sector to the judiciary. We wrote government policies. We wrote curriculum for schools. We wrote national laws, imposed elections, revised the Constitution, and then we went ahead and we planned the economy for the next 12 years. We did it all. We did it all without domestic consent. Oh, it's all too complicated, they'll tell you. But what if it's not? What if the situation was actually reversed? What if here, in this very city, there's an emergency, a natural disaster, our city shuts down, but instead of receiving aid from another country, we get a flood of foreigners that arrive and take over the city. They pass new bylaws, they run our schools, they run our clinics, and they do this all in another language that we would have to learn just to keep up with the changes. It sounds absurd, doesn't it? It would never happen, right? So, if it can't happen here, why does it happen in almost every other part of the world without anyone questioning it? You see, I think that the reason why we cannot help vulnerable communities in the world is because our interventions are more about us, a celebration of who we are and who we think we are. When the West engages with other societies, especially non-Western ones, it's trying to find a glimpse of itself in them. It's looking for Western values, ideals, and principles, and when it can't find them, it sets up an aid relationship that has very little to do with helping others and more to do with disciplining them, reforming them to become more like us—Western, capitalist, liberal, democratic states. But here's the thing. You see, it took Western Europe over 200 years of struggle and violence to achieve state maturity, but Afghanistan? Afghanistan has like a minute or a decade to accomplish the same task. This is the main target for reform. I'd like to introduce you to Suraiya. I met her for the first time in Afghanistan. She was to lead the health module of our training program, and I have to tell you, I admit, I was really nervous. See, I didn't think that she was competent enough to run the training module, because it was technical and it was a difficult training module. I approached Suraiya, and for some reason I started asking her if she knew about icebreakers, because we always begin each training session with icebreakers. So I started to explain icebreakers, what they were, why we use them, and then I drew a blank, because I couldn't come up with a sample icebreaker that she could use in her session. So she interjects, and she politely states, well, I always do icebreakers. I've got several. Maybe I could use one of mine. And I said, oh, all right. So I stood at the back of the room while she conducted a brilliant training session. Suraiya is a medical doctor, an educator, an activist, and so much, much more. And when I got back home, I was really embarrassed by the assumptions that I had of her, and I realized that my assumptions were based on an underlying relationship that exists in the international aid system, this binary of who we are, us, and who they are. You see, we, in our aid, encounter with them, and they could be Africans, Asians, Latin Americans. We are always modern and progressive, and they are in varying degrees of traditional, tribal, backward. We're problem solvers, and they always have just problems. We're technical experts, they have no capacities. We're knowledge creators, and they are passive receivers. We are efficient and productive, and they are always, always lazy and corrupt. I realized that the entry point that we have to almost all of the societies that live in the majority world are based on what these countries lack, what is absent, what doesn't work, what needs to change, what needs to be reformed. When was the last time that you read something interesting or positive or inspiring from countries like Pakistan, Yemen, Afghanistan? I realized that if an aid relationship is based on one party that fundamentally believes that they are always better than others, morally, culturally, politically, intellectually, then how could anything good emerge and be sustained by such an unequal and pejorative relationship? So if we could begin anew, a fresh start, give aid a tabula rasa, I would think that we should begin by shifting the way that we perceive and construct third world societies and states, understanding them by how they define themselves, not by our labels about them. To build aid relations based on their identified strengths and capacities, not our assessments of their failures and weaknesses. You see, if you were to ask Soraya how she would describe herself, she wouldn't say, I'm oppressed and subordinated, please rescue me. She would say, I'm resilient, I'm a survivor, I'm hopeful, I'm determined, I'm pious, I respect the traditional values of my country, and I'm a fighter. I fight against oppression and injustice wherever I will find it. Soraya is full of complexities, as is her country. Maybe we should do a lot less. Perhaps if the Western aid establishment stepped back and allowed other countries and societies to do more, to imagine and to create their futures based on their own terms, their own cultural, political trajectories. What this would entail is that the aid apparatus embraces the politics of pluralism, diversity, and multivocality. This means opening the table up and enabling and appreciating and validating different and even contending points of view, perspectives, and worldviews. You see, pluralism opens the door to mutual learning, sharing, and the transformation of both ends of the aid relationship. I wanted to leave you with a simple statement that I came across several years ago that transformed me. It had a profound impact on me, and this very simple statement is echoed by the world's indigenous traditions, and it reads, to do good work in the world, you must first be good. I was intrigued by the statement, and I realized that what it meant was that what is manifested in the world by our efforts is a reflection of who we are as individuals, as a society, as a civilization. Thank you. you