Humanitarian Marketing's Dangerous Race to the Bottom

The world's worst humanitarian crisis? (photo credit: New York Times)

Somalia is the world's worst humanitarian crisis, according to a warning issued by Oxfam this week. The statement prompted a Time article "Somalia's Crisis: Not Piracy, but Its People's Plight" that is now making it's way around Twitter. The designation of "worst," while good for flashy magazine headlines and NGO press releases, is part of a dangerous race to the bottom in the marketing of global humanitarian plight that has inadvertently sapped political relevance.

The first time I went to Uganda was in August 2005, a little less than a year after then head of UN humanitarian affairs Jan Egelend called it the "biggest neglected humanitarian crisis" in the world. As one of my earliest up close interactions with the global humanitarian system, it was fascinating and strange to see how international nongovernmental organizations wielded that designation like a trophy or talisman. As I researched international aid in northern Uganda's internal displacement camps, versions of Egelend's quote came up more often than just about any other statistic or sound byte.

This is understandable and deeply human. Superlatives exist in language to help us differentiate magnitude, excellence and severity. And in a world in which so many global challenges vie for media attention and donor dollars, it is understandable that the aid community grabs onto external forces that validates the atrocity of the particular injustice they seek to address and that can lead new allies and stakeholders in their direction.

But I have come to believe that this clinging to designations of superlative horror is the one of the most corrosive and dangerous forces in marketing and media around humanitarian crises. I believe that by propagating these sort of statements, aid agencies have accidentally become complicit in inspiring apathy in the broader public.

Superlatives like "worst," and "most neglected" put the emphasis of our attention not on the horror of injustice, but on the singularity of a particular instance of injustice. While this may prove a temporarily galvanizing force, what it leads to is a shortness of attention and a race of resources to the next new worst crisis. Aid worker after aid worker in Uganda in 2005 talked about having been stationed in one location, getting half way through a project, and then having resources immediately vacate as some new crisis (the big disruptive force then was the Tsunami) grabs more attention.

Now it's a fair question to ask how much of this problem is the endless cable news media cycle vs. the aid agencies themselves. It's also at least reasonable (if I think wrong) to ponder whether humanitarian aid policy should be driven by trying to ease the worst of the worst situations. But I still believe that the quickness with which we the social change community latch on to superlatives is a fundamental problem. It is, to be ironic, perhaps the "greatest" branding and marketing challenge we face.