The Dangers of Development-Talk: “Non-Emergency Emergencies”

Hearing that “waiting to die” was the default treatment prescribed for most severely malnourished children in Nepal and knowing that 99% of these children don’t have a system designed for them broke my heart. Hearing that this “wasn’t an emergency” broke my patience and my belief that our development frameworks and rules are at all rooted in the concepts of social justice.

If 99% of all severely malnourished children in a country don’t have any treatment, how is that not an emergency?

Apparently this situation is not “bad enough” for some, and if we can’t prove that this is an “emergency” in the eyes of donors, the bad news is that this “non-emergency” will continue, because a big-time donors are only used to supporting CMAM (Community-based Management of Acute Malnutrition, as discussed in my last blog) in the “emergency context.” Traditional donors only fund for emergency situations and promoting this program in the “development context” instead of “emergency context” takes donors out of their traditional framework and comfort zone.

So here is a classic case of the “dangers of development talk.” Several of Nepal’s nutrition levels surpass the emergency cutoffs set by the WHO, yet it’s not being classified as an emergency because there hasn’t been a sudden, drastic deterioration of the nutrition situation in recent years. The argument seems to be that “because Nepal has always been in an emergency, we cannot qualify it as an emergency” --which I hope seems senselessly circular and completely irrational to more than just me.

This certainly lit an indignant fire under me. Now I understand why Paul Farmer refers to some of these international players as “TBMEs” or Transnational Bureaucrats Managing Inequality. But my indignant fire is likely to extinguish hopes of attracting donors funds for this program, as I’m sure no donors like to be told that “they don’t care about malnourished kids enough.”

So what would you do? We are a small player trying to make a big impact in shaping the future of Nepal’s nutrition program. Knowing what you know about the situation, if you were placed in a boardroom with donors who may or may not fund the scaling up of a community-based nutrition program, what tools, methods, and strategies would you use to convince them this is vitally important and worth their money?

Please share your ideas because it looks as if this theoretical situation will become real in the very near future. The Head Nutrition Officer at the Child Health Division of the Government has asked me to work with UNICEF to bring all the key players together for a meeting as soon as possible. Your thoughts and advice are much appreciated.

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