Working in International Development and Humanitarian Assistance

A Career Guide

Maia Gedde

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781134613342
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Peace & Global Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This is an indispensable career guide for everyone wanting to work in or already working in the international development and humanitarian emergencies sector. It provides a general introduction and insight into the sector, for those exploring it as a potential career, and offers students up-to-date advice when choosing a course, whether it's at undergraduate or postgraduate level. Should they study International Development, or will Public Health, Environmental studies or Media get them closer to where they want to get? This book offers graduates or career changers who are new to the sector an understanding of what skills and experience will make them stand out above the competition and get that job. It enables those already working in the sector to gain a long term view of where they want to go and how they might structure their professional development to gain the skills and competencies necessary to get their career on to an upward trajectory.

This book draws heavily on insiders' advice, case studies and top tips, to provide the reader with various perspectives and insights. How do you become a country director for an international NGO? How can one become a gender mainstreaming expert? What can you do to get in to consultancy? Career trajectories, Career clinics Q&A boxes and the personal planner in the appendix will help you get to where you want to go.

It also gives a detailed account of the myriad of careers and specialism available within the sector and methodologically describes the pros and cons of each option. So if you are not sure where you want to go with your career, you will be after you have read this book. Whether it's Programme Management, becoming an Environmental Advisor, or an Acadmic this book will give you an insight into what the job entails and how you can get in to it. It will be an invaluable guide to all readers, irrespective of their country of origin, who are interested in the sector.

PART 1

The sector

This first section will help to give you an understanding of what working in the sector involves, where you could work, and who the major employers are. It helps to give those new to the sector some perspective of the field and what opportunities may exist for you within it.

• Chapter 1: Development and humanitarian assistance provides a brief introduction to these two fields, touches on some of the main discourses and historical defining events, and explores the interconnection between them.

• Chapter 2: Is it for you? explores some of the aspects that most often attract people to the sector, and addresses some of the common concerns.

• Chapter 3: Who could you work for? The employers within the field of development and humanitarian assistance are broad; this chapter breaks down the leading organisations into the major sub-sectors.

• Chapter 4: Where could you work? Whether based in a donor or recipient country, jobs primarily follow the aid channels. This chapter helps you to understand where these are concentrated.

PLATE 1 Catholic Relief Services’ shelter and settlement technical advisor Seki Hirano holding a focus group discussion with Tuareg refugees on the border of Mali and Niger in 2012.

Source: CRS/Seki Hirano

1

DEVELOPMENT AND HUMANITARIAN ASSISTANCE

If you are new to the world of development and humanitarian assistance you probably have many questions. Before embarking on the journey this book will take you through – career opportunities – you need first to understand the basics of the sectors themselves. What actually is development? What is its goal? What is the difference between working in a development and a humanitarian crisis? What might you be more suited to?

This short chapter cannot cover all these issues in detail but aims to give you a very brief introduction to these two very broad fields of work and highlights some of the key issues and trends within them. Appendix 1 offers a reading list of books and resources that can help you to take this journey further.

What is development?

A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It’s where the rich use public transportation.

Gustavo Petro, Mayor of Bogotá

Development is a complex issue, not always easy to define and thus so difficult to achieve. A principal focus of development is poverty reduction. In an attempt to help gauge the extent of poverty around the world, the World Bank (WB) developed the concept of absolute poverty in the 1990s and the international poverty line was anchored at $1.08 dollars per day. This was the minimum income needed to meet a person’s basic needs such as food, clothing and shelter by the standards of the world’s poorest countries. It is typically measured with respect to a household’s average income, not the individual. Thus, the poorest of the poor – the target for many development programmes – are those who subsist on less than $1 per day. In 2008 this line was revised to $1.25 dollars a day¹ and moderate poverty as less than $2 a day.

Many development programmes aim, either directly or indirectly, to reduce extreme poverty. But the concept of absolute poverty is troublesome as it fails to meet broader quality-of-life issues or address the levels of inequality in society. These criticisms led to the concept of relative poverty, which defines poverty in relation to the economic status of other members of the society: people are poor if they fall below prevailing standards of living in a given societal context. By this definition we find a large number of poor people in the so-called developed countries.

Both these concepts are, however, largely concerned with income and consumption but poverty can be multidimensional in nature. Social exclusion and lack of access to basic human rights, such as health, shelter, education and sanitation – for whatever reason – are also an issue. Infrastructure and access to such services is also important.

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) uses a wide definition of development: to them, it is ‘to lead long and healthy lives, to be knowledgeable, to have access to the resources needed for a decent standard of living and to be able to participate in the life of the community’. For others, development is the process of finding creative solutions to chronic problems of hunger, poverty, disease, joblessness and powerlessness (Monterey Institute of International Studies).

The Human Development Index (HDI) is used as a measurement to capture social and economic development by combining indicators of life expectancy, educational attainment and income into a composite human development index. The HDI was first produced in 1990 by the Pakistani economist Mahbub ul Haq and the Indian economist Amartya Sen, and published by the United Nations Development Programme. It started as a single statistic, whereas now it can be disaggregated by indicator. In 2010, the Inequality-adjusted HDI (IHDI) was introduced. In 2012 the country with the highest HDI rank was Norway, and the one with the lowest was Niger.

Grand ambitions, realities and the future of development

Global poverty continues to be a tremendous problem today and no less striking than it was immediately after the Second World War era. Some of the key issues have changed, but as progress is made in one area, new challenges emerge in another. Extreme poverty still affects one in six people worldwide.² One criticism is often made that development aid is not impartial, and there are often political agendas hidden behind poverty reduction.

Development projects thus happen in complex and multifaceted situations, where narrow approaches do not work. The challenge is that often development projects are designed with a shallow understanding of the broad and complex contexts in which projects exist. Poverty reduction is not a linear path, and cannot be achieved by climbing up the rungs of a ladder. We have learned that churning out volumes of plans and programmes to accomplish ambitious targets in just three years does not work. We also need to recognise that the development of ‘rich’ countries happened under very different circumstances to what ‘poor’ countries currently face, so neither the process nor the end product can nor should serve as a model. Creative, innovative, multifaceted solutions are needed.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF DEVELOPMENT

The concept of development has its origins in the industrialization of the nineteenth century, when societies were being reshaped by economic and political changes. But it was only after the end of the Second World War (1939–1945) that the idea of development resurfaced with the meaning we use today. International institutions such as the United Nations (UN), the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) were created to assist Europe in its economic recovery from the war. While Europe rebuilt itself and Europe’s colonies started on a path towards independence, the US embraced its new position of global leader and drafted a new foreign policy for the advancement of less economically developed areas. This was a global movement for peace and reconstruction and the start of globalisation.

As prevailing theories on the best way to do development changed, as did international priorities, distinct development decades emerged. A few characteristics of these are:

• 1960s: As post-war Europe recovered, they started to see themselves as part of a movement for change and ‘progress’, pooling their resources to assist the poor. In 1963 US President Kennedy inaugurated the PeaceCorps scheme to promote social and economic development. African nations had or would imminently gain independence. But the approach adopted was top-down and paternalistic. As developing countries took centre stage in the majority at the UN, it was a decade full of optimism and the 1961 UN plenary meeting declared it the United Nations Development Decade (the first of many). But visionary leaders such as Patrice Lumumba in Zaire (now DRC) faced a lot of meddling from the former colonial powers when these leaders did not serve their interests. A pattern of military coups also started to define African politics. At the same time, in the east, the Asian Tigers of Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan started their industrialisation and maintained rapid growth rates that by the end of the century placed them in a high income country status.

• 1970s: The landmark 1974 Sixth Special Session of the United Nations General Assembly called for a New International Economic Order to eliminate the unjust trading patterns inherited from colonialism. But at the height of the cold war, the optimism from the 1960s faded when the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) oil price was hiked in the mid 1970s, plunging the world into a recession. Oil-exporting countries had large amounts of extra money which Western banks used to grant huge loans on very relaxed terms to Third World countries, burdening these countries with impossible repayment rates for decades to come. Donors also engaged in large-scale development projects mostly ill-fitted to the local contexts, resulting in failures: these White Elephants of development occurred where misallocation of investment with negative social surplus often benefited local politicians. Import substitution industrialisation was also advocated.

• 1980s. Reagan’s trickle-down economics favoured the wealthy and high-income earners and in the 1980s loans were no longer offered as freely as in the 1970s. Following the neoliberalism ideology spearheaded by the ‘Washington Consensus’ institutions – The World Bank and IMF – loans were now provided on ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of career profiles
• Foreword
• Who is this book for?
• Structure of the book
• Note on terminology
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part 1 The sector
• Part 2 Breaking into the sector
• Part 3 Moving up in the sectors
• Part 4 Areas of speciality
• Appendix 1 Reading lists
• Appendix 2 Continuous professional development
• Appendix 3 Humanitarian competencies
• Index