Amateurs without Borders

The Aspirations and Limits of Global Compassion

Allison Schnable

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780520300941
• eBook ISBN: 9780520972124
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Amateurs without Borders examines the rise of new actors in the international development world: volunteer-driven grassroots international nongovernmental organizations. These small aid organizations, now ten thousand strong, sidestep the world of professionalized development aid by launching projects built around personal relationships and the skills of volunteers. This book draws on fieldwork in the United States and Africa, web data, and IRS records to offer the first large-scale systematic study of these groups. Amateurs without Borders investigates the aspirations and limits of personal compassion on a global scale.

1 Origin Stories

Before we can make sense of how grassroots INGOs are remaking development aid, we need to understand how these organizations start. This chapter tells five groups’ origin stories. These organizations were established between 2000 and 2010 by Americans with different sorts of links to Africa—some the loose ties of previous volunteer work, but some the more intimate bonds of migration or marriage. The founder of the first group I describe was born in Tanzania and migrated to the United States in his twenties; in his thirties, he launched a grassroots INGO to aid his native village. A second group was started by an American who had spent several childhood years in West Africa but went on to start an organization in Rwanda. Three of the groups were started by Americans who had done short-term volunteer work in Africa, sometimes in countries other than those where they launched their grassroots INGO. We see that cooperation among family members is a common feature of these organizations and that religion often plays roles in motivating or facilitating these organizations’ births—a theme I develop further in chapter 7.

If the ability to be a short-term volunteer is one of the novelties of working with a grassroots INGO—nineteenth-century missionaries were understood to have committed for the remainder of their lives—another novelty is the ability to do aid work part-time. Three of the organizations were launched as part-time ventures, and the leaders of the remaining two, Indego Africa and For Kenya’s Tomorrow, scaled back to part-time involvement within several years of founding. Recent scholarship on full-time aid workers has shown that even professional aid workers do not have tidy identities that separate their work from the rest of their lives; they are constantly working to integrate their personal sense of self into new surroundings and jobs that are physically demanding and emotionally exhausting.¹ But as these vignettes show, the task is different for the founders of grassroots INGOs. These individuals are building the identity of “aid worker” around their other identities and learning what it means to do development work in the context of their families or within religious or professional networks. The leaders of these groups have kept one foot in the world of their American careers and personal lives, and the other in the world of their African friendships and projects.

The groups’ origin stories given below highlight the diversity of these worlds. Table 1 gives a few basic details of each group’s operation.

TABLE 1. Case Study Organizations

Activate Tanzania

Until Activate Tanzania started work in 2004, you could count on your fingers the number of people from Muyinga who had gone to secondary school.² One of those was Erasto, who then became the first from the village to attend college in the United States. As a student at a Lutheran liberal arts college, he met a fellow student named Kate, from Minnesota, who was studying anthropology and had traveled to Cameroon and Nepal. They returned to her hometown and married, and soon Erasto found a job in software engineering. Before long, Kate and Erasto welcomed two sons. During these years Erasto occasionally returned to Tanzania and often sent cash to support his extended family there. Erasto and Kate quickly found support in Minnesota when they first broached the idea of opening a secondary school in his home village.

One of the legacies of German colonial rule in Tanzania was the presence of Lutheran churches, which throughout the twentieth century grew with support from European and American missionaries. It was through these relationships that Erasto had won a scholarship to study in the United States, and these Lutheran ties also linked St. Paul, Minnesota, to Erasto’s home region of Tanzania through a sister-church relationship that began in the early 1990s. Through friends, Erasto was introduced to a Lutheran pastor who had traveled several times to Tanzania; they soon discovered that the pastor had not only visited Erasto’s village, but had also met his mother.

These religious ties notwithstanding, the objective of Activate Tanzania from the beginning was secular and specific: to open a private secondary school in Muyinga. As an immigrant who had made good, Erasto had for many years been seen as a patron of his village, and ultimately, he wanted to do something other than give ad hoc donations in response to individual requests. Students in Tanzania are admitted to secondary school on the basis of competitive examinations and even in public schools must pay fees. For Erasto, being admitted to secondary school was the turning point in life, and he believed that better access to education would do more good for the village than anything else he could contribute.

Starting in 2004, Erasto and Kate approached their friends, colleagues, fellow church members, and her large extended family for donations to build the school. Erasto’s boyhood friend, still living in Tanzania, brokered a deal with the village leadership: the school would take possession of several empty buildings and a tract of land owned by the village government, and in exchange the school would provide ten full-tuition scholarships each year for village children. Within about a year, Erasto and Kate had raised $80,000. Renovation on the buildings began—with the money being wired through the Saint Paul Lutheran Synod, since Erasto and Kate had not yet set up a 501(c)3—and the Muyinga Secondary School opened for its first students in 2006.

Back in Minnesota, the school project had attracted particular interest from working and retired teachers. Consensus emerged among Erasto, Kate, and the newly formed board that the Muyinga school should exceed typical Tanzanian standards of education. While adhering to requirements of the Tanzanian national curriculum, the school should instill the American educational values of creativity and problem solving. The board believed the school would need good facilities like a library and science lab if students were to do more than learn by rote; in addition, they would need to lure good teachers with competitive salaries. Erasto played the middle man, having final say on issues of spending and personnel in Tanzania, trying to relay the American board’s vision to Tanzanian school leadership while also sensitizing Americans to long-held Tanzanian ways of doing things.

Board members and other supporters made trips to visit the school roughly every other year beginning in 2006. While visiting, they assisted in English classes and offered in-service training to the Muyinga teachers. Three recent US college graduates have now served as volunteer teachers for a semester or more at the school. The school has posted strong test scores on the national exam and has been able to attract highly qualified teachers who had taught in other private schools in Tanzania. Now that the school has two hundred students and about two dozen employees, Activate Tanzania has to bear all of the challenges of operating a selective private school (teacher complaints about salary and living space; parents late on their tuition payments) while operating a 501(c)3 that can continue to appeal to volunteers and donors to raise the tens of thousands of dollars the school requires in excess of tuition receipts to stay open each year. These responsibilities obligate Erasto to spend late-night hours on the phone to Tanzania several days a week. He jokes that he is “a programmer by day but teacher by night.”

For Kenya’s Tomorrow

For Kenya’s Tomorrow is the product of the extraordinary energy of a young Pentecostal woman from rural Michigan. After growing up in a church that supported several missionaries and taking a religious volunteer trip herself to Malawi as a fifteen-year-old, Natalie was living in Florida, in a young marriage that was dissolving, and wondering if she could “get Africa out of [her] heart.” An acquaintance at her church in Florida gave her the name of a man working with a church-based community organization in the Nairobi slum of Kawangare, and in 2008 Natalie flew to Kenya to see what she could do there. Natalie’s previous volunteer work in Malawi had given her the idea to work with AIDS orphans or street children, but on this trip, she had a visceral reaction to the sanitation conditions in the slum and decided that she would focus her work there. She explained this shift in focus as divine intervention:

I just had this vision flash before my eyes of just a place that didn’t exist at the current time. It was, you know, pure streams where sewage was running and where there was trash everywhere. . . . And so, when I got that vision, it literally like slapped me on the back of the head because I had never, never envisioned doing anything like that. My heart was really to be with AIDS orphans, and street children, and all that. And so, since obviously my relationship with God plays into this a lot, I really just started seeking God and said, “What does this look like to you? Where did this come from? Because I don’t know what to do with it.” And then I just really got some clarity with addressing the sanitation issues and what that looked like with toilets and with new shower rooms and recycling centers, and addressing water issues and all of that. And then I just started kind of heading in that direction.

Having no professional training in development work generally or sanitation specifically (she had left college before completing a degree), Natalie returned to the United States and began her research at a Barnes and Noble bookstore and on the internet. In the same period, she recruited several peers to serve on the organization’s board of directors: her sister, two childhood friends (one who worked at a bank, another with a degree in engineering), and two friends from her Florida church. To raise money, Natalie sent out a letter to friends and family explaining her project and asking for support. This sort of letter was not unusual among her circle of acquaintances—she had sent out a similar letter in the past, asking for financial support for her religious mission trip, and her family regularly made small contributions to others making similar requests. She gave a speech at the Michigan church she had attended as a girl, which her parents still attended, and the congregation agreed to add her to its roster of sponsored missionaries and make regular contributions to her work.

Natalie continued to travel to Kenya for a few months a year, seeking out partners for her sanitation projects. She made a crucial connection with Ruth, a Kenyan pastor who had founded a Pentecostal church in Kawangare that drew a few dozen worshippers each Sunday. Ruth was also the head of a community-based organization (CBO). This was crucial for Natalie’s entrée into the community and for meeting Kenya’s legal requirement that foreign NGOs partner with a local CBO. The other important consequence was that Natalie eventually came to date Ruth’s son, David, a musician. Natalie and David married in 2011. Ruth and David’s family and close friends became the trusted network upon which Natalie built the organization’s work in Nairobi, while her own family and close friends provided financial and administrative support in the United States.

The sanitation projects moved slowly. Eager to see some tangible results, Natalie used a $10,000 donation to set up a workshop where a handful of Kawangare women could make beaded jewelry. This idea was modeled loosely on what Natalie had seen at fair trade shops in the United States, in particular, a Kenyan company called Kazuri Beads. Natalie took on the tasks of purchasing the beads, creating the designs and teaching them to the workers, and taking the bracelets back to the United States for sale. There was no grand scheme for the sale of these bracelets; they sold a few at a time to friends, and Natalie and some of the board members approached shops that they knew of and asked if they would carry them.

While the women’s craft shop began operations and Natalie continued research on sanitation projects, she regularly began accepting “mission teams,” or groups of short-term volunteers, from her Michigan church. These groups would participate in church services and Bible studies with Ruth’s congregation and offer special prayer meetings in Kawangare; they also volunteered with the Saturday meals provided for children at Ruth’s church. Though these teams’ work was not connected intimately to the development projects that Natalie envisioned for For Kenya’s Tomorrow (FKT), Natalie encouraged the trips because travelers often became committed supporters of the organization.

In 2012, FKT built its first two biogas toilets in Kawangare. The women’s workshop was producing a small quantity of jewelry that was sold in the United States, and FKT paid for and staffed a “feeding,” or lunch and playtime session, each Saturday at Ruth’s church. Natalie and David, by then parents of a baby girl, worked full-time for FKT and split the year between their families’ homes in Nairobi and Michigan. Much of the day-to-day work in Kenya was carried out by Martin, a childhood friend of David’s. FKT is pursuing a small grant from the Rotary Club, but continues to rely on a handful of Pentecostal congregations in the United States and the individual donations of family and friends for its operating funds.

Wellsprings of Hope

Founded by a self-described Baptist “cowboy-pastor,” Wellsprings of Hope is a Christian organization operated in Uganda by a group of five pastors and in the United States by a cadre of volunteers drawn from Baptist, Methodist, and nondenominational evangelical churches in suburban San Antonio. Shared religious faith is at the heart of the organization. The partnership began when Pastor Bill Smith visited Uganda with a delegation of Baptist preachers, and the initial goal was to provide financial support for the “ministry” of five Ugandan pastors that he met there. Influenced by larger religious ministries in Uganda that were catering to earthly needs, the five pastors shared with Bill their ambitions that extended beyond preaching the gospel: schools, clinics, youth programs. Bill’s US congregation agreed to send money, and soon the volunteers followed. By 2006, teams of volunteers from Bill’s congregation and from the town’s United Methodist Church were coming to Uganda for multiweek stints.

Uganda has been heavily evangelized in the last three decades, particularly by conservative Protestant groups, but the town where Wellsprings of Hope is based maintains a slight Muslim majority. Surprise at the harmonious relationships between Christian and Muslim Ugandans was a recurring note in my conversations with the Texas volunteers. With the steady financial contributions of the Texans, Wellsprings of Hope now operates two elementary schools, a clinic, men’s and women’s religious ministries (which include Bible teaching and vocational training), and a farm. The five pastors serve as directors for all these programs and oversee the nurse who runs the clinic and the headmasters of both schools. This is a source of some tension, because in Uganda nurse and school headmaster are prestige positions, and the pastors have less education than these professionals.

Most of the American board members of Wellsprings are retirees from long careers in related fields—nursing, teaching, accounting, and construction—and as a result they have strong ideas about how the organization should operate in Uganda. These ideas are borne out in what the board members believe should be the material standards in the clinic and schools and priorities in how money should be spent. But differences in opinion between the American and Ugandan leadership are smoothed by the mutual good feelings engendered by the frequent (yearly or twice-yearly) visits of many of the board members to Uganda, and by what both Ugandans and Texans explain as a common purpose that emerges from their shared faith. Wellsprings’ most consistent source of revenue is monthly child sponsorships. Wellsprings introduced this model after seeing it gainfully used by Africa Renewal Ministries, another evangelical NGO based in San Antonio and operating in Uganda. American sponsors contribute $35 to $50 a month, with the bulk of that providing for school fees and uniforms, and the rest kept in a reserve fund to pay for medical expenses or other family difficulties. The approximately 150 child sponsorships organized by Wellsprings are one of the major channels through which some relationship is forged between Ugandans and Americans. Sponsored children are required to write letters to their sponsors at least twice a year, and the younger students (for whom English is a second or third language) do so with the help of a teacher or social worker. American sponsors receive a photograph of their sponsored child every year, and in some cases, copies of the students’ school report cards. The American coordinator of the sponsorships, Frances, explains, “[I send] any piece of information I can get because I want the sponsors to know their kids as individuals, not just a name. I want them to know what their struggles are and whether they’re doing well in school or not, and what they need to be praying for, for that child.” The sponsorship program is therefore not just a reliable source of revenue for the organization, but also a key site where ideas of Ugandans are shaped and transmitted by the organization to American supporters.

These personal relationships and shared religious beliefs are what Wellsprings of Hope’s supporters value most in the organization and see as the qualities that distinguish it from other aid organizations. But as the organization approaches two hundred sponsored children and seventy-five Ugandans on the payroll—from the pastors down to the janitor of the clinic—the financial and organizational demands of the organization are prodding it toward increased formalization. The Ugandan pastors have been trained to keep financial spreadsheets and to submit them each month to the US treasu...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Origin Stories
• 2 Who, What, Where? The Projects of Grassroots International NGOs
• 3 Amateurs without Borders: A Role for Everyday Citizens in Development Aid
• 4 Provide and Transform: Grassroots INGOs’ Models of Aid
• 5 Resources, Relationships, and Accountability
• 6 Seen It with Their Own Eyes: Grassroots INGOs’ Discourse
• 7 Networks, Frames, Modes of Action: Roles for Religion
• Conclusion
• Appendix 1: Note on Methods
• Appendix 2: Codes Used in Content Analysis
• Appendix 3: Grassroots International NGOs in Website Sample
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index