Left Wing Imperialism

Spiked has a great piece written by Nathalie Rothschild on what is really behind the western drive to give the third world "appropriate technology" instead of modern technology. It's time to unwrap ‘Oxfam Unwrapped’

Volunteers from the youth education charity WORLDwrite went to Ghana to make a series of short documentaries investigating life at the receiving end of debt relief and development initiatives. One of their films, Keeping Africa Small, which premieres at the Rich Mix cinema in London next week, challenges ‘Western “feelgood” shopping for goats and hoes’. The film crew found that the friends and strangers they met in Ghana had aspirations that are way out of line with Western development programmes that champion sustainable development and small ways of coping with poverty.

The Ghanaians interviewed in WORLDwrite’s film dream of living in concrete houses instead of mud huts; of owning washing machines instead of having to trek to a bore hole several times a day to fetch water. They want motor-powered fishing boats instead of wooden canoes, which have to be dragged to the shore by hand. They want university education, not lessons in how to use a condom; and they prefer having regular work in factories to the hand-to-mouth existence offered by NGOs’ micro-credit schemes. They do not, as the charity Water Aid argues, think that extracting water by rope pumps from hand-dug wells constitutes ‘appropriate technology’. And they do not want a goat for Christmas, thanks very much.

Yet development organisations working in the areas that WORLDwrite visited don’t seem to offer things that locals actually want. A resident in the village of Anamole received three grass-cutters from Action Aid. No, a grass-cutter is not the latest electrical lawnmower; it’s a cane rat, a rodent that is commonly reared in West Africa and which eats long grass. As one man points out in Keeping Africa Small, this is not a serious development initiative; it is a ‘pet programme’. NGOs are clearly not heeding the Anamole village chief’s call; in the film, chief Nii Ayitey Tetteh Okpe II says ‘people must come up with what they think the best solutions are for themselves so that, at the end of the day, they can take their destiny into their own hands’.

But that would work against the left's new rallying call: Human dignity for me, not for thee.