Logos are no substitute for accountability
Justine Greening in Za’atari
When Britain’s Secretary of International Development Justine Greening visited the Za’atari refugee camp in Jordan last September she tweeted that she was looking at how British aid is helping the 80,000 refugees there. I trust the many Union Jack posters around the camp – underscored with the explanation ‘UK aid from the British people’ – provided her with visual confirmation of her country’s contribution to the relief effort.
I don’t mean to denigrate the generosity of Britain’s aid programme. It is a model for others to follow. But the Za’atari example does pose a broader question: Would the humanitarian rose smell as sweet if it did not have donor flags and agency logos plastered all over it? To my mind, the ubiquity of this visual ephemera distracts from the more important focus on aid effectiveness and accountability to the people that relief is supposed to serve.
Trumpeting your country or your agency’s contribution has been going on for so long that logos and other attention grabbers are now an unquestioned part of the visual landscape of every humanitarian emergency.
Logos can, of course, save lives. A great example is the International Red Cross’ rondel that provides something of a shield in dangerous places thanks to the agency’s track record of neutrality and even-handedness. The UN’s famous emblem and light blue livery used to offer some measure of safety but, as we saw in this week’s attack on the food convoy in Homs, Syria, its protective value is no longer what it was. The salutary incident in Homs is unsettling but in many places prominent identifiers of relief workers, their vehicles and facilities still can mean the difference between life and death.
Are other drivers of logolization equally compelling? Fund-givers and fundraisers are in large part responsible for the explosion of flag-waving, virtual and real. The European Commission, for example, demands that all its grantees respect strict protocols that draw prominent attention to European largesse. Other donors follow similar policies, with bags of food, tents and assorted relief items covered in their logos with strap lines that underline the generosity of the people of the United States, Japan, China, the UK, the EU, and so on.
I guess it is human nature to hoist your standard to indicate ownership, assert domination or suggest some visceral sense of belonging. In the context of international aid, the goal is mainly to draw attention to presence or beneficence. (Most claims are made in English which begs the question as to who is the audience for this cacophony of messaging). Whatever the motivation, there is little evidence that flags and logos do much to encourage good humanitarian donorship or better programming.
Perhaps there is a correlation between the number of times your logo appears in the media and the amount of money you raise or can justify giving. If there is a study to prove it, I’ve not seen it. But the assumption that it does so continues to drive big budgets dedicated to visibility items affixed to everything from tents, vehicles, and water towers to caps, T-shirts and even penknives. No surface, it seems, can escape the inevitable logo.
While the benefits (beyond the security dimension) are not proven, the negatives are worth underlining. Endlessly drawing attention to your particular contribution or your presence says nothing about the difference you make. Furthermore, it flies in the face of the collective effort that should underpin humanitarian endeavour. More important it tends to exacerbate competition and rivalry between aid actors as they vie to proclaim their particular effort rather than their common purpose. I am told by some aid workers that the branded clothing most of them now wear has a pernicious influence on the way they interact and socialize with each other, with birds of a feather flocking together.
More important than determining who goes to which party is that donor insistence on having logos or flags prominently displayed can be just a step away from insisting on the kind of aid a donor will provide – whether it is needed or not. For instance, in Jordan several Gulf states push to fund “model” camps and other facilities for Syrian refugees to act as national flag carriers even if the aid does not meet priority needs.
The biggest negative of logolization to my mind is that it reinforces the unequal power relations between benefactors and beneficiaries. There’s a stark contrast between the constantly reaffirmed identity of the aid providers and the anonymity of the beneficiaries.
What to do? I propose a multilateral moratorium. Let’s declare that refugee camps and displaced persons shelters be logo-free zones. Instead of visual identity, let us pay more attention to effectiveness and impact. It is time to focus on outcomes for the people on the receiving end of aid rather than the provenance of inputs from donors and agencies. If Justine Greening leads the way, perhaps others will follow.
