Hi Georgia

I  don't have personal experience of aid agencies  doing things that  cause
harm,  but I  have friends who do have this experience.  As it's not in the
breastfeeding field hope it's OK to write a few words,  which I hope will
show problems that can happen with   well meaning but  difficult to
sustain in the circumstances aid.  Also I'm glad to say that I don't know 
which
agencies provided the aid
A soil scientist friend  showed us pictures of  the aftermath of some 
Western
aid in a part of Africa he'd worked in.  Terracing had been introduced to
the area  to  try and improve  farming there.  It had worked, for a while,
the  agency had moved on,  but it turned out that the hillsides were
actually underlaid by a material which  was v strong when left alone, but
once the water started cutting into the  hillside,  the  crystalline
structure of the subsoil meant that  it just crumbled like a sugar lump,
and a ravine developed down the side of the  hill,  so people had to walk a
really  long way round to get to the school, the market,     they had to
abandon the  terraces [which work well in other parts of the world] and
continue with the traditional ways so  were worse off than before as they
had less time.  One agency supplied Western beehives  to a part of the
developing world.  Once the  people had no   access to factory made 
replacement parts,
the hives were useless,  and were used as furniture.  Another appropriate
technology  organisation went out and looked at  traditional beekeeping,  in
the area, and in  nearby areas and made suggestions   how yields could be
improved using   the local materials, [in one case,  sticks],  showed how to
process it to  produce a better product,  how to use the wax to produce
creams which could be sold,  candles which could be sold [ one group had
just been throwing  it away],  giving plastic buckets to store it in
cleanly,  listening to  the local people and  the cultural attitudes
surrounding beekeeping.  One aid agency gave money  to be used  training
beekeepers which had to be used to train  50% women on the courses.  Didn't
work as for those women,   going into the  forest  for a couple of days to
harvest  honey, would have taken them away from their  children,  and would
expose them to  being thought of as immoral as only  certain women went off
alone into the forest like this.  And mixed training groups didn't work
either, for either the men or the women.  It was only when the  local people
were listened to and things changed ,  with the women leaning more about
processing , packing and marketing the   honey and wax that   the project
became useful.  Another project which dammed a river led to  a thriving
local economy which didn't figure on anyone's radar,  suffering because
their river had nearly dried up.   Another project in contrast  developed a
low tech  water pump built with local materials by the people themselves,
with parts easily made locally.  These pumps were maintained by the local
community because they could   maintain them, and they had   contributed to
the  much lower cost, whereas in other parts of the country,  where
complicated western pumps were installed,  they couldn't  be easily and
cheaply maintained by the local people so  once they started needing
maintenance they were  useless
When the focus was  taken from  'let's improve things to western standards
using things that work well back home' to 'how can  we share what we know to
help these people  do what they are doing   in a way which  improves their
livelihood using locally and culturally appropriate means  which  can be 
sustained after we
go home'  things worked better.  No society knows   everything does it

I think there are a lot of lessons there which could be applied  by
organisations to   aid which involves breastfeeding, birth and  young
children.

Helen


  hi... ok i'm not implying that anyone is criticising morgan for her stance
on oxfam... however, i want to say that i wholly support her in taking
oxfam's attitude to the baby bottle VERY seriously .. i refuse to excuse
them because they " do good things" .... so often i see aid organizations
take the view that "western things = good" "developing nation practices=
bad"... e.g. like the idea of these "poor women" having natural births
without access to fetal monitors... and the like... i think there are
dangerous assumptions in these organizations that serve no purpose but to
disempower the very countries they try to help.... that oxfam IS NOT AWARE
of deaths from using formula suggests to me that they do NOT know what the
heck they're doing and surely there are grassroots orgs that are actually
working to help countries with the right information.... suggests a
recklessness and misinformed organization who cannot be wholly effective and
could quite
> possibly ultimately harm.. and i'm not convinced that this ignorance is
> purely limited to PR depts.....
>
> rgds
> georgia (opa!)

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