Review of Keeping Africa Small

by Laura Gisby

This documentary examines the current propensity for "ethical gifts" and the dominant orthodoxy of "basic needs" as the priority for development spending, in line with the Millenium Development Goals that centre on poverty reduction. It contends that so-called "ethical gifts" are patronising and degrading, and that small-scale solutions offered by NGOs to passive recipients who have no say in terms of what they themselves desire do not constitute either "development" or what Africans "need". We need to challenge the very idea that the needs of our peers in the developing world are "basic", through emphasising their similarity to us in terms of ideas and aspirations. The word "basic" itself is an imposition characteristic of Western NGO development rhetoric.

The film opens with snapshots of NGO adverts in the West, setting up the debate by asking who decides what a better life should consist of - NGOs or Africans? And what indeed does this better life consist of - absolute basic rights or Playstations? The latter question instantly highlights the provocative slant taken by the film. A series of NGO worker soundbites are displayed, implicitly questioning their ideas that "there is no point campaigning for people to be rich".

The perspective then switches to the Ghanaians, whose emphasis on what is needed for development is strikingly different from that of the NGO workers. They are shown to laughingly dismiss NGO ideas of "appropriate technology". WaterAid's campaign to reintroduce the rope pump is exposed as a "sad reflection for mankind" through looking at the African perspective on its "appropriateness". The Ghanaians are depicted as playfully asking why a situation never arose in which the poor man was asked to advise the rich man. Another example drives the point home - the grasscutters offered to Ghanians by NGOs were not lawnmowers, but rodents! Again, the reaction of African recipients is one of derision. They ask for the chance to "take destiny into their own hands" and assert that they do not want stagnation - that simply increasing basic needs does nothing to increase the levels of these needs and thus generate actual "development".

The Ghanaians criticise conditionality, as well as currently fashionable monitoring and evaluation techniques, and query why they have to spend so long filling in ridiculous forms measuring people's "change in attitude".  They discuss with condemnation the neverending stream of NGOs telling them how to behave, criticising, for example, the extent of interference in their sex lives. The narrowness of development projects does not match the ambitions of Ghanaians, for example Godbless asks why NGOs do not provide a factory for a man who can produce "a very beautiful Italian shoe". They consistently question Western ideas, such as the insistence that Africans "think small", whilst they have the same "big brains, dreams and aspirations" as Westerners, and why Americans living with HIV live so much longer than Africans do.

The key message of the film is that "the best" needs to be put back on the map. Indeed, Ceri Dingle emphasised in her introduction that if we truly believe the British public to be as "caring and sharing" as NGOs always enthusiastically thank them for being, we need to stop encouraging them to buy animal dung for their African contemporaries and inform them of the truth. Indeed, NGOs are not just degrading Africans, but also the Western public, as evidenced by the "dumbing down" of development in the public sphere.