THE self-criticism set out in an anti-racism statement published by UK development charities is ahistorical and risks demoralising supporters and empowering the sector’s critics, a former member of the Charity Commission Board has warned.
“There are plenty of individuals, politicians and whole political parties who think that charity should begin and end at home, and who wouldn’t give a button for global solidarity or human suffering overseas,” Dr Andrew Purkis wrote last month.
“Those forces have their tails up. . . They might be only too pleased to have this apparent public confirmation right from the highest that international development, including the work of INGOs, at all times was a flawed endeavour with nothing much to have a good time.”
Dr Purkis, who served as public-affairs secretary to Archbishop Carey between 1991 and 2002, and chaired MotionAid UK, was responding to an announcement issued on 29 July — one yr because the summer riots within the UK in 2024 — by Bond, a UK network for organisations working in international development. It was signed by 43 charity CEOs, including those of CAFOD, Oxfam, and Christian Aid, and the interim CEO of Tearfund.
Entitled “A message of solidarity from members of the Bond CEO Anti-Racism Group to our peers across the sector”, it contained an in depth criticism of the sector: “We have misrepresented the lives of many individuals in poorer countries in our media, fundraising and campaigns. We have undervalued the knowledge and expertise that’s abundant across low- and middle- income countries. We have too rarely asked what we, within the UK, can learn in return. We haven’t placed global solidarity on the centre of our work. . .
“As leaders, we must recognise our role in either perpetuating or difficult the unequal systems our organisations are a part of. . . It means confronting how we engage with partners and communities, how we take into consideration expertise, and whose voices count. It means indeed questioning our very existence.”
In his response, Dr Purkis wrote that he had “raised an eyebrow” on seeing the CEOs “questioning publicly the very existence of those organisations whilst also soliciting our continuing donations”.
Among his concerns was the apparent eliding of distinct issues. “Unequal power relationships may or may not have much to do with INGO [international non-governmental organisation] racism specifically,” he wrote. “We see the arrogance of powerful ‘expert’ developers, politicians, bureaucrats and their cronies in several economic systems everywhere in the world. . . This is just sometimes anything to do with racism or colonialism.”
The statement also didn’t acknowledge changes within the sector, during which “shifting power relationships” had “long been a part of the advocacy and practice” of many charities. In many cases, he argued, “the major obstacles to effective empowerment of marginalised groups in developing countries” weren’t “the soiled mindset of INGOs” but “the entrenched attitudes and structures of intersectional discrimination within the independent developing countries themselves”.
“The statement assumes that INGOs are affected deeply if unconsciously by being the heirs of an imperial and colonial power, with its odious racial hierarchies, but there isn’t any acknowledgement that they may additionally be the heirs of those that decried and demonstrated against racism and colonial power,” he wrote. “The CEOs find absolutely nothing to have a good time previously record of their organisations.”
The charities’ own “great achievements” included each practical interventions reminiscent of “providing water and sanitation to impoverished and displaced people”, and their campaigning record. Oxfam and Christian Aid had been “very lively, vocal leaders” within the campaign against apartheid in South Africa. “For a long time, the agenda of campaigning by Oxfam, Christian Aid and lots of other signatories has clearly been a justice agenda based on explicit ideas of solidarity, breaking apart the restrictive definitions of charity imposed by the Charity Commission within the Nineteen Eighties.”
The charities had taken “serious risks” in signing the statement, he warned, including “further demoralisation throughout the organisations and particularly their supporters, already under strain. A charity that seems to disown its own past, to the purpose of questioning its own very existence, is liable to losing its mojo and alienating those that were under the impression that supporting them over a few years was an act of worldwide solidarity and a blow for global justice.”
Responding to Dr Purkis’s letter, the Bond signatories said that the statement was “never about repudiating our past. It was about harnessing it. . . By facing as much as our history in full, we change into more trusted partners, more relevant organisations and simpler actors for change.”
