Share & more
In 2022, Lindis Hurum and her team at MSF Norway made a decision: No more white saviour tropes.
It was Norway’s annual fundraising event, TV-aksjonen. On one Sunday every October, the country rallies in support of a single organisation, chosen in advance, with thousands of volunteers blanketing cities and villages alike to raise money. It was once again MSF’s turn, and Hurum was determined to make the most of it.
“We said early on that we would take this opportunity to frame our conversations in a different way than we did last time we had this event, where all the comms material that we used was very much white saviour, and extremely cliché, horrible suffering,” Hurum, MSF Norway’s general director, told The New Humanitarian.
Ignoring pushback from the event’s broadcaster and advertisers, Hurum and her colleagues decided to tell MSF’s story in more honest terms than it previously had. The biggest splash was made by a video released in conjunction with the event, in which Hurum and a colleague, Dr. Chinonso Emmanuel Okorie, admitted that MSF had often told a single story, one that cuts out the agency of the people it serves, and valorises the work of its Western workers over local staff. Acknowledging that this was a reflection of the colonial history of global humanitarianism, they challenged MSF to tell a more accurate tale and the audience to be open to it.
Hurum and her colleagues braced for a hit. Would telling a messier, more honest story, be alienating? Would admitting fault open the organisation up to criticism? Would donations plummet?
The video went viral. Commenters called out other organisations, asking if they, too, would be owning up to their past wrongs. Hurum herself received some backlash. But donors did not shrink from the message: That year, TV-aksjonen raised over $23 million, at the time the highest amount ever donated through the event.
How the humanitarian narrative began, and evolved
Witnessing suffering has been the animating force behind Western humanitarianism since at least 1859, when Swiss businessman Henry Dunant saw for himself the bloody aftermath of the Battle of Solferino. The carnage impelled Dunant to form the International Committee of the Red Cross, the first in what would soon evolve into an entire ecosystem of organisations committed to aiding victims of war.
Descriptions of war’s atrocities flooded newspapers in the decades that followed, and by the time of the Spanish Civil War, evocative words were accompanied by something even more potent: photographs.
The language and imagery were meant to transport the viewer to a place they would never visit – a battlefield, surrounded by the groaning throngs of dying combatants. For the newspapers and magazines publishing these images, the reaction became the point, writes Susan Sontag in Regarding the Pain of Others. Shock itself “has become a leading stimulus of consumption and source of value”.
At the same time, these extreme depictions formed the basis for how war is understood by those not experiencing it firsthand. As images gave way to film, by the late 1960s Western audiences were watching live footage of mass starvation in Biafra as they ate their dinners. These scenes had a mobilising effect, pulling attention – and resources – to a conflict that would otherwise have transpired outside US and European consciousness.
Alerting the wider world to the problems unfolding in West Africa was not inherently bad – quite the opposite. The problem was the narrative smoothness with which such stories were told. When one sees a hungry child on TV, one wants to help. And increasingly, the most direct means of doing that was writing a cheque to the proliferating humanitarian organisations. Children – so the thinking went – would then be fed, and whatever dark forces led to their hunger would be beaten back into the void.
If such narrative smoothness remained strong throughout the 20th century, it hit its peak in the 1980s, as Ethiopia found itself racked by famine. But in fact, it didn’t “find itself” that way at all: contrary to how it was reported in the media, the country’s mass starvation was not a sudden-onset act of God as much as a direct product of Mengistu Haile Mariam’s dictatorship. But viewers of nightly news reports were never burdened with the details of Colonel Mengistu’s agricultural policies or the military offenses that obliterated food supplies. Shorn of economic, political, or social context, a simplified narrative emerged: Ethiopians were the helpless victims of a blameless natural disaster, and only Western aid could save them.
It was a crisp – if inaccurate – story, and it caught fire. Musicians Bob Geldof and Midge Ure were so moved that they joined forces under the name Band Aid and penned what would soon become a global charity super-hit: “Do They Know It’s Christmas?", whose lyrics would cement not just famine-stricked Ethiopia but the entire African continent in the Western imagination as a place wholly devoid of agency, snow, food, water, joy, and yes, Christmas.
Donations poured in, even as the song inspired well-deserved backlash. But 40 years on, it’s not precisely clear what has changed. Just last year, “Do They Know It’s Christmas” was re-released, and subsequently defended by Geldof, who told the Sunday Times that his “little pop song has kept millions of people alive. Why would Band Aid scrap feeding thousands of children dependent on us for a meal?”
It’s just one song, but it is also a tidy encapsulation of the current state of humanitarian appeals. Aid groups like MSF Norway are consciously endeavouring to do better – to eliminate depictions of white saviourism, and instead tell a more honest, nuanced, and equitable story. And yet, as I pulled up a YouTube video while researching this piece, the ad that preceded it was an appeal from one of the world’s largest humanitarian organisations featuring a lingering shot of a white woman, presumably an aid worker, surveying the destruction in the Gaza Strip.
The question is no longer whether the sector knows better. It does. The question is whether the humanitarian funding model is willing to produce anything else.
The shift to self-regulation
Criticisms of aid representation have existed about as long as the aid sector itself. In 1981, the Danish aid worker Jorgen Lissner pointed to the “quiet rebellion” brewing in response to the images of “emaciated children with bloated bellies and listless eyes” splashed across “our TV screens, on the front page of our newspapers, on billboards and posters and in countless other places.”
“Good intentions simply aren’t enough if they are pursued with little or no regard for the political side-effects, with little or no understanding of what such images do to the mentality, the attitudes, the political emotions and behaviour of their audience,” he wrote.
Many NGOs – particularly religious ones – were also incensed by the “helpless victim” narrative, with one Christian Aid official writing in 1985 that Band Aid reinforced an oversimplified understanding “as something we (rich, educated whites) do for them (poor, ignorant, Blacks)”, in addition to promoting “a racist view of the world” that makes “no attempt to look at the causes of the situation.”
Hugo Slim, a researcher at the University of Oxford and former head of policy at the International Committee of the Red Cross, acknowledges that he became interested in humanitarian work himself after seeing images of Biafra play across his own TV screen in the 1960s. According to him, the sector itself never had any delusions that portraying children with distended bellies and heads wreathed with flies was anything other than a manipulation – but it was one that worked.
Things began to change, he said, when NGOs started recruiting respected journalists to their communications teams, who brought a more sophisticated sensibility to storytelling. In 1989, the General Assembly of European NGOs published a code of conduct (since updated), instructing organisations to cease using “apocalyptic or pathetic images”, “which foster a sense of Northern superiority.” Five years later, Slim himself was part of the committee who authored yet another code of conduct from the IFRC and ICRC, which states that disaster victims shall be recognised in publicity and advertising materials as “dignified humans, not hopeless objects”.
According to Slim, the shift was born, not from public pushback, but from an internal sense that change was needed. “We started to try and self-regulate because of our own criticism of ourselves,” he says. It wasn’t that the images coming out of Ethiopia (or anywhere else) were inaccurate – there was, indeed, a terrible amount of suffering. But it was a simplistic account of Ethiopia’s troubles, one that did not ask what set of circumstances led to the famine, nor what exactly the donations flooding the country would be doing to help. As a result, “we committed to telling a bit more of the whole story,” Slim said.
These revelations haven’t yielded the progress one might expect. Organisations are largely unaware of the codes. Even when they agreed with the intent and were conscious of the need for more nuanced narratives, humanitarians weren’t necessarily sure that the public would buy it. And not everyone is convinced the NGOs were really trying. Moky Makura, executive editor of Africa No Filter, has long been critical of the effects of Live Aid on the Western conception of Africa, which is painted in the broad strokes of war, starvation, and a desperation that can only be ameliorated by the West’s benevolent intervention (ignoring that such intervention is largely responsible for much of the conflict that continues to plague the continent today).
“The whole premise behind a lot of these development organisations is that they feel they need to make themselves the hero in the story,” Makura told The New Humanitarian. “In order to do that, somebody has to be the victim.”
One step forward, two steps back
In the 40 years since the Ethiopia famine, change has been uneven. Every few years, tangible steps are taken to reduce the prevalence of dehumanising images in humanitarian communications. Some amount of time passes, and the same organisations that once promised to do better suffer a relapse. Save the Children, for example, released its first guidelines on ethical photography back in 1991; in 2013, they received public blowback for depicting emaciated children in a TV spot.
So little had improved by the mid-2000s that one Norway-based solidarity group launched a campaign called Radi-Aid, born of a spoof video in which Africans donated radiators to freezing, hapless Norwegians. For a while, Radi-Aid went on to hand out annual awards – Rusty Radiators – for the most cringe-inducing, trope-riddled humanitarian appeals released that year. They also celebrated the sector’s successes – the ones that proved a fundraising video could have heart and humanity while still being wildly effective.
Today, Western-based humanitarian organisations are at something of an inflection point. The events of 2020 – most prominently, the murder of George Floyd, which sparked the Black Lives Matter movement – catalysed a renewed demand for accountability in storytelling and, in many ways, organisations rose to meet the moment.
Jess Crombie, who teaches narrative ethics at the University of the Arts London and leads storytelling initiatives for humanitarian organisations, says that prior to 2020, a “shocking number of really big NGOs” lacked a consent process for how images were used in communications materials. That’s no longer the case – the majority of major organisations now have mechanisms for ensuring the subjects of images are fully aware of how their likeness is being used, in terms explained in their own language, with the understanding that their access to services is not contingent on their willingness to consent.
The UN posted a video using an AI-generated “re-enactment” of sexual violence in conflict, including an AI-generated testimony of a Burundian woman describing being gang raped. It was taken down only after the Guardian called attention to it.
What remains a problem is the stories themselves. In the years post-2020, when diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives were at their full power, organisations like MSF Norway were making public, concerted efforts to decolonise the way their stories were told.
But the ascendancy of Donald Trump, the dismantling of USAID, and the general spread of global authoritarianism has had a divisive effect: While some organisations have doubled down on their commitments to decolonise, others have quietly backslid. One staffer at a major nonprofit called Crombie in a panic, saying that in the face of the current funding crisis, senior management had announced the end of its commitment to ethical storytelling. AI images have also emerged as a newly troublesome form of poverty porn: Now, some fundraisers have taken to perpetuating stereotypes using artificial footage. In 2024, for example, the UN posted a video using an AI-generated “re-enactment” of sexual violence in conflict, including an AI-generated testimony of a Burundian woman describing being gang raped. It was taken down only after the Guardian called attention to it.
The argument made by organisations, says Crombie, is that humanitarian need is at an all-time high, and in a constrained environment, it’s best to rely on tactics that have been proven to work. The sacrifices made to inclusive storytelling, they say, are worth it. Some more conservative NGOs have even decried inclusivity efforts as overly “woke”, and are now “leaning back into what they did before because it’s their core brand”, she says.
The problem is that putting out the same stories as the ones peddled in the 1980s creates the impression that nothing has actually been achieved. And in a world that has seen an increasingly rightward shift, “you end up with a group of people who stop wanting to support you because they start wanting to support people who look like them,” Crombie explains. “Ultimately, it’s like double shooting yourself in the foot.”
The Gaza effect
To some degree, how humanitarian communications move forward will be dictated less by the will of NGOs than by a changing media landscape. In the same way that Biafra was among the first televised conflicts, the war in Gaza has been the first to play out on social media. With international outlets barred from reporting there since the violence erupted in 2023, the world has come to understand the conflict largely through the eyes of Gazans themselves, who have been posting and streaming their experiences in real time. Figures like Motaz Azaiza, who went from 25,000 Instagram followers to more than 15 million, have become the primary witnesses to the conflict, bypassing institutional media entirely.
This represents a structural break from the model that has governed humanitarian communications since Biafra. For decades, the assumption has been that Western institutions – news organisations, NGOs, UN agencies – would mediate the suffering of distant others for Western audiences. Gazans have bypassed that apparatus. They are telling their own stories, on their own platforms, to audiences who trust them more than they trust institutions.
The extent to which organisations acknowledge this shift in storytelling will be a determining factor in their continued relevance. Among her Gen Z students, Crombie says, “we've got a whole generation who don't care what the big institutions of the world have to say.” In fact, it’s more than that, she corrects herself – ”they don’t even know they exist.”
If you decolonise completely, white Westerners should prepare to be exposed to images that may chafe their sensibilities. Some of the content from Gazan journalists he’s seen, for example, has been much more graphic and emotional than would make the cut on the BBC.
While trust in institutions generally has waned dramatically, they do have a potential role to play going forward, says Deborah Adesina, a communications executive and co-author of the 2024 report “Charity Representations of Distant Others”. As disinformation spikes, both NGOs and news organisations can play the crucial role of separating fact from AI-generated fiction. In a world where entire realities can be constructed with a few keystrokes, institutions can advise on media literacy, and help discern legitimate appeals from scams.
The spread of technology has also forced accountability, in that multiple audiences are now privy to materials that were once aimed specifically at Western donors. More than half of the Earth’s population owns a smartphone, meaning people can often see for themselves how their images are being used. “The complication is that we are now speaking to multiple audiences, and one message will not cater to all of them,” Adesina says.
And why should they? Different audiences have different priorities. There’s a caveat to this, Slim says. If you decolonise completely, white Westerners should prepare to be exposed to images that may chafe their sensibilities. Some of the content from Gazan journalists he’s seen, for example, has been much more graphic and emotional than would make the cut on the BBC.
“It's really heavy stuff,” he says. “Most Westerners will be sort of triggered and in counselling for weeks afterwards.”
The differences are also more subtle. Adesina, who is Nigerian, says it’s frowned upon in NGO circles to include depictions of people saying “thank you”, because it smacks of saviourism. (It also works both ways – Adesina also says she was recently told by one NGO photographer that he was discouraged from thanking photo subjects for their time.) But to Adesina, a failure to say “thank you” is deeply countercultural.
“I've always challenged the notion that if we say something is ethical, it has to be applicable across the board,” she says. “To what extent does culture ameliorate what we consider ethical?”
Local storytelling and diverse perspectives matter
Here’s what we know: Donors do respond to locally developed stories. One study – conducted in partnership with Amref Health Africa, the University of East Anglia, and the University of the Arts London – found that a fundraising campaign designed by a community health worker in Kenya raised more from UK donors than an equivalent one developed by Amref’s comms, and 38% more than earlier appeals.
“People want to know that things are changing. [They’re] tired of doom and gloom,” said Africa No Filter’s Makura.
In the time since MSF Norway’s anti-racism campaign aired, Hurum told The New Humanitarian, the organisation has continued to try to make good on its promises. This has meant making more videos that emphasise MSF’s partnerships in communities, with local medical staff working with foreign staff side by side. It has meant pushing Norwegian journalists to interview more MSF staff working in the field, versus talking to Hurum herself. The organisation is also tracking the voices it uses in its materials, in order to ensure its perspectives are actually diverse.
In truth, a story that’s conceived in partnership with local communities may not look radically different than one dreamt up in a London or New York office, says Crombie. The difference is in the nuance. Rather than presenting “a kind of paper cutout of suffering, you are presenting a real person,” she says. In blind tests, the British public has responded more positively to the context-rich version of the story.
Despite this evidence, fundraisers are reluctant to mess with a formula that they think works. They are desperate to go back to a time when poverty porn was a surefire way of making money fast. But those days are winding down.
“There's this perception that [ethical] storytelling is a luxury item, a nice-to-have,” Crombie says. “It's not. It is absolutely at the heart of your survival.”
Edited by Patrick Gathara.
