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“The remedy to the cause of poverty is reduced to a single calculus of saving lives”.
This is one of the many lines from The Humanitarian Fable. Saviorism, Race, and Aid, a new book by David Jefferess, which charts the dehumanising communication methods that humanitarian aid has employed over the decades. The book challenges the specific type of communication messages and methods that have been created around poverty and humanitarianism by the Global North, through the stereotypical framework, “the poor are – or have problems and it is the responsibility of Northern humanitarians to solve those problems”.
While humanitarian communication depends on many problematic narrative tropes such as the one above to establish itself, the issue is larger than that. It is that the idea of creating and using narratives is itself problematic, particularly in the humanitarian and development space. This is because they are created to continually present a stereotype of suffering that, as Jefferess argues in his book, perpetuates the assumption that the causes of poverty are not historical or structural; that the history of slavery, colonialism, and Western exploitation have no bearing on present suffering.
This form of narrative-building originates as far back as the 1980s during the Ethiopian famine, which solidified the image of the “poor starving African” popularised by Northern NGOs like Oxfam. More than the communication message, it was the intention of fundraising behind such images that made them even more nefarious a technique.
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As I write this, Save the Children Canada is using images of poor, sick, African and Asian children to ask for donations online (and a free tote bag for your generosity). I was stopped the other day on the street in Ottawa by a paid fundraiser, ironically, on behalf of the organisation, and asked to donate in the wake of the recent aid funding cuts, so that it can help the “poor children of Gaza”.
In 2026, the “poor starving Palestinian” has replaced the Ethiopian as the narrative of choice. This narrative, employed by those who claim to rid the world of poverty, conflict, and violence, took almost two years to use the word “genocide” when it came to Gaza. Likewise, the narrative employed for the crisis in Sudan was that of a “famine” and not of an imperial-backed guerrilla uprising that has killed more than 150,000 people. And Iran today is not even on the humanitarian radar, let alone deemed worthy to build a narrative around, despite thousands having been killed in what is clearly an illegal attack.
Further sanctioning this approach, and what the book also argues, is the fact that it is overwhelmingly white humanitarians who get to design these narratives of overwhelmingly non-white victims. They are what Jefferess calls, “bridge characters” – white saviours whose “humanitarian memories” bear witness to horror and suffering as an authentic bridge between the West and the rest.
These bridge characters are key to the success of narratives amongst its largely white, Western audience. The book identifies many such characters, which include hyper-masculinised celebrities like Bono and Bob Geldof, as well as the late global health advocate Paul Farmer, as the archetype of the genuine and committed humanitarian whose trauma is presented as “evidence of their ability to genuinely care”.
We can also see such characters in Western media: Nick Kristoff’s article in The New York Times about the reality of torture in Palestine was lauded for its authenticity by the same press ignoring the real-time reporting shared on the issue by Palestinian journalists in Gaza.
These bridge characters are, in essence, the driving force behind how narratives both distort and conceal historical injustices, and perpetuate a divine aura around the Global North as a humanitarian saviour.
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The irony of narratives is that they are designed to change course with the wind. Humanitarian and development organisations are constantly searching for the next big catastrophe to populate their communication messages to tug at our heartstrings. Donald Trump’s evisceration of USAID in 2025 led to the latest narrative of “millions will die of hunger and disease”. Unabashedly claiming that the Global South cannot survive without the generous help of thousands of well-meaning USAID staffers, it is fuelled by “projections” – including one made by a Global North think tank – of “lives lost” based on financial forecasting, rather than on real-time data.
This trend is spilling over into the current “humanitarian reset” argument, a disassociated narrative in itself, where it is not the victims who are being given space to redesign the flawed system, but the benevolent Western humanitarians in their grand bargains and future-of-aid summits; a narrative that does not give credence to the dignity and autonomy of those who suffer, but one that reduces the cost of human life to a story that should resonate with the public, so that aid “should flow more freely”. Aid, mind you, and not an end to violence, oppression, and historical occupation.
One of the many problems of humanitarian discourse, as Jefferess argues, is its self-inflicted aversion to seeing possibilities outside its Northern-centric confines. These possibilities include social movements and their relentless activism in the Global South against state displacement, and for land and territorial rights. Yet none of these are acknowledged by Northern humanitarian and development policy practitioners, who instead rely on stereotypical narratives of saviourism – whether it be climate disasters, wars, or indeed, foreign aid cuts, to prove their relevance and keep the “Donate” button clicking.
Humanitarianism has become a brand and every brand needs a narrative. The problem here is, firstly, that the narratives are being created in and by an artificial and tightly controlled environment of Western institutions and media. Secondly, they are completely shutting out those who are supposedly the “stars” of these narratives – the poor, the destitute, the marginalised. To overcome this, it is vital that we openly question the need for narratives within the humanitarian sector and call them out as a tool to maintain white supremacy and the status quo of Western institutions over everyone else. Because, indeed, in the absence of addressing the root causes of humanitarian emergencies, narratives simply exist to fundraise and maintain relevance for institutions that should never have been allowed to proliferate and dominate the sector in the first place.
And if we insist that narratives have inherent value in addressing injustice, inequality, suffering, and displacement, then we need to allow those who experience these directly to tell their own stories. For that, the Western humanitarian sector needs to take a seat far back as an observer, rather than the creator; or make what Jefferess calls, an “ethical retreat”, where those in the affluent North “re-check our deeply racist imaginaries of the agency, ideas and philosophies of people in the places we’re so interested in intervening in”. We, in the Global South, are still waiting for that to happen.
