A Cry for Help. Or at Least Email

Published July 02, 2009 @ 04:48PM PT

There are many wonderful things about July. Canada Day. Independence Day. Bastille Day. The birthday of Haile Selassi I.

And, of course, an inside look at your favorite NGOs and UN agencies.

Pulling together a blog series on what's good and what's not-so-good about working for various aid agencies.

Quality of programs. How they treat staff. Bureaucracy. Support, or lack thereof. Endless strategic planning. No strategic planning. Security awareness. Reporting burdens. Accountability, or not so much.

Am doing my best to gather information, but would love to cast as wide a net as possible. If you work - or used to work - for a humanitarian or development NGO or UN agency and would like to write down some short (or even short short) thoughts about the experience, positive or negative, please send them to mkleinman@change.org.

I'll aggregate the answers, and do a different post for each agency. Each response will, of course, be completely anonymous.

(And, if anyone has any thoughts on the blog - things you'd like to see more or less, suggestions, recommendations, painless criticism - please send it along.)

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Comments (2)

Great idea. I thought about this before, and whether it would be possible and or desirable to set up an UN/NGO version of wikileaks, or something along those lines, so I'll be interested to see how this works out.

As for my own contribution, not having worked for any of the larger NGOs that people generally know about, don't feel I have so much to say. Maybe later.

Posted by Harry Rud on 07/05/2009 @ 12:21AM PT
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How's life in Kabul-town?

MBK

PS - what's a wikileak?

Posted by Michael Bear on 07/09/2009 @ 10:57PM PT
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Michael has worked for NGOs in Afghanistan, across east and central Africa, and Iraq. Prior to going overseas, he worked on a project providing assistance to the United Nations on the application of International Humanitarian Law to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.