There’s a fascinating blog post by Duncan Green, Oxfam GB’s head of research, about whether the charity should open up its guest house swimming pool in Nairobi. Apparently it’s closed at present for fear of…
Reputational risk – back in the UK, where swimming pools are luxury items, Oxfam’s big cheeses saw a tabloid scandal in the making and closed it (see right, the blue of the pool is a protective tarpaulin, not water). It didn’t help when some bright spark decided to advertise for a swimming pool attendant on the Oxfam website……
Swahili Street has an interesting response:
The aid business is a very strange world. It sees itself as a world apart, which is self fulfilling. Thinking that yours is a world apart leads to both guilty hand wringing, as seen in Oxfam’s empty pool, and also a deeply unattractive sense of entitlement, as seen in some of the comments on the post.
I think this hits the nail on the head. Charities have a lot to think about in East Africa. The billions of pounds poured into Somalia, Kenya, Uganda and the rest have made little difference to sustainable development. There’ll be another famine scare in the Horn in a year or so’s time, despite the 2011 appeals. Few of them dare speak out about the corruption and poor governance that means the region cannot move forward. And at times, the charities seem more interested in beating the others to funds (such as the occasion Oxfam moved forward its Darfur appeal to beat an upcoming one by the Disasters Emergencies Committee).
There is plenty for the charities to mull. The issue is not a sodding swimming pool. After all, I’ve swum with plenty of aid workers in plenty of pools across the region.








