Development

Perhaps, child sponsorship is the most successful type of charity in raising money in the history of development. Why is the child such an interesting figure? And why must it be a child from the third world that is victimized and poor? Escobar tackles the “problematization of poverty” which he argues is a result of the formulation of development discourse from the early post-World War II period to the present. Escobar says we construct things in a culture and in a language that have an effect on how we see the world. For Escobar, child development and its affiliated term, third world, and related to them, poverty, formed a cluster of terms. This cluster came into existence at a certain moment in time and affected how the two developed worlds in the “Tale of Three Worlds” see the people in the third undeveloped world. Based on evidence from credible policy documents, Escobar (1995) concluded that certain representations become dominant and indelibly shape the ways in which reality is imagined and acted upon. Escobar agues that a certain order of discourse produces permissible modes of being and thinking while disqualifying and even making others impossible. Unfortunately, the development experts disastrously “disqualified” local differences in the discursive homogenizations of the third world.  

Evidently, there is a fixation on the figure of the child by child-sponsoring agencies like World Vision. This is because the child is innocent, and represents the already constructed image, while being unpolluted by the other images and ideas that can be alien to sponsors. The child has not yet been contaminated by political corruption and by war. So there is a way in which the fixated figure of the child is also a figure of hope for the future. Sponsors can ignore everything else that Africa represents to them. You can seemingly address the problem of the Africa, one of the third worlds, that is a basket case in terms of development and of political corruption. With the child, all these agencies need is an aristocrat who could sit in Washington, New York, Geneva, London, Ottawa, and design what they think will be the absolute solution to poverty in some African village through a child that represents hope for the future.  

After analyzing a couple of World Vision’s Internet sites, among others, you could easily see the issues with child development through Arturo Escobar’s analytic lens. You begin to realize through Escobar that even though you might want to help a poor child in the Third World, sponsoring them with dollars is not the best way. It is important to acknowledge that sponsorship of the child on a website, someone you don’t even know may do some good, but may also just be a contribution to a homogenized system of what is in fact a system of modernly complex realities.

Well-intentioned child sponsoring agencies like World Vision, Save the Children, Compassion International, among others, have been raising tremendous amounts of money, but perhaps doing profound damage at the same time. There is no sign of parental or local difference considerations on their websites. And a more critical review of World Vision’s Internet sites reveals a homogenized child development discourse that promotes naïve paternalism and racism, and an organization that is striving to address issues raised by its critics.

With the hope to pull at heartstrings and gain donations, a constructed image of a starving child, an orphan or a child with begging eyes, and a note on what this child can and cannot do, will surely get your attention on World Vision’s websites. In short, the resultant effect of using a distorted and trivialized imagery representations of people in developing countries has been the “pornography of poverty” that many in the international development community have been speaking of for years. Arturo Escobar (1995) suggests that the body of the starving ‘African’ child is a striking symbol of the power of the First World over the Third. He believes a whole economy of discourse and unequal power relations is encoded in that body. The sponsored child is constantly reminded that they are the 'poor relation'. They must always be prepared to show gratitude to the 'rich parents' on whose charity they depend.