Content warning: This story includes descriptions of racist fundraising advertisements. 

A Black child stares dully into the camera. Perhaps they’re picking through a mountain of garbage, carrying jugs of water on their heads, or sitting in a dirt-floored hut. There is often sad music, reminiscent of an animal adoption campaign. Sometimes, they cry. 

Amid these heart wrenching scenes, a narrator urges donors to give something — anything — to spare these poor children from their hardships. Cue a 1-800 number, a charitable organization’s logo, and a fade to the next commercial. 

This narrative template is known as the ‘starving baby appeal’: a reliance on white pity to draw donations from benefactors in the Global North. These appeals can take many forms, but tend to rely on colonial stereotypes about local communities as helpless, one-dimensional, and totally without agency. According to a 2013 paper published in the Canadian Journal of Communication, these types of appeals dehumanize their subjects and serve to foster the notion that development problems can only be solved by Global North charity.

It’s difficult to say exactly how many Canadian NGOs used, or continue to use, these narratives in their fundraising. An analysis by the Canadian Journal of Communication of three major Canadian charities found the practice was already shifting in 2011. It notes World Vision went from running a fundraising campaign about African causes featuring only white speakers in 2005 (but with a starving Mozambique family in the background) to putting out a series of videos in 2011 where, out of seven videos examined by the researcher, just three were hosted by white Westerners. 

Still, blatant white saviourism does make its way into fundraising campaigns. Médecins Sans Frontières made headlines in 2020 after it aired a $400,000 TV fundraising campaign in Canada that depicted crying Black children being treated by MSF medics with the REM song “Everybody Hurts” playing in the background. 

Academics, activists, and social impact professionals themselves have criticized the sector’s use of white saviour narratives in fundraising campaigns for decades. But the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, and the international outcry against anti-Black racism and colonialism that followed, lent a new sense of urgency to these criticisms. Gloria Novovic, policy lead at Cooperation Canada, says Canadian and U.S. organizations released statements in solidarity with protests against anti-Black racism at the time — and then started looking inward. 

“One of the key issues that many of us were really underlining was the need for an acknowledgement of historical harm that has been caused and that leads to white saviourism approaches,” she says. “I think that is what shifted the discourse from something really vague, to people sending emails to one another across organizations and saying: ‘Look at this ad. This is terrible.’” 

Here are some ways social impact organizations, both domestic and international, can alter their fundraising strategies to respect the dignity of local communities and bring in donations and support for charitable causes:

Tell stories of hope

Jon Cornejo, an NGO campaign professional-turned-anti racism consultant, once worked for Amnesty International U.K. on highlighting the stories of people facing or at risk of human rights abuses all over the globe. These campaigns across the sector, he says, often frame their subjects as someone who needs a donor’s help. But he believes NGOs can weave a much more compelling narrative in a way that doesn’t victimize their subjects. “There is a much better story here,” Cornejo says. “Why aren’t we telling a story of hope? Of resistance? Of an activist who is standing against something — and how our supporters can be part of that?”

Supporters of what the Canadian Journal of Communications paper calls “drastic imagery” defend them as accurate portrayals of the horrific situation of people in the Global South. “People are starving, children are dying of preventable diseases, people are clambering over trash piles looking for food,” it says in an explanation of supporters’ positions. “If images were modified to present a less horrific picture, the real truth would be obfuscated.” 

But there are alternatives, Cornejo says. He points to Shelter, a U.K. based charity focused on domestic homelessness. In their 2021 campaign, “Fight for Home”, images of Britons affected by their country’s housing crisis — Black, white, old, young, disabled — are projected onto the sides of buildings. They are stern and serious, but also loving, strong, even playful. Amid dark streets and stark brick homes, there is a warmth that radiates from these faces. 

Wretch 32, the rapper and songwriter who wrote the video’s track, starts by emphasizing the emergency (“I’m wishin’ for no riches to be rich/I’m wishin’ for a kitchen and a fridge/a window and a sink”) but slides into a message of hope and solidarity (“Some circumstances you cannot choose/and all we’ve got is us/all we’ve got is love/affordable housing just ain’t affordable for some.”) It deftly balances urgency and humanity, not to mention a catchy beat, and leaves the viewer feeling that ending the realities of precarious housing faced by 17 million Britons is a daunting, but nonetheless achievable task. 

Other charities in Canada have managed this balance, too. Rossbrook House, a Winnipeg neighbourhood drop-in centre, ran a fundraising campaign for the Great Canadian Giving Challenge focused on supporting summer activities. Instead of running ads about how hard it was for kids to be stuck at home during the COVID-19 pandemic, they ran videos and photos showing kids on summer outings — showing supporters what kids could do if they opened their wallets to donate. 

Consider the golden rule

When public health officials closed England’s schools during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, schoolchildren across the country undoubtedly went hungry. Rwothomio Kabandole, who handles social media for No White Saviors, a Ugandan-based advocacy campaign that advocates on the dangers of white saviourism by white development agencies, says NGOs raised a lot of money in response — but didn’t use imagery of hungry children in their campaigns. 

No White Saviors does consultations and panel discussions for Global North-based INGOs. During these sessions, Kabandole says his organization tries to impress upon attendees the idea of the golden rule: don’t do to others what you wouldn’t want others to do to you. “We try to tell these organizations that people in these communities are deserving of respect,” he says. “They’re not props. They’re human beings.” 

The prevalence of the white saviour complex, a pervasive idea rooted in centuries of colonialism, is that white organizations — and white donors — are best-placed to solve the problems of African nations. Since No White Saviors launched on Instagram in 2018, it has confronted the many ways in which INGO white saviourism has harmed Ugandans, from sex trafficking by white social impact workers in Africa to the case of Renee Bach, an American missionary who came to Uganda and set up a medical clinic despite having no medical training whatsoever. At least 105 children died in her charity’s care. 

Kabandole says one of the best ways for INGOs to help African communities is to simply stop engaging in practices like running international aid organizations from head offices that are very far from the communities they are trying to help. “It’s oppressive,” he says. “It isn’t supportive. It’s about sustaining the position of the Global North on top.” Cutting out these practices would, in Kabandole’s view, “be the biggest support” Global North NGOs could give at the moment. 

Let communities tell their own stories

Images used by INGOs in their fundraising campaigns live on the internet for a long time. Kabandole adapts a line by Kendrick Lamar to explain his point: the one in front of the camera lives forever. Therefore, he says, they should be more involved in the campaign process. “They should have the right to choose, or have an impact on what is being done,” he says. He also says INGOs should also place local communities behind the camera, too, by hiring local photographers. 

This idea is not unique or new. In a recent report edited by Peace Direct — in partnership with Women of Color Advancing Peace, Security and Conflict Transformation, Adeso, and Alliance for Peacebuilding — international development and aid professionals say organizations should work from the assumption that all positions can be filled by local staff. 

It also says INGOs should end the practice of using imagery and language that diminishes the agency and dignity of communities in fundraising and marketing materials. “Moreover, they should conduct an audit of their external and internal communications to provide a benchmark for future improvements, and consider alternative and collaborative approaches to documenting efforts in the Global South,” the report says. 

Do the readings

Scholars like Sonia Alvarez Leguizamon, writers and artists like Teju Cole, and Global South leaders like Ahmed Sekou Toure have discussed the problems of development and white saviourism for decades. Novovic says she’s found UN briefs from the 1970s that refer to concerns about policies carried out by international organizations to this day. 

Novovic suggests INGOs who are really worried about the possibility of ‘white gaze’ practices to step back and simply do their homework. There is already a wealth of books, articles, and speeches on the issues around white saviour attitudes — and ways to empower local communities. 

“I would really caution people who are essentially wasting the time of their local colleagues to get involved in what are emotionally draining conversations to teach them how to do better despite the availability of really good literature that we continue to ignore,” she says. 

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