Welcome to ‘The Battle for Hearts & Minds’.

Found via @AdamWestbrook, this is, no doubt, going to endear the US armed forces to an entire new generation of Afghans.

There’s a great opportunity up for grabs for one lucky third level student at the moment, with three weeks remaining for entries. The winner will get the chance to visit Uganda and become a temporary ‘Crisis Correspondent’, visiting projects run by Goal and Concern in the unstable north of the country.

The project is run by ECHO (The European Commission’s Humanitarian Aid Organisation), jointly with partners Goal and Concern, and Carr Communications. The prize is, frankly, a fantastic chance for someone who’s got their head screwed on to steal a march in this area of reporting, which lacks committed souls who understand the problems deeply enough to avoid the typical cliches that come with humanitarian crisis reporting.

Humanitarian crisis reporting is an area that suffers hugely from parachutism. Reporters drop in by plane as a crisis heats up, be it a burgeoning famine or escalating situation of internal displacement for one or other reason. They immediately start counting corpses or, among the living, visible ribs on walking skeletons. The attention a crisis receives peaks and dissipates rapidly, with all but the most scant of attention often paid to the underlying causes. Often, through no fault of their own, journalists are dispatched with a handful of clippings and some flimsy background information on the country into which they are about to be immersed.

Often, what ensues is a frustrating dance between NGOs and journalists on the ground, as the two groups butt heads over sensitive topics. Journalists want access, stats and something splashy. NGOs have their own agenda. Immediacy becomes the name of the game, and it’s the symptoms that get all the coverage, while the root cause goes unchecked.

I know a thing or two about this for a few reasons. One is that I spent a summer looking into humanitarian crisis reporting in Ireland for a thesis, during which I interviewed numerous high-profile journos and media gatekeepers about the problems associated with covering crises. (I compared Ethiopia in 1984 with the Rwandan genocide, and added commentary on the then developing Niger food crisis for good measure).  Another reason is that I spent a year before that studying Aid & Development for a postgrad in what was then UCD’s Centre for Development Studies.

The third reason is that the year after I finished my thesis, I applied for a similar programme to the current Crisis Correspondent which Concern were running. I felt that all the planets were aligned – it seemed to match all my areas of interest and the interview went well, but ultimately I didn’t get it. Up for grabs was an opportunity to visit Concern programmes in East Africa. I spoke to one of the panel after the interview, and was told that it was felt that I posed a threat as I was too curious, too independent. If something went wrong, they guessed, I was not likely to quietly brush it under the specified carpet. In reality, what they were looking for was not a journalist, but a PR intern or multimedia producer, someone who would provide good news stories only and not look too deep.

The recipient of the award that year was another member of my MA class, a top-class journalist who now works for a major national news organisation. I learned from them that there was some wrangling during the course of the trip about what could and could not be covered. The recipient wasn’t entirely comfortable with how it all worked out, but came away with some worthwhile pieces of work nonetheless. The competition was much lower-key than this year’s edition, it must be said, and the candidate was expected to place their work on their own, with no help from the likes of Carr Communications or Morning Ireland.

NGOs need their good stories to be put out there, but equally suffer from suspicion on the part of the public as to how funds and donations are spent and just how efficiently that money is put to use. Fungibility and inefficiencies will always exist in African projects to some extent despite best efforts, and the public often fails to understand this. An example of the suspicion we feel is the latent animosity towards commission-earning chuggers, the most public and abrasive faces of the NGO world. Being seen to hide anything, or try to cover it up, can only lead to further suspicion.

That Concern and Goal are getting together with Carr, who have a mass of media experience, and putting a professional veneer on this kind of initiative is a massive step towards getting better quality coverage for aid & development stories, of which there is a huge abundance. But if you’re a candidate reading this, hoping to be called for interview, my two cents is to play up your creative side, and play down your investigative side. They’re paying for your plane ticket, so it’s unlikely they’ll want someone who’s likely to go opening their closets, looking for those damn skeletons.