Aidnography

Twenty years ago, Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures was published. The catchy title ensured that the book became one of the first modern classics of aid worker literary endeavours, mixing autobiographical anecdotes, a bit of fiction and an unfiltered view of what it is really like to be a humanitarian. Mustafa Marwan’s Guns and Almond Milk is a contemporary answer to the question of how we ended up in a hospital in Yemen’s port city of Aden with a lot less sex and a whole lot more desperate measures… But let’s start at the beginning, perhaps even a bit before… When I first saw Marwan’s book, I expected something a bit more light-hearted. After all, “almond milk” has become a trope in aid worker social media circles after someone posted a question about the availability of non-dairy drinks in Lebanon in a large and well-known global aid Facebook group. “Almond milk” turned into a meme for privileged Western expectations of life in “the field”. We are not in Solferino anymore

NightCafe prompt "Sweden cuts development aid" While the announcements of cuts that large INGOs like International Rescue Committee (IRC) and Save The Children International (SCI) have recently made receive attention in the sector, the developments in Sweden provide a glimpse what the “future of aid” may hold for traditional Western donors and particular their civil society. I agree to a large extent with Will Worley’s assessment that International aid agencies pay the price for boom and bust and that “staff cuts and financial turbulence (…) follow years of aggressive growth (…), even as government aid budgets have fallen” but what we are seeing in Sweden right now is worrisome on a different level. Just over a year ago I wrote about The worrisome shift to the right of Nordic development cooperation and the fall-out has now become quite visible in Sweden, after initially toning down feminist foreign policy and cutting development-related academic research funding. When I