Book tackles taboo topic of dual aid salaries

Wednesday, October 20, 2010
Book tackles taboo topic of dual aid salaries

Organisational psychologist Professor Stuart Carr tackles the issue of dual salaries for local and international aid workers in his new book.

The Aid Triangle explores alternatives to what Professor Carr considers an inherent injustice – that people from developed countries can earn 10 times more than a local worker in a developing nation for doing the same job.

It is a scenario he and co-authors Professors Malcolm MacLachlan and Eilish McAuliffe call a form of "economic apartheid" harking back to colonial days. The huge disparity in pay rates can inflate the local economy to the detriment of locals.

"A lot of aid is not dignified," Professor Carr says. "So how can you expect people to get involved and motivated by it when it's actually undermining the very thing it is supposed to be facilitating or enabling? It has to stop replicating the things it seeks to remove, like inequality."

He says the subject has been considered taboo. "People don't like to talk about salaries at the best of times. Those salaries are symbolic of a whole range of things, like inequality and status. Even the language people use – 'developing', 'third world' and 'lower-income economies' – reinforces the inequalities. There is a hierarchy in the world, and we're not supposed to talk about it."

The authors say such contradictions "are sometimes so stark and so uncomfortable that aid workers may act as though they are 'splitting' their consciousness; being forced to coexist in an aid system that at once places them in situations of great need, suffering and perhaps even starvation, and at the same time in situations of great affluence, hedonism and overindulgence".

"I actually think the solutions aren't complicated – you raise [some salaries], you lower [others], or you meet in the middle," Professor Carr says. "The bit that needs work, is figuring out which one works."

He and his co-authors have recently won a grant from the British government to evaluate the effectiveness of raising civil service salaries in lower-income economies.

Change is already in the wind: Papua New Guinea, one of the nations he has been closely involved with, is leading the way by debating the scrapping of dual salaries at its National University.

"Ultimately, we can't continue with a system designed for colonial days,' Professor Carr says. "That whole system doesn't stack up anymore because you have poorer nations with well-educated, trained people now. What do you replace it with? Something that's going to work better."

ENDS

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