The amount of personal obligations and ethical considerations involved in development work may not be inexhaustible -- but there are certainly enough that it would be challenging to develop an overarching framework in 500 words or less. (A user’s manual may not be such a bad idea).
However, it seems that some of our key knowledge on these topics can stem from the unusual or jarring experiences that suddenly bring these issues to light. In the absence of a clear, widely-accepted rubric of ‘ethical’ development, these circumstances can be very instructive in qualifying both what we should do (obligations) and how we should do it (ethical considerations).
Some recent HIV-related work I’ve done around ‘men who have sex with men’ (MSM) in developing countries may provide a good example of this. (The footnote here is that MSM is a behavior rather than a self-identification, which is why it’s not just shortened to ‘homosexual’).
Put simply, MSM populations are extremely vulnerable to HIV for a variety of reasons. Stigmatization and criminalization have led to an extreme lack of prevention services and care. To put the added risk in perspective -- MSM in Bolivia are 179 times more likely to contract HIV than a member of the general population.
Unfortunately, the neglect that MSM populations face in their home countries is matched by the international donor community. Only a fraction of the billions of HIV aid dollars goes to MSM services and organizations.
I was shocked when I discovered these statistics, and my surprise got me thinking about the obligations we have to vulnerable populations, and the ethical considerations that should factor into our projects.
In the case of MSM funding, the obligation is to acknowledge the hard truths about the issues we deal with and organize our work accordingly. We have an obligation in this case, for example, to match HIV funding dollars to the impact of the epidemic rather than pet projects and causes. (No easy task to be sure -- and impossible without community-wide coordiantion -- but I think it's an obligation nonetheless.)
Second, the ethical implications should involve a careful and robust consideration of how projects are funded and carried out – ‘do no harm’ is usually a good starting point, though many other issues come into play. Funding MSM groups or other ‘invisible populations’ is a difficult task, as grantees need to be kept anonymous for fear of government or community reprisals.
This is admittedly a pretty simplistic assessment of an issue, and what it could mean int erms of our obligations and ethics. However, I think these jarring experiences are some of the best ways to suddenly discover a new way of looking at an issue -- and that in itself can be instructive in terms of our of personal obligations and ethical development practices.
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