This is a love story. Forget what you’ve heard. It isn’t a war, it isn’t a fight. It isn’t a race, it isn’t a competition. This is a love story.
Over the last few years, bringing international NGOs together to make the case for aid and development, we’ve been digging deeply into how people think (or, more accurately, how they hardly ever think) about the life-saving work their taxes pay for. We’ve captured that below, as dos and don’ts designed to help spokespeople from international organisations frame interviews, opinion pieces and social media posts in a way that will resonate at a time when families are worried about the impact of the coronavirus crisis on their own finances.
Western governments, following the example of China, have
adopted broadly similar approaches to tackling the COVID-19 pandemic. After
initial hesitation, and once infection rates and deaths have reached sufficiently
alarming levels, they have enforced country-wide lockdowns.
Lower-income countries are beginning to copy this model.
Rwanda, South Africa, and India are on full lockdown; Kenya and Sudan on
partial lockdown. Measures implemented by other low-income countries in Asia,
Africa, and Latin America grow stricter by the day.
A one-size-fits-all approach, however, risks overlooking the
enormous differences between rich and poor countries with regard to living
conditions, social mores, and the availability of resources and services.
As the world prepares for and responds to the direct health impacts of the COVID-19 coronavirus, those of us who work on reducing violence and preventing conflict are also bracing. The coronavirus pandemic is already producing knock-on effects for safety at the individual level, the community level, and – potentially – at the international level.
Recognizing and naming the risks we
face is imperative, as is highlighting the positive steps being taken to
reinforce peaceful resilience, to remind ourselves of our common humanity, and
to re-invest in the international systems of cooperation that are more critical
now than at any time in the past decade.
You’re not being bold enough. I don’t mean that you should be going out. Stay at home, covidiots! I’m writing this from home in Italy – and just as it is said that the past is another country, right now this other country, Italy, is probably your future. So stay home.
And I don’t mean the nurses and the frontline workers – you are heroes. You are the boldest and the best of us.
I mean you policy wonks and thought leaders and popular economists. Seriously, you are not being bold enough.
Just like climate change or political tribalism, coronavirus asks us: do we see ourselves as part of a Larger Us, a them-and-us, or an atomised “I”?
Each of us is answering that question all the time right now. Do we hoard hand sanitiser, or leave enough for others? Do we observe social distancing protocols, or shrug and figure we’re young enough that the symptoms will be no big deal so why worry? Do we think we’re all in this together, or do we blame it on others (the Chinese, the Mexicans, the Americans)?
