Why Christian Aid?
Red envelopes in the middle of May? That’s how someone once described Christian Aid to me. With some 17.5 million house-to-house envelopes ordered for distribution during Christian Aid week in 1992, it is likely that most households in Britain received one. What is behind the familiar envelope? What happens to the money? What happens to the people on whose behalf it is collected?
Christian Aid is an official agency of the British and Irish Churches and exists to combat the poverty and injustice suffered by so many in the world. It seeks to put into practice Christian teaching about human dignity and the equal worth of all people as well as love for our neighbours, especially those in the developing countries.
Christian Aid’s aim is to strengthen the poor through long-term development projects, emergency help in times of disaster and special hardship as well as on-going campaigning and educational work in the UK and Ireland.
Vital to this work are two sets of partners. Overseas partners run the projects and use the money raised here to help those in need in their own countries, cities, towns and villages. Without them, Christian Aid, which has no staff permanently overseas, could not work.
Home partners are the people, mainly from the churches, whose work to raise money and support for Christian Aid, makes everything possible. Over 4000 “committees” — some of which are committees of one — work to make Christian Aid Week in May one of the most effective fundraising ventures there is. In 1992, income from Christian Aid Week reached £9 million. Many committees work year-round at fundraising and at keeping development issues at the front of their churches’ agendas.
Overall, Christian Aid is supported by nearly all the Christian denominations in the UK and Ireland. The Roman Catholic Church has its own Aid and Development organisations but many Catholics, including many here in York, work in or help Christian Aid.
How then did Christian Aid begin? By the end of the Second World War many people in continental Europe had lost their homes and all their possessions in the fighting. Apart from bomb damage, Britain had not been so badly affected, so the British and Irish Churches decided to help by establishing an organisation called “Christian Reconstruction in Europe.”
In 1948, the World Council of Churches was formed and the reconstruction work became part of the British Council of Churches. Then known as “The Department of Inter-Church Aid and Refugee Service”, the name “Christian Aid was not adopted until 1964. Income grew in forty years from £29,000 in 1949 to £28,000,000 in 1989. In the financial year 1991–92, Christian Aid’s income was £42,000,000.
When most people think of the work performed by Christian Aid, their minds usually turn to overseas projects. However, there are two other important kinds of work that go along with this. The first is raising money. It’s not as easy as it might seem. Fundraising carries with it a message — the message that Christian Aid is committed to the equal sharing of resources and to the working out of the potential strengths of those who live in developing countries. So pictures of starving babies are out. Images that inspire revulsion and pity are out.
Christian Aid hopes to inspire giving with words and images that remind people of the ways in which we are similar to the people in developing countries, share similar hopes and dreams, have similar needs. Anyone who has seen Christian Aid’s posters over the years will know what we mean when we speak of positive images. Here is one example: This year’s Christian Aid Week materials feature many photos of a Ugandan coffee farmer called Pebronilla. When her coffee crop had dropped dramatically in value because of prices on the world market, a woman’s co-operative, supported by Christian Aid, helped her to start growing a crop of passion fruit, which could be locally processed and could provide a more secure source of income.
The hope is that people will give to Christian Aid because they believe in the possibilities for helping people like Pebronilla to help themselves.
A second task that Christian Aid does is in campaigning and development education. Up to 10% of the income Christian Aid receives goes into this work. Some of our partners both at home and abroad wish it were more. Educational work includes publications for children and young people around Christian Aid Week and materials for use in schools on the causes of and solutions for world poverty. Work with adults happens through Christian Aid’s area staff, whose contacts with groups throughout the country involve speaking and preaching, writing and broadcasting. All of Christian Aid’s publications seek to help people to more fully understand what poverty is and how we can help.
As well as its own educational work, Christian Aid is a major funder of development education carried out by other groups in the UK and Ireland. In the North East, Christian Aid, along with other groups, funds several Development Education Centres as well as smaller development education ventures.
The task of ending poverty, however, clearly requires more than Christian Aid and other development charities working in more and more villages around the world. It requires huge changes in the way countries relate to each other and in the priorities of governments. Campaigning for a reduction in Third World debt or for better terms of repayment is one way to bring about the end of a system that perpetuates poverty.
Christian Aid aims as a Christian organisation to hold to the view taken by both the Old Testament and by Jesus, that of justice for the poor. Jesus calls them blessed and he brings them good news. This view can sometimes bring a conflict of interests with powerful people and institutions that benefit from the poverty of others. Christian Aid states though, that it never supports any political party or ideology. However, it is often true that the causes of poverty are all too often linked with political issues.
This often means pressing government ministers on different topics. A recent example, indeed an ongoing one, is to do with bananas and in particular the banana producers of the Windward Islands. Some EC countries are pushing for cheap bananas, but Christian Aid have been pressing for effective monitoring of the EC market to provide sufficient protection for the traditional suppliers.
The greatest proportion of Christian Aid’s income — over 80% — goes towards projects overseas. Christian Aid works in 70 countries, supporting some 700 large and small partner organisations in their development work. It has no permanent staff overseas, or projects of its own, but instead concentrates maximum resources on help for the long-term projects that tackle the causes of poverty. To achieve this end, it works closely with the local people, listening to what they are saying about their area, because they know what is needed the most. This can mean supporting agricultural projects to improve land, equipment, crops. Technical training in trades, community health and preventative medicine, self help community developments and counselling on legal rights.
Twice recently, Christian Aid projects have featured on the television. Firstly, on one of the most effective and touching of the Anneka Rice Challenges and more recently on Comic Relief night, with a report by Joanna Lumley on the project which Comic Relief supports through Christian Aid in Eritrea. Here we see a prime example of Christian Aid working with local people. In the past year Christian Aid has spend over £500,000 on projects in Rora Habab, a remote plateau area in Eritrea, now independent from Ethiopia. With the help of the local partner agency (the Eritrean Relief Association) and using some money from Comic Relief, 12,000 people have become self-sufficient in food and seen real improvements in social and community services. Schools and health clinics have been started, with trained local people running them. Land terracing has reduced soil erosion; dam building has improved the water supply. Tree nurseries have been established to counteract deforestation that has happened over the years. A veterinary service is helping farmers to vaccinate their livestock.
When I visited South Africa on behalf of Christian Aid in 1990, I saw a much smaller and different sort of project at work. In Cape Town I went to the local offices of SADWU: the South Africa Domestic Workers’ Union. This is a trade union for the many black people, mostly women, working as domestics in the country. Christian Aid have helped to fund the educational programme which the Union runs. The domestic workers can be very isolated people, even in a changing South Africa. Often required to live in the homes where they are employed, miles away from their families, the women are paid very little. The educational programme involves everything from training in the basics of literacy and numeracy, to practical information about her legal rights as an employee, to cooking and sewing classes.
Nyami Mbhele, who ran the educational programme when I was there, explained what else “educational work” might mean. She said, “We teach the maids to hold their chins up when they speak to the madams. They don’t have to look at the floor. We help them to remember that they are people who are just as important as anyone else. We tell them that it is alright to say ‘no’ if they have been working all day and they are asked to work at night as well.”
SADWU members were holding a march while I was with them. They were asking for things like a legal right to some holiday each year, six weeks maternity leave to have a baby. The banner we marched under read, “An injury to one is an injury to all.” It reminded me that the inequality that exists, alas, even now in South Africa hurts everyone; not just the maids in South Africa, but us here as well. We are all part of the same human family.
In July 1987 Christian Aid agreed, with the help of many partners at home and overseas, a statement of commitment for action and reflection called “To Strengthen the Poor.” The statement reads:
In penitence and hope we commit ourselves to strengthen the poor against injustice.
The majority of the world’s people have scarcely enough to keep them alive. They have little or no say in what happens to them. Unlike the strong they cannot protect or further their own interests.
We cannot be content to alleviate their suffering. It must be brought to an end. The world, we believe, is likely to be a fairer place where strength is not left to take advantage of weakness but is balanced by strength.
We must act strategically to strengthen the arm of the poor until they can stand up to those who so often act against them, and have the power to determine their own development under God.
This strategy for justice is not ours. We can only pursue it in partnership with the poor and all who stand by them. We commit ourselves to partnerships of mutual sharing and accountability which try to achieve in themselves the justice they seek everywhere.
As partners we will welcome diversity and make room for disagreement. Differences of opinion will provide opportunities for listening and plain speaking, not occasions for parting company. Where however there is no commitment to strengthen the poor the future of any partnership must be called into question.
We believe this commitment, above all to a strategy for justice, is required of us by our Christian faith, which also requires us to look beyond a world that is fair to a Kingdom that is more than fair; beyond the power of the strong to strength made perfect in weakness; beyond justice to forgiveness and reconciliation.”
Betty East is Christian Aid Regional Coordinator, and Mark Comer is secretary of the Christian Aid York Committee