Origin – Africa – followthethings.com

“Radi-aid: Africa For Norway“
NGO video campaign by and for The Norwegian Students’ & Academics International Assistance Fund (SAIH).
Video playlist embedded above. Campaign website here.

It’s unusual to find a humanitarian campaign where people in the Global South take pity on people in the Global North and send them aid in the hope that it will improve their miserable, pitiless lives. The kind citizens of many African countries, blessed with warmth that many take for granted, get together to help the people of Norway who are suffering terribly from freezing cold temperatures. What better to send them? Electric radiators. Charity workers collect and deliver them to grateful aid recipients. They even record a charity single and video to raise awareness and funds, like Band Aid’s ‘Do they know it’s Christmas?’ or USA for Africa’s ‘We are the world’. Their song is just as awful. Just as patronising. Just as one dimensional. Just an inaccurate. Just as tear-jerking. This is a campaign by a Norwegian development NGO that wants to challenge the ‘white saviour complex’ that so much European development NGO fundraising is based upon. What if the tables were turned? What if you were represented in the way that you represent others? What if you found that offensive, partial, ridiculous? Would that lead you to think differently about humanitarian aid, the way it is represented in charity ads, and the things that its NGOs send to people who it sees as needy? Like goats. This campaign, and particularly the video for its charity single ‘Africa for Norway’, went viral. This became a very public debate. Who could have imagined that a gift of radiators could have been so effective?

Page reference: Marie Conmee, Rebecca Jones, Frederic Montaner-Wills, Thomas Paulsen, James Pidding, Hannah Rusbridge & Joe Shrimpton (2016) Radi-Aid: Africa For Norway (taster). followthethings.com/radi-aid.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 9 minutes.