Hooked on Dependency: the Pitfalls of Teaching a Man to Fish
George Carlin, one of my favourite all time comedians, with a unique take on the well known phrase.
For over a century, common wisdom suggests that it’s far better to teach a man to fish, than it is to give a man a fish. I agree, but I think the aphorism doesn’t go far enough.
In the 1885 novel “Mrs. Dymond”, the popular novelist Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie wrote:
“He certainly doesn’t practise his precepts, but I suppose the Patron meant that if you give a man a fish he is hungry again in an hour. If you teach him to catch a fish you do him a good turn. But these very elementary principles are apt to clash with the leisure of the cultivated classes.”
Upgrading to modern times, the saying goes, “Give a person a fish, and you feed them for a day. Teach a person to fish, and you feed them for a lifetime.”
This phrase has been used widely in charity work and international development. After all, decades of handing out fish had resulted in dependency on charities, and surely teaching people to fish would end this. For many countries such as the Solomon Islands, development aid was the primary source of income.
But as I outlined in my book, Redundant Charities, the cycle of dependency only really ends when the charity isn’t needed anymore. It’s when the charity can shut down that the cycle is truly broken.
So what’s better than teaching a person to fish?
Help them build their own fishing industry.
This mean that you address the root causes of the problem as opposed to just the symptoms. It means the charity can make itself redundant.
Let’s use the example I found in Cambodia when I first arrived in 2012 . Despite one in 25 people needing speech therapy, there was not one single Cambodian speech therapist in the whole country. This was a situation that many well-meaning foreigners from countries like France, the United States and Australia had recognised.
Giving a person a fish in this case would mean sending across speech therapists to Cambodia to provide therapy for a few weeks a year, perhaps in their annual leave. As noble and self-sacrificing as this is, speech therapy takes weeks, if not months or years to produce a difference. Providing the service for a few days in a village makes little to no difference.
Beyond this, some foreign speech therapists in Cambodia appear to have limited understanding of language, cultural considerations, history and power dynamics. They may well be excellent therapists in their home countries, but this apparent lack of contextual knowledge can significantly restrict their effectiveness in Cambodia.
These fly in fly out visits are often referred to as “missions” – an outdated word with echoes of the term “missionary”. The connotations of this highly paternalistic description align with the mentality behind giving a person a fish. And yet, these missions continue to occur.
The irony of these methods of helping is that while their long term impact on the country of Cambodia is questionable, their impact on the visitors is enormous.
They are very connected to the cause and quite understandably feel good about helping. Because there are tangible effects of their efforts, the effects make for great social media posts and tons of kudos.
Voluntourism, the idea of combining volunteering with a holiday for tourism, can have a longer lasting effect on the volunteers than the people you’re trying to help.
But that’s not what effective helping is about. Truly working with local partners at the forefront and supporting their needs often involves sitting in the background and not portraying yourself as an agent of change. This doesn’t make for great social media posts.
While giving a person a fish is almost universally accepted as ineffective, teaching a person to fish is only marginally better.
In the context of speech therapy in Cambodia, teaching a person to fish is, for example, Australian speech therapists flying to Cambodia to conduct workshops with Cambodian health and disability workers to improve their knowledge of speech therapy.
As in the first example, taking their annual leave to do so results in a couple of weeks of training per year. But as per the first example, without a grounding in context, training can only go so far.
Have you ever tried to explain something really technical about an area of interest — say, the Westminster system of government — to someone you don’t know well? You would have to spend a significant amount of time understanding their level of knowledge before launching in.
The same goes for training people in a profession. And yet, with only a couple of weeks per year, there simply isn’t the time to do this. Well hang on a second, you might say. If training is so ineffective, then why do so many people request it?
This is one of the rare occasions when simply asking people what they want is not going deep enough.
Put yourself in the shoes of a Cambodian community disability worker. Your job, day in, day out, is to get on a motorbike and drive long distances along dusty roads, in often 35-degree heat, to see children in their homes.
A rich Western agency is offering you the chance to sit in an air-conditioned room for a few days, with lunch supplied, and learn skills to improve your knowledge. Oh, and on top of that, they’re going to be paying you a per diem, a daily stipend of US$20 for the inconvenience. I don’t blame anyone for wanting to take up this option.
Prior to starting OIC Cambodia in 2013, there had been decades of people coming into Cambodia to provide training courses of various lengths. And still, at that stage, there was not one single Cambodian speech therapist in the country.
The issue with training is that it comes from the outside in. It’s not a Cambodian-owned, Cambodian-led solution. It will always be paternalistic.
After working with my Cambodian colleagues for years, I could see how the continued cycle of volunteers flying in and out of Cambodia - the celebrated ‘teach a person to fish’ approach - had led to very little long term change.
This is why to create real change in countries like Cambodia, we need to move beyond teaching a person to fish.
What we need is to help Cambodia create its own fishing industry. In the case of OIC Cambodia, this is a Cambodian-owned, Cambodian-led speech therapy profession.
In practical terms, this means thinking about what is needed in a country for this to exist. Rather than thinking about what solutions a charity can offer, OIC Cambodia was started with the end in mind. We thought about the results that we wanted to have and then designed activities around them.
We would need a university course. We’d need government policy integrating the profession into schools and hospitals. We’d need to stimulate demand for the profession. We’d need evidence base and local tools and resources.
These activities and the ensuring results would then avoid all debate around mission drift. As opportunities come up to do specific pieces of work, all anyone needs to ask to determine if it’s appropriate or not is, “Does this piece of work get us any closer to our end point?”
And that’s the beauty of a fishing industry approach. Clarity, and a defined end point.
It turns out George Carlin got it wrong.
When teaching a person to fish, you can’t just sit in your boat drinking beer all day, because there’s always more to do. You’re still on the cycle of dependence – needing to do more and more teaching.
When you create a fishing industry, with the people you’re working with at the forefront in positions of power – that’s different. One day, the work will be well and truly done. And you can sit back in a boat, drinking all the beer you like.
I don’t know about you, but that sounds pretty good to me.
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