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We are all consumers. When we purchase medicine, or processed food, or petrol, when we take out a loan, or hire a mechanic or a plumber, we do so with a vast array of legal and institutional arrangements in place to protect our interests as consumers.

These rights and protections are the result of over 50 years of people organizing for their consumer rights, and governments responding with rules and regulations designed to ensure that the products and services we buy are safe, effective and fairly priced. Wherever the consumer rights movement is strong, the mechanisms are in place to hold sellers to account for inferior products and services.

The contrast with the ‘development industry’ of aid, donations, and citizens groups acting for some public benefit could not be greater. There is no consensus on what these rights should be. The poor and disadvantaged people who are meant to benefit from aid are not organized to protect their ‘consumer interests’ as aid recipients.  There are no Consumer Councils of aid beneficiaries. There is no legislation geared to ensure that aid is safe, effective, and delivered at a reasonable cost. There are no independent watchdog agencies – public or private -- that maintain standards and test and review the quality of development products and services.

It is the donors and the implementing organizations that dictate the standards and practices that prevail in the development industry; those meant to benefit can do precious little to hold them to account. The development industry is at best, technocratic, and at worst authoritarian. Perhaps the most accurate descriptor is paternalistic. It is an industry in which those with resources and skills ‘dispense’ development to the people in whose name they claim to be working, people with very little choice in the matter.  

In the past decade, there has been a growing clamour for better accountability and, related to this, measurability, in the development industry. But absent a very small number of relatively isolated radical innovators, this clamour has generated more heat than light.[1]

Is it not time to formulate and commit to a clear statement of the rights of consumers in the development industry?

Is it not time that the power that comes from the control of resources, skills and institutions of development is balanced by the power of the rights of the primary consumers?

Could a campaign for the rights of aid consumers become the driver that lifts the development industry from a one-sided, top-down, ineffective and bureaucratic ‘dispensers and receivers’ model to a dynamic and creative collaboration among diverse actors that makes us all constituents of a process towards a more just and happy world?

Towards a Consumer Rights Charter for Aid Recipients

What might a rights charter for aid recipients look like? If we take economic consumer rights as a point of reference, five basic rights come to mind:

1. The right to safety – to be protected against aid products and services that are harmful or hazardous to health or life, are wasteful of scarce resources or are socially, culturally or economically damaging. The humanitarian aid field must remain especially vigilant to this danger as aid workers and peacekeepers have great power over extremely vulnerable populations.

2. The right to be informed – to be provided in an appropriate way with all the information relevant to people for the purpose of holding an aid project or organization to account for its actions. This right needs to be spelled out and embedded at each stage in the operational cycle, including needs assessment, planning, implementation, monitoring, and reporting.  [2]

3. The right to be heard and respected – where the poor and marginalized are guaranteed the right to speak as equals in dialogues where the views of all involved and affected are heard and responded to seriously. This means in the planning and monitoring of interventions and in the reflection, learning and reporting. To be meaningful, reporting on aid and civil society organization work needs to be genuinely inclusive of consumer views and experiences as opposed to the prevailing practice of the selective publication of ‘feel good’ or ‘success’ stories. [3]

4. The right to choose – to have, wherever possible, some choice among aid products and services. In the circumstances in which choice is not practical, to have some assurance of satisfactory quality at an affordable price. We would not let companies sell new drugs absent a clear demonstration of the effectiveness of those drugs. Why do we allow untested and unproven aid projects to be foisted on people? Assurances here could include transparency to those intended to benefit of how funds are raised and how they are spent. By setting and enforcing meaningful standards of public and donor reporting, we can make significant progress toward keeping the system open to new entrants with better ideas. Reporting that includes the perspectives of aid consumers will allow them to influence the aid donors.

5. The right to representation – to have representatives from those meant to benefit from aid seated at all governance and important decision-making bodies of aid agencies and civil society organizations. The best guard against paternalism is democracy -- to directly empower those meant to benefit through formal structural power in an organization.