07 ISSUE III
FEBRUARY 2025
FEBRUARY 2025
At the funeral of modern global aid
In her new novel, the writer delves into understated themes of international development as a gay American woman of Indian descent working in the sector.
By Mala Kumar
“If we do our jobs well, we’ll all be made redundant,” my boss said. I set my beer glass down on the table and sat back, drinking in both the alcohol and her words. “How so?” I asked, even though I knew the answer. “Well, our jobs are to build local resilience and capacity, are they not?” she replied. “Indeed,” I agreed, albeit quietly. As any good practitioner should acknowledge, international development has different layers of goals. Yes, my boss and I were in Senegal to help develop a new way to build resilience against chronic food insecurity. But the ultimate goal of our profession, however hard to acknowledge so early in my career, was to do a good enough job so that, at some point, our work would no longer be needed.
That conversation with my former boss happened just a few years after I finished graduate school. More than a decade later, I sat in front of copies of my second novel, WHAT IT MEANT TO SURVIVE (Bywater Books, 2024), in which I explored many themes and events that have directly, deeply, and profoundly shaped me as a person. The most obvious is the mass shooting, dubbed “the Virginia Tech Massacre” by the media, which in real life, killed three of my friends. I also explored several cultural challenges and stigmas I experienced in being with my wife, who is from Lagos, Nigeria. One of the more understated themes I explored was my life as a gay American woman of Indian origin who works in international development. As Ramya, one of the novel’s main protagonists, put it, “She never quite knew where to place herself on the spectrum of oppressed < – > oppressor.”
To write from the perspective of Ramya, I had to self-reflect on my career in tech for international development/tech for social good. I spent 15 years designing, building, implementing and deploying tech tools of all shapes, sizes, functions and purposes to advance nearly every Sustainable Development Goal (SDG). I’ve spent most of my career at the United Nations and in big tech, and at varying points, I have been met with well-earned recognition, good compensation, and global access that is hard to achieve as a gay woman of color.
But I’ve also benefited from the privilege that comes with my American citizenship and accent, and that undoubtedly helped me gain employment at these prestigious institutions and companies. And so my reflection went: in its sum total, what did I actually accomplish for the people on the ground? What expertise did I really offer? How did I benefit from a system that values “international” over “local” staff? Did I add more than I took? Does any of that really matter? The international development industry, the institutions that shape it, and my role within were not lost on me as I wrote WHAT IT MEANT TO SURVIVE.
With the likely collapse of USAID and the myriad of downstream effects it will have globally, this reflection feels especially relevant. A generationally wealthy white South African who grew up during Apartheid and later became a tech investor in the US has helped irrevocably gut decades of progress that, admittedly, sat at the cusp of the same orientalist system that propelled him to success. On an infinitely smaller, infinitely less evil scale, it’s the same orientalist system that aided me in my success and that Ramya contends with in WHAT IT MEANT TO SURVIVE.
One of the fundamental differences between working in international development and in private sector tech is the latter grows as you become more successful.
“scale, Scale, SCALE!”
The tech industry constantly screams in our face. If you are successful in tech, the industry fables, your work grows. If you are successful in international development, the industry fables, your work shrinks. This whiplash effect is only compounded by the fact that in American corporate tech, your team and life’s work can be shut down, reorganized, or otherwise cease to exist at the whims of a very few number of people and with no advanced notice. This same South African individual is responsible for one of the most infamous of such shutdowns in modern tech history. Now, he and it are back to rear their ugly heads.
It’s with that same destructive heavy-handedness we are seeing the sudden erasure of about forty percent of all global aid. Oh the irony, that our goal in international development was already to shut ourselves down as a sign of good progress. Instead, we’ve been fed into a proverbial woodchipper, making mulch out of decades of work that undoubtedly must go on lest we slip into an unprecedented and dangerous era of extreme global poverty and, eventually, violence.
Ramya is a character of my imagination and her journey of self-reflection as both a subject of and a purveyor of oppression ended in chapter 33 of WHAT IT MEANT TO SURVIVE. For me, for you, and for the rest of us who are somewhere on that oppressed < – > oppressor spectrum, we must decide what we can do and what comes next to tip the balances back to a more just era. At the funeral of modern global aid, these effects must grow.
Mala Kumar is a global leader in tech for social good. She is the author of the novels, ‘THE PATHS OF MARRIAGE’ and ‘WHAT IT MEANT TO SURVIVE.’ Mala has worked for the UN and GitHub and lives in New York City with her wife.