In October 1984, a three-year-old girl lay close to death in a feeding centre in northern Ethiopia while a BBC camera crew filmed. The footage became the picture of the famine. It was played at Live Aid the following year. According to The New Humanitarian, her emaciated face reached television screens around the world while almost nobody who used it knew her name.
Her name is Birhan Woldu. She survived, went on to study agriculture, and was introduced on stage by Bob Geldof at Live 8 in 2005. The same New Humanitarian report records her fear that quick fixes and dependency would continue without real help. The girl on the screen had been a symbol of need for years before she was asked what she thought about aid. She said nothing came of it, and lives her life largely underground because of the fame.
That gap is the whole problem. A campaign lasts a season. The person in the photograph keeps living in the same community, often in a place where the image is still findable. Everything else in ethical NGO storytelling follows from taking that seriously.
What the sector has already written down
None of this is new. In 2007, Irish development NGOs adopted the Dóchas Code of Conduct on Images and Messages, which CONCORD approved the same year for its European membership. The code rests on respect for dignity, belief in equality, and a commitment to fairness, solidarity and justice. Its seven principles include representing a situation truthfully in its wider context, avoiding stereotypes and sensationalism, and using images only with the full understanding, participation and permission of the people shown or their guardians. Signatories also have to give the public a way to complain.
More than 70 organisations had signed by the time DevelopmentEducation.ie catalogued the code. Signing is easy. Following it in the week a campaign deadline collides with a budget gap is the hard part.
The people who keep score
Since 2013, the Norwegian student group SAIH has run the Radi-Aid Awards, handing a Rusty Radiator to the worst use of stereotypes in a fundraising video and a Golden Radiator to the best. The winners are instructive on both sides.
In 2014, the Rusty Radiator went to Feed a Child South Africa for a spot that showed a Black child in the role of a dog, making the point that some animals there eat better than some children. The organisation later retracted it, while noting that a viral video cannot really be recalled. The intention was to shock people into caring. What actually went into circulation was a child compared to an animal.
In 2015, the Rusty went to Band Aid 30, and the Golden went to the White Helmets for The Heroes and the Miracle Baby, in which the Syrian rescue worker Khaled Farah tells, in his own voice, the story of a baby pulled from rubble in Aleppo. The people with the most at stake are the narrators. The audience still feels something, and nobody has been reduced to a prop.
The Band Aid argument has not gone away. The British-Ghanaian musician Fuse ODG turned down the 2014 recording because he believed it dehumanised Africans, and Ed Sheeran, who sang on that version, has since distanced himself from the song. This is not his first time as moving away from controversy.
The part that is awkward to admit: it works
An honest piece on this topic has to deal with the fact that bleak imagery raises money. Sheeran’s 2017 Comic Relief film, in which he meets a homeless boy in Liberia, won the Rusty Radiator that year. Comic Relief said the film helped raise $109 million as part of its Red Nose Day campaign, and a New York Times op-ed by Tariro Mzezewa argued the backlash was overblown and could discourage people from giving.
The research is mixed in the same way. A survey experiment by Bayram and Holmes found that negative, personalised images of people in despair increased support for foreign aid. A review of the literature, summarised by Critical Fundraising, found tentative support for the practitioner belief that sad faces raise more money, particularly when donors have little time or information, while stressing that the evidence is far from overwhelming.
The opposite claim, that this imagery breeds paternalism in the public, is less well tested than its loudest advocates suggest. A 2024 experimental study noted that the link had been widely asserted with almost no experimental evidence, and in its own test, the Save the Children advertisements did not change respondents’ likelihood of donating.
So the case against exploitative storytelling does not rest on conversion rates. It rests on the people being portrayed, on accuracy, and on what an organisation is willing to do to someone’s face in exchange for a better response rate. That is an ethical argument, and it should be made as one.
What the people in the pictures say
For decades the people in the pictures were the one group nobody consulted. Save the Children changed that with The People in the Pictures, a study by Jess Crombie and Siobhan Warrington. The research covered the UK, Jordan, Bangladesh and Niger and involved 202 children, women and men: contributors, people from similar communities, and staff.
Its main recommendations are plain. Informed consent should be treated as a process with several stages, not a signature at the end of a shoot. Dignity has to hold during the making of the image, not only in the finished frame. Save the Children said it would revise its image guidelines and develop a consent app in response.
The follow-up work came from the Bond Ethical Storytelling Group, founded by Crombie and the late Tamsin Maunder, whose guidelines Putting the people in the pictures first put the standard in six words: if it isn’t informed, it isn’t consent. Consent has to be gathered in advance of, and separately from, the content gathering itself. For groups and children, the guidelines require specific arrangements rather than a shrug.
Practical changes
The code, the awards and the research point at a short set of habits that can be audited in any communications team.
| Common practice | Problem | Replacement |
|---|---|---|
| Photographing first, explaining later | Consent given without knowing where the image will run is not informed | Explain the purpose, the channels and the shelf life before the camera comes out, and record the consent separately |
| An unnamed child as the face of a statistic | Reduces a person to an emblem, as in the Woldu case | Name people where it is safe and agreed, and give them a role beyond suffering |
| A single image of crisis with no context | Falls foul of the Dóchas principle on truthful representation | Show the cause, the response, and what the community is already doing |
| Celebrity visits fronting the film | Centres the visitor; Labour MP David Lammy called photos from Stacey Dooley’s Uganda trip tired and unhelpful stereotypes, and Sheeran’s Liberia film drew similar charges | Let project staff, parents, teachers and local filmmakers carry the story |
| Treating a published image as permanent | Images outlast programmes, and people change their minds | Set a review date, and honour withdrawal requests |
| No public route for complaints | Required of Dóchas signatories | Publish a feedback address on the same page as the code |
One organization that changed course
Comic Relief offers the most useful recent example, partly because it had so much to lose. In October 2020 it announced that it would stop sending celebrities to Africa for appeal films. Local filmmakers would direct all new African films for Red Nose Day 2021, with project workers, doctors, teachers and parents leading the stories. Co-founder Lenny Henry said at the time, “African people don’t want us to tell their stories for them.”
The shift followed years of pressure, including the Sheeran film and a Stacey Dooley trip to Uganda. It also came with something concrete: the Sema Stori programme, which funded ten emerging African filmmakers to make short films on social issues. The organization did not give up fundraising. It changed who held the camera.
An NPR review of Comic Relief’s 2018 ads shows the limits of an early version of this effort. Commentators there still found the “quick fix” framing of a malaria spot and little sign of systemic change in a family planning film. Changing the voice does not fix a thin story. It only makes the next fix possible.
A working test
Most failures in this field come from deadlines, not villains. A usable test for a draft appeal is whether the person in it could read the copy, see the picture, and recognize themselves as someone with a past, a view and a future. If the only thing the draft allows them to be is grateful or suffering, the draft is not finished.
Birhan Woldu’s story ended up better than most. She survived, was eventually named, and was given a platform even though it drastically changed her life. None of that was designed into the way the original footage was used. The job of a communications team is to build processes so that decent outcomes do not depend on luck.
Sources
- Dóchas Code of Conduct on Images and Messages (Habitat for Humanity Ireland summary of principles)
- Dóchas Code of Conduct, via DevelopmentEducation.ie
- Dóchas Code of Conduct, via CONCORD
- The Dóchas code of conduct on images and messages, SOFII
- The Radi-Aid Awards, PhotoVoice
- And the award for most offensive fundraising video goes to…, NPR Goats and Soda (2014)
- Radiator Awards kick back at aid industry stereotypes, Eldis/IDS (2015)
- Stop hating on Ed Sheeran’s fundraising ad, say critics, NPR (2017)
- ‘Face of famine’ has evolved to hope 20 years on, The New Humanitarian
- This concert was the soundtrack to soft power, Georgia Public Broadcasting (2025)
- British-Ghanaian singer Fuse ODG urges artists to follow Ed Sheeran, Malay Mail/Reuters (2024)
- The Logic of Negative Appeals, International Studies Quarterly (Bayram and Holmes)
- Poverty Porn and Perceptions of Agency: An Experimental Assessment (2024)
- How ought beneficiary stories be told?, Critical Fundraising (2018)
- The People in the Pictures, Save the Children Resource Centre
- The people in the pictures, Bond (2017)
- Putting the people in the pictures first, Bond Ethical Storytelling Group
- Comic Relief announces move away from celebrity-led appeal films, UK Fundraising (2020)
- Comic Relief to stop sending celebrities to Africa, Deadline (2020)
- Comic Relief tries to improve its charity ads, NPR (2018)
