Ed Sheeran’s fundraising campaign video for Liberian children perfectly exemplifies why people from the west must be careful in the way they conduct themselves when attempting to do humanitarian work. Ed Sheeran’s video often seems to revolve more around Ed Sheeran than about the issues at hand in Liberia. The video plays Sheehan’s music while it focuses on the artists reactions to seeing the poverty of Liberian children first hand. After the video is over the audience is not much more informed about the issues going on in Liberia than they had been before the video had started.

To be completely fair, the video was successful in raising many millions of dollars, and I’m sure most of this money went into benefiting the people in need, however, the video embodies what is wrong with a lot of humanitarian work of Westerners working in developing nations. First of all a lot of humanitarian work often dehumanizes the people receiving the benefits of the fundraiser. The people are projected and perceived as helpless victims who require Westerners to come save them and raise them from poverty. Secondly, those participating in the humanitarian work often approach the work as a self esteem booster, they do the work to feel better with themselves rather selflessly helping others.

The same issues can be applied to the  humanitarian work programs many Western teens go through in which they travel to developing countries in order to “help out” the locals. Such trips could include work-learn programs or religious mission trips,  where the traveler provide services which the community needs done such as house building, working in coffee fields, doing reforestation and many other activities. However, when traveling abroad to these areas to fulfill this role, it is important to remember that the westerners are not saviors to the community, and that the people living in those communities are not simply victems of poverty, but also everyday people just as much as the middle class of the western countries where the teens come from.

Much of these attitudes can be attributed to the demeaning way other countries are presented in western media, and the way in which these views are internalized by the youth of those nations. “Poverty Porn” has become incredibly useful in mobilizing westerners’ empathy to draw out dollars and get active them active in humanitarian efforts, however it creates a negative view of developing countries and those who live there.