Professional Documents
Culture Documents
CASE #1. Food For The Children-Or Bribes For The Minister of Education?
CASE #1. Food For The Children-Or Bribes For The Minister of Education?
IN INTERNATIONAL NGOs
CASE #1. Food for the childrenor bribes for the Minister of Education?
Food for the Children, an international NGO based in the UK, provides foodgrains and
powdered milk to families where children are at risk of malnourishment or starvation. It
has provided food to families in the small South Pacific Island nation of Papua Tuyua for
the past eight years, utilizing the school system as the means of identifying needy
children and distributing the food. The Minister of Education in Papua Tuyua has
approved the involvement of the school system in this project, though each year the
process of approval has become more cumbersome and drawn out. Sarah Britton has
arrived from London for a one week visit as the representative from Food for the
Children sent to negotiate the arrangement, and she quickly comes to the opinion that the
Education Minister is delaying the process in hopes for a bribe. The local school officials
are eager for the food supplies and assure Sarah that they can distribute the food on their
own with or without the Ministers approval.
Sarah sends an email to the executive committee in London requesting instructions on
what she should do. The food has to be supplied within the next several days before the
monsoons come.
ROLE PLAY. You are members of the executive committee. What should Sarah do?
CASE #2. Combatting AIDS can be funor not?
Jessica Eager is a young American working with a group of international interns in the
President Clinton AIDS-Awareness Campaigna US-based educational NGO operating
in Africathat has sent the team out after a slide-show introduction to African culture
and instructions to be creative. She thinks she has the perfect approach to getting the
word out about condom use to young people in the village of Northern Nigeria.
Remembering how AIDS education was effectively conducted when she was in college in
Santa Barbara, Jessica thinks that the best way to reach young people is through a
positive approach. Rather than promoting the health benefits of condoms and scaring
young people with the threat of disease, she and her fellow interns create a local
campaign based on skits that describe the fun of condom use in sexual situations. One of
the more amusing skits involves a young woman attempting to put a condom on a banana
and then on a large gourd while talking to the vegetable as if it were her naughty lover.
Initially Jessica is delighted that the skits appear to be such a huge success. Enormous
crowds gather, and the young men in the village seem to be especially delighted with the
presentations. But the Muslim elders in the village meet secretly and decide that this
nonsense has to be stopped. They demand that Jessica and the interns leave the village
immediately and that the Clinton AIDS-Awareness Campaign be reprimanded for
promoting immorality. New York staff members rush to Nigeria to deal with the crisis.
ROLE PLAY. You are in one of the following three groups:
1. Sarah and the interns
2. The Muslim village elders
3. The NY staff of the Clinton Foundation
Explain your position and see if it is possible to come to a compromise or a resolution
of the conflict.