It was almost exactly five years ago that I realised something was changing. A video landed on my phone – I was living in Ghana then – raising awareness of “this time of need for Norway”. This “need” was winter, and the video was hilarious. Amid scenes of blizzards, vehicles overturned in snow, and children battling through subzero conditions, glamorous (and warm) African pop stars encouraged donations of radiators for Norway. “People don’t ignore starving people, so why should they ignore cold people?” they sang.

The song, Radi-Aid, was a clear riff on Band Aid, the Feed the World charity set up in response to the 1984 Ethiopian famine. In the ensuing years, Band Aid has come to epitomise the genre that “radiators for Norway” so mocks: poverty porn.

The colonial perspective has such a strong hold that we regard their very identities as in need of being saved

Poverty porn, wrote Jorgen Lissner, who first popularised the term in 1981 as an appropriate label for the aid campaigns targeting developing countries, “exposes something in human life that is as delicate and deeply personal as sexuality, that is, suffering ... It puts people’s bodies, their misery, their grief and their fear on display with all the details and all the indiscretion that a telescopic lens will allow.”

Over three decades later, it seems little has changed. This year, three aid campaigns in particular have attracted attention for the wrong reasons: the singer Ed Sheeran, in a Comic Relief appeal to alleviate poverty in Liberia; the actor Tom Hardy, calling for donations to the Disasters Emergencies Committee for the crisis in Yemen; and the actor Eddie Redmayne, in a DEC advert on the famine in East Africa.

SAIH, the Norwegian group that conceived Radi-Aid, has awarded all three campaigns its “rusty radiator award”. Its verdicts are damning. The campaign featuring Sheeran – who is so moved by the plight of two boys sleeping rough in a filthy canoe during his visit to Liberia that he personally commits to placing them in a hotel until they can be “sorted out” – is found guilty of a particularly narcissistic white saviour offence, with an aggravated charge of “poverty tourism”.

The DEC campaign starring Hardy, who is also clearly touched by the plight of starving children, receives a similar appraisal. “It is surprising to see the ‘white spokesperson trope’ in a development video published in 2017,” SAIH says. “The video offers no political context … How is the long-term issue addressed? Awful.”

These may seem like harsh verdicts. No one is questioning the celebrities’ motive – which seem to me a desire to do good – and Hardy, in particular, attempts to humanise his subjects: “These children live in a far-off country many of us are not familiar with. But they are children nonetheless, children just like yours and mine.”

It’s the right sentiment, but well-intentioned remarks fail to arouse viewers’ empathy when the video has the opposite effect. By showing starving and sick children at their most vulnerable and exposed, it goes against the idea that their dignity is worth as much as his children’s, and creates an artificial distinction between “us” and “them”. Here we are, the resourceful and benevolent agents of change; and they are the passive others in need of our charity.

There’s a simple reason aid agencies use such explicit images: they shock people into giving. And that does, undoubtedly, help alleviate problems in the short term. The East African Emergency campaign between 1980 and 1984, of which Band Aid was a part, brought in £17m for famine relief in Ethiopia. In Yemen, the subject of Hardy’s video, 10,000 children have died of preventable diseases. This is a heartbreaking reality, one we should all commit to trying to change.

But what will really effect change is not charity but activism. The problem with adverts of this kind is that, by denying viewers any context as to who “the victims” are, or the structural factors that have contributed to their situation, they give the impression that the suffering is inevitable. It is not. Yemen’s humanitarian crisis, which the UN has called the worst in the world, is being exacerbated by the continuing blockade by Saudi Arabia, one of Britain’s closest allies. Lobbying the government to stop selling arms to the Saudis would have a far greater impact than charity.

In 2015, the financial assistance received by the 54 countries on the African continent was far outstripped by the $203bn (£150bn) taken out of it by multinationals repatriating profits and moving money into tax havens, or by costs imposed by other countries – many of the same nations whose citizens are being fed the idea that only their generosity can save Africa’s impoverished children.

These narratives do not exist in a vacuum. The colonial perspective – in which we regard the developing world as a place to plunder, while simultaneously congratulating ourselves on our humanitarian concern for its people – has us in an enduring psychosis. This skews our judgment, allowing us to commit these extreme acts of othering, even when – as is clearly the case with these well-intentioned celebrities – we are trying to help.

It’s not that the content of these videos is false. As the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie – who has spoken powerfully of the problems of a “single narrative” of the African continent – has put it, the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue. The problem is that they are stereotypes. And in the long run they are powerful enough, in denying people their agency and caricaturing them as beggars lacking dignity, to create more problems than they solve.

• Afua Hirsch is a freelance writer



• This article was amended on 7 December 2017 to correct the amount taken out of the African continent from £150m to £150bn.

