Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, December 2004, pages 36, 75

Special Report

Into Africa: A Low-Profile, High-Impact Charity

By Roger Harrison

A woman separates grain from dust after an April 16 food aid delivery at the El Meshter camp for displaced people near El Fashir, in Sudan’s western Darfur region (AFP photo Unicef/Ben Parker).

IN ABOUT THE TIME it takes to consume the hors d’oeuvres in the business-class cabin of a modern jetliner, the traveler passes from oil-rich Saudi Arabia west across the Red Sea from Jeddah and over the coast of Africa. From that continent, images of ragged African women carrying inert, staring babies, with abdomens bloated from starvation, are the common currency of television reportage. Lack of viewer interest in the plight of millions of such people is explained away with the euphemism “compassion fatigue.”

Occasionally, however, the images of poverty beamed into the extremes of luxury produce more than a yawn and scramble for the remote.

In one such instance, an elderly woman, clad in rags, lath-thin and barely able to move, squatted on the parched ground in the searing African sun clutching an immobile baby to her side. Slowly, she scraped the desiccated earth from a small mound of soil with a stick and probed inside. She withdrew her hand after a few seconds and ate the ants that covered it.

Three thousand miles away, in a luxurious hotel suite in northern Europe, the image, included in yet another news report on the plight of the people of Niger, appeared on a television, left on as background company.

The impact on one viewer was sudden and shocking. Coming froman ultra-privileged royal background and wealth, the starkness of the image of terminal poverty amid the hotel suite’s overstuffed Louis Quatorze decor first shocked, then prompted the question, “Why?”

The viewer made a swift telephone call to an aide; the instruction was simple. “Find that woman.”

Few people would have had either the resources or the will to do so. But the reach and philanthropic power of HRH Sultan Bin Abdulaziz turned the instruction into actuality. In a remarkably short period she was found—and so were thousands like her.

Fairy tale? No; all documentable fact. The rapidly convened Special Relief Committee, as it was initially known, was the direct result of that 1988 television image and spontaneous phone call. Even now, it is little known outside the Middle East, but its work in Niger, Mali, Chad, Ethiopia and other poverty stricken states has had great impact and expanded enormously since then.

The scale of the task of bringing relief to these areas was and remains huge. The first task was immediate relief to the area where the starving woman was found, followed by a survey of the surrounding areas and assessment of the challenge.

These tasks complete, a formally constituted organization was set up as part of the Sultan bin Abdulaziz foundation and the Special Relief Committee re-named as the Africa Committee.

Based in Riyadh, the organization has developed the complex administrative structure needed to coordinate its many activities in eight or so countries in which it operates. The range of the committee now extends as far south as Malawi—where in 1971 it was one of the first relief organizations on the scene bringing aid to flood victims—and as far north outside Africa as Tajikistan.

The headquarters are staffed by men who emanate a quiet but powerful presence, and chaired by Faisal Bali, who has been a colleague of Prince Sultan for some three decades. Visitors are greeted with the customary courtesy and coffee of Saudi Arabia, but there is an intensity of purpose in the smiles and conversation that is both unusual and deeply encouraging.

After addressing the immediate needs of the people of Niger who unknowingly sparked the organization into life, the committee expanded rapidly, opening offices in several countries across Africa with a view of assessing needs on the ground.

As with other major relief organizations—the Red Crescent, Red Cross, and Oxfam, for example—it is axiomatic that the Africa Committee is committed to, in the poetic language of its constitution, “feed the hungry and quench the thirst of the poor, provide clothes and assist the desperate without regard to race, color or religion.”

Its founding in Saudi Arabia and being run according to Islamic principles adds a definite character to the operating procedures. It also brings with it a hospitality and friendliness that is natural to Saudi culture and a positive requirement of Islamic teachings. In a world used to other images, the practice of charity as one of the five pillars of Islam is frequently ignored, or even unknown, in the West.

And the charity is considerable. In its first four years, over a third of a million families were helped directly with food and clothing, school building, care of orphans and debt-settlement at an initial cost to the foundation of nearly $4 million. That sum has increased exponentially as the sphere of operations has expanded.

Hardly a top-heavy organization, there are only 68 administrative staff handling the entire operation.

The Africa Committee has expanded its range of operations considerably since the early years. In an intriguing mix of humanitarian work, relief and technology, the aid workers carry the invitation of Islam to all beneficiaries. Committee members go to great lengths, however, to emphasize that is not a condition of charity, of “singing for your supper,” as was frequently the case with 19th century missionaries in Africa.

“Certainly, part of our brief is to highlight the tolerance of Islam,” said Bali, the chairman of the committee. “But that is not the main purpose at all. It all started from one man’s reaction to a human being in extreme distress. That distress and the human anguish involved is our starting point in anything we do.”

Completely unlike those earlier missionaries, the committee is able to call on the Saudi government’s satellite technology to survey and collate environmental information to predict areas of potential shortage and act pre-emptively.

With the immediate threat of starvation lifted in the target areas, the committee turned its attention to particularly pressing medical problems hindering Africans’ struggle for survival. Particularly handicapping is blindness.

To date, five camps with mobile clinics able to perform laser surgery and cataract correction are operating in Ethiopia alone. More are planned in the other countries where the committee operates.

Other camps have been founded in Niger, Chad, Mali and Malawi to train local medical staff and recruit student doctors in the hope that they will return and develop programs of health education and combat endemic disease like cholera and malaria.

President Richard Nixon is credited with the aphorism that “90 percent of success is about ‘being there.’” The massive project that is the modestly titled Africa Committee may never have come into existence had a particular person not seen a particular image at a particular time.

Roger Harrison is a free-lance writer based in Jeddah.