Burkina Faso has made a historic move against imperialism: it banned poverty porn.
On July 2nd, the Council of Ministers adopted a new decree regulating humanitarian aid, including a ban on NGOs photographing vulnerable people next to the donations they’ve just received.
The decree, which restricts degrading or exploitative images of aid recipients and requires informed consent, is part of a larger, radical anti-imperialist project led by the country’s leader, Captain Ibrahim Traoré, who has also nationalised gold mines, rejected IMF loans, and ordered the withdrawal of French troops from the country — all in service of his self-declared war on imperialism.
Although many around the world celebrate the Burkinabe government’s anti-colonial project, the political conditions in which it is being carried out are far from auspicious, with a government crackdown that has dissolved political parties, shut down civil society groups, and tightened control over NGO money and operations.
Even in a regrettable political context, this small line in a larger policy is a significant win in a much bigger fight over who gets to tell the story of crisis, and it exposes a deeper truth about the humanitarian sector’s obsession with turning crises into content.
We have to ask ourselves: why has the Burkinabe government targeted humanitarian action as part of its war on imperialism?
Human billboards, virtue signalling, and opportunities for compassion
The new rules bar humanitarian actors from taking, displaying, or sharing images or videos that depict beneficiaries with donated items in a manner considered degrading or exploitative. The regulations are intended to ensure vulnerable people are treated with dignity and respect.
A couple of months ago, one of the top voices in fundraising made the same point in his Substack newsletter. Beneficiaries shouldn’t have to carry around donated goods that bore the logo of the aid organization, he said. There really is no need for kids to carry a backpack with a huge NGO logo to school, to be constantly reminded of their position as aid recipients. It’s just unnecessary.
You shouldn’t have to turn real people into billboards to convince others that your work is worth funding.
I thought this was an obvious claim that did not need further discussion, that we were past using communities in crises as props for promotional communications. But I guess I was wrong.
An American man, who had built his career as a Strategic Advisor to U.S.-based philanthropies and NGOs, took to LinkedIn to call this idea “peak ridiculousness”. “Storytelling takes many forms,” he argued, “and telling the stories of others is a perfectly valid way of creating opportunities for compassion.” He went on to declare that communities in crisis did not need this kind of “virtue signalling” and “we should be honest about what gets audiences to open their hearts and wallets”.
Here is the uncomfortable thing: he is not wrong about the mechanics.
The sad photo works. A 2024 study interviewing fundraising managers at NGOs in Ghana found they knew exactly what they were doing, described the imagery as effective, and considered the ethical cost worth the money it raised. In a way, the American strategist was right — beneficiaries need the money more than they need the virtue signalling.
But what if it wasn’t about that? What if what Burkina Faso found was that these depictions carry more than just a moral cost, but perhaps also a monetary and political one?
The real story isn’t who benefits from the picture, but what it costs, and who pays.
A false story of passivity
What he was doing was defending what is commonly known as “poverty porn”, a form of humanitarian imagery that uses graphic, shocking, or stereotypical depictions of poverty to elicit sympathy, pity, guilt, or donations, often by portraying people as helpless, dependent, and devoid of agency.
This kind of distorted representation was first described by Jørgen Lissner in Merchants of Misery (1981), who warned against the “pornographic” use of suffering in aid imagery. His critique, and the work that followed, made a simple but important point: when people’s grief, bodies, and fear are displayed for emotional consumption by distant audiences, they are effectively stripped of their agency and their lives flattened into suffering.
One thing I’d like to say up front, before I go deeper into this topic, is this: communities in crisis should not be reduced to simply being aid recipients.
In many cases, they are also direct responders, actively leading resilience, peacebuilding, and reconstruction efforts. They effectively organize themselves within and outside of the sphere of international humanitarian assistance, forming community patrol groups to protect civilians in displacement camps, Village Savings and Loan Associations to pool resources for emergency funds, and mutual aid groups to deliver essential services where others cannot reach.
When INGOs flood their communication materials with images of these communities receiving aid, they are perpetuating a false narrative of passivity, actively shaping how audiences judge what affected people are capable of.
Now comes the million-dollar question: who is truly benefiting from this narrative?
Hint: it’s not the communities.
The White Savior Industrial Complex
Poverty porn is not just a fundraising style but a business model.
It relies on infantilizing and degrading stereotypes of beneficiaries to keep the colonial trope of the helpless ‘other’ alive, as a vehicle for sustaining humanitarian business.
Why do you think most nonprofit leaders in the Global North believe that by emphasizing powerlessness, they will unlock more generosity? Because it reinforces the same moral script Western humanitarian fundraising has long relied on. The more desperate the people in the photo, the more righteous the donor feels for helping them.
That is what this kind of visual stereotyping does. It casts the person in the photo as helpless and the organization as the savior, turning aid into a performance of moral authority that reinforces harmful narratives of white saviorism that are at the core of international development.
A recent study looked at 363 charity ads in the UK and found that the majority of photographs used by INGOs featured children, or women and children, and depicted rural areas and poverty. Not a man, teenager, electrical device, or shoe in sight.
This portrayal is intentional. The use of indigenous women and children as symbols of innocence and fragility, and the use of rural scenery to portray Global Majority countries as underdeveloped can be traced back to the origins of colonialism, when foreign lands were described as virginal, fertile, untouched (do you see the pattern here) and the people living in them as uncivilized savages in need of saving.
The same study also demonstrated that Africa remains the predominant subject of charity appeals, even when this does not reflect the ratio of programmatic delivery by the organisations producing these ads. Read that twice. We have turned Africa into a ~literal~ begging bowl.
“This continuous majority casting of African nations in the theatre of global development as recipients of humanitarian assistance, serves only to aid and abet the colonial notion of Africa as one huge ‘begging bowl’” — Deborah Adesina and David Girling, Charity Representations of Distant Others
This kind of fundraising tactic profits from neocolonial ideological constructions, white sentimentality, and white guilt without requiring the viewer to confront their own role in the systems of power that created that injustice in the first place.
Teju Cole, who coined the term ‘White Savior Industrial Complex’ in his 2012 article of the same name, named this dynamic years ago, and it is still with us. In his own words: “The White Savior Industrial Complex is a valve for releasing the unbearable pressures that build in a system built on pillage. We can participate in the economic destruction of Haiti over long years, but when the earthquake strikes it feels good to send $10 each to the rescue fund.”
In other words, Global North charities, development, and humanitarian organizations, in their performance of white saviorism, are simultaneously benefiting from the exploitative and extractive post-colonial global order and helping perpetuate it by creating a cognitive “vent” through which the moral pressure of existing on the winning side of this system is relieved.
Photography as a tool for empire
So there it is, the ugly truth. International aid uses photography not for storytelling but for extraction.
None of this is new. Photography has been a powerful tool for empire since its invention in 1839, shaping what could be seen, known, and believed about colonised peoples and places long before it decided what could be crowdfunded.
The Decolonial Centre explored this in the article Photography and Colonialism, which explains how Western photographic practices have been used to create Eurocentric ‘visual regimes.’ Using Palestine as a case study, it examines how European photographic representations after World War I othered, erased, or deliberately mischaracterized Palestinians, framing them as disorderly subjects in need of control in times of resistance, and using visual erasure to deny their historical ties to the land.
As anti-colonial theorist and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon famously said, colonialism is a psychological project as much as a political one.
That’s what the American strategist missed. Photography is not just another form of storytelling. It is an inherently political medium, and it serves colonial interests now as much as it did a hundred years ago.
The Grand Bargain’s Lie
I know what you might be thinking: Woah, Paola, slow down.
First you say poverty porn is a fundraising tactic, then a business model, and now you’re saying it’s a political tool? You’re starting to sound a bit conspiranoid.
To which I say: hold my tinfoil hat.
In 2016, the biggest players in humanitarian aid signed the Grand Bargain and promised to move at least 25% of funding to local and national responders, as directly as possible. It was going to be the great correction.
In 2024, less than 10% of international humanitarian funding reached local and national actors at all, counting money that passes through intermediaries first. Direct funding sat at 3.8%. More than ninety cents on every dollar stayed with international organizations, most of it with UN agencies and international NGOs.
So there is the stated bargain, and then there is the real one, the one nobody signed but everyone honors: keep the old architecture intact while performing its dismantling. Say decolonize in the panel. Wire the money north after.
It’s all a clever scheme. The real bargain allows rich countries to quieten and distract from calls for global redistributive justice and new systems of global equity-based power distribution, which gained traction in Global Majority countries after World War II. All while keeping more than 90% of the tens of billions of humanitarian dollars flowing through and to Global North institutions.
How do they do it? Use human rights as a distraction, humanitarian action as a band-aid, and development as the smokescreen.
This is what makes aid imagery so politically useful to the existing order. As Janice Nathanson argues, aid photography often isolates suffering from the political and historical causes that produce it, so audiences are encouraged to see crisis rather than structural injustice. In other words, the same visual economy that turns poverty into pity also helps depoliticize inequality, making it easier to sustain a humanitarian system that manages symptoms while leaving the broader architecture of global redistribution untouched.
The international humanitarian community uses sad pictures of vulnerable people to manufacture moral authority, which allows it to keep operating exactly as it does now.
It makes international aid look essential, its value undeniable, its continuation imperative.
It benefits us, the expensive intermediary layer sucking up 90% of the money, because it makes us seem necessary, instead of optional and redundant.
It takes agency away from affected communities, which is convenient to international NGOs, because it justifies gatekeeping resources from local and national actors, rather than treating them as equal partners. It assumes communities in crisis should be grateful no matter what, which divests accountability to them and spares INGOs the work of meaningfully engaging them and capturing their voices.
It’s a hard truth that most people in the system will never admit: that they need communities to stay dependent on international aid, so they can continue benefiting from their struggle.
The humanitarian and development sectors don’t really want resilient communities. They want to get paid to foster resilience in communities.
This bargain is so enmeshed in the fabric of the system that even people within it, like you or me, will inadvertently contribute to its continuation.
The alternative: pictures that honor agency, dignity, and resilience
But is it true that this genre of imagery is the most effective way to raise money? Obviously not.
Stories of resilience, transformation, and overcoming travel much farther than stories of despair. Agency and persistence in the face of adversity will always be more compelling to audiences than sad stories that flatten the diversity of human experience.
Look at what comes out of Gaza every day, images and videos made by Palestinians insisting on being seen as full people under conditions built to erase them, and how far those images move compared to any appeal a Western agency has ever art-directed.
If poverty porn turns crisis into a spectacle of passivity, then the images and videos coming out of Gaza offer a radically different visual grammar. They reveal a struggle not only over land but over subjecthood itself — over who gets to define the meaning of life under conditions of domination. As Zahra from The Mazaj argues in her article Colonisation is as Much a Psychological Project as it is a Political One, Palestinians’ insistence on visibility and dignity on their own terms is an act of radical resistance to the oppressor’s decades-long attempt at narrative erasure. In that sense, the videos and images Palestinians create and circulate are not just records of suffering; they are acts of self-definition.
And these images are more effective in unlocking generosity than swollen bellies and dusty feet. Susan Sontag warned that compassion is not a stable resource; it must be translated into action or it withers. The problem with poverty porn is not simply that it shows suffering, but that it so often leaves viewers in a state of passivity, where repeated exposure can slide into boredom, cynicism, or emotional numbing rather than solidarity. The sad photo does not just cost the person in it. It exhausts the audience it depends on.
The videos circulating from Gaza confront this passivity directly: they demand that viewers not only witness suffering, but respond: to prove, as it were, that they are still human enough to be moved. — Laila Gutknecht, «Please don’t scroll»: Social Media as Humanitarian Communication in Gaza
These alternatives exist in humanitarian work: plenty of local and lived-experience-led organizations already use visuals that center resilience without erasing pain. They show people as responders, organizers, and political actors, not just as aid recipients — and they don’t bypass dignity or consent in order to inspire generosity.
The way forward
Burkina Faso’s new decree does not solve the politics of aid, but it does expose a basic truth: the people being photographed are not props in someone else’s fundraising campaign. They have the right to refuse that role, and the aid sector has the right to be judged by how seriously it takes that refusal.
The people caught in crisis are already rewriting the narrative behind a system that uses poverty and human suffering as promotional and fundraising tools. Our job is not to overwrite those accounts with prettier, more fundable narratives. It is to stop mistaking extraction for storytelling, and to build fundraising and communications strategies that do not depend on humiliation as a shortcut to compassion.
We are undergoing a collective reckoning, and the new order — the one where mutual aid groups substitute foreign aid and South-South cooperation becomes the new ODA — will not be dependent on white pity.
And it matters that we have honest conversations about this, not only as fundraisers, humanitarians, or donors, but as individuals who make choices about where our money, attention and support go. Our everyday decisions about how to engage, represent, and stay accountable to communities are how we build more equitable and sustainable alternatives to the current system.
