Despite various strides made by the global development sector in reforming its communication, humanitarian campaigns still (too) often contain racial stereotypes, dehumanizing images and colonial narratives. In our Beyond Poverty Porn series, which we make together with Emiel Martens and Wouter Oomen from the Expertise Centre Humanitarian Communication (HuCom), we open up the conversation about ethical, respectful, and inclusive communication in and on global development.

In short episodes of about 15 minutes each, Martens and Oomen will take a critical look at trending genres within the field of humanitarian communication. Following their critique on celebrity humanitarianism in the previous storycast, in this episode they zoom in on the popular genre of the individual changemaker. While they see the value of the shift in agency that changemaker stories seem to represent, they do find several issues with the 'individual solutions to structural problems' habit of these campaigns.