From Vietnam to Burkina Faso: Who Gets to Tell a Country’s Story?
Burkina Faso has just enforced a rule the aid sector has spent nearly twenty years asking itself to follow voluntarily: stop photographing struggling people in ways that strip them of dignity. The government now requires NGOs to obtain genuine consent before publishing images of vulnerable people, and has banned the use of suffering as a marketing device. As far as I can tell, it's the first government to turn this into enforceable law rather than industry self-regulation. Dignity in imagery has just moved from a self-policing ask to a matter of state.
The aid sector has technically had a version of this rule since 2007, when a coalition of European relief and development NGOs wrote a Code of Conduct asking members to portray people “with sensitivity and respect for their dignity”. Admirable in principle, and largely ignored in practice, because nothing happened to anyone who ignored it. In 2014, one of the world's largest charities ran an ad showing a mother giving birth to an unresponsive baby, real footage filmed in a Liberian maternity clinic, and broadcast it despite hundreds of complaints calling it too graphic to air. A rule with no consequence is only ever a suggestion.
Enter: Burkina Faso. Earlier this month, its Council of Ministers approved a decree prohibiting NGOs from taking, publishing, or using images that portray vulnerable people in a degrading, humiliating, or exploitative manner, and mandating prior authorisation and informed consent before any such imagery is used at all. It did this while confronting one of the most severe humanitarian crises anywhere in the world: millions displaced, hungry, caught in conflict. It’s easy to assume that a country in crisis needs sympathetic, even distressing, imagery more than ever, to keep aid flowing. Burkina Faso decided its people's dignity mattered more than that assumption. The message is unambiguous: you may help us, but you no longer get to decide how we are shown to the world while doing it.
This hit close to home. I spent years in tourism communications for Vietnam, and the bulk of that work was contesting a story that had already been written for the country long before I arrived. To much of the outside world, Vietnam remained frozen as one of two things: a war, or a cheap backpacker circuit. Even sympathetic coverage reached for the same narrow set of images, and neither version left room for the country as it actually is. The campaigns we worked on had to do double duty: say something true, and dislodge whatever fixed idea of Vietnam the audience already carried.
That's what struck me with this Burkina Faso story. It's about who holds the authority to define a country's image. For decades, that authority sat with whoever was doing the telling—a foreign NGO, a foreign correspondent, a foreign tour operator, rarely the country itself. Burkina Faso's decree is a government reclaiming that authority. Vietnam's tourism boards have been pursuing the same goal for years, more quietly, through branding rather than legislation.
It's worth mentioning the timing. This decree sits inside a broader pattern in Burkina Faso, where the government has tightened oversight of NGOs and leaned hard into the language of national sovereignty. You don’t need to endorse every element of that shift to see the logic connecting them: a state seeking greater control over its resources and institutions will seek greater control over its image as well.
This brings me to a question that concerns all of us doing communications work in or with the Global South: what do we mean by effective communications? For too long, effectiveness has been measured largely by outputs—donations raised, engagement, reach. That measure comes with a cost: research on charitable advertising has repeatedly found that negative, degrading imagery raises more money than respectful, empowering imagery does. Dignity and short-term fundraising performance are in tension, and any honest reassessment has to start there.
But beyond the moral case, this is becoming a matter of governance too, one some states are now prepared to legislate. That changes the baseline competence the job requires. Good instincts and good intentions are no longer sufficient. Understanding the politics of the place you represent is now part of the brief.
I doubt this will remain an isolated story. Once one government demonstrates that a law like this is workable, it becomes a template others can reach for. Maybe that's exactly the nudge the sector needed. I'd treat this less as a compliance problem and more as an opening, a real chance to rebuild a definition of effective communications that doesn't depend on stripping people of their dignity to work.
