Marketeers of Misery: The Never-ending Business of Fighting Poverty, Wars, and Famines

Stephanie Nyombayire ’08



 

Every day, the dignity of entire communities continues to be traded for ready-made campaigns and solutions, spreading the belief that problems come from the inside and solutions must come from the outside. Great marketing campaigns raise the profile of the marketeers of misery while carefully avoiding complicated explanations that actually may provide any real understanding of the context. This generation of change makers seeking to live in a more equal world must ask themselves by what means the marketeers of misery can be driven out of business.

As a first-year student at Swarthmore, Stephanie Nyombayire co-founded the Genocide Intervention Network. She is a graduate student at the NYU Wagner School of Public Policy.