After briefing Michael Buerk, and countless other journalists, before they set off to cover the 1984-85 famine in Ethiopia, in which a million people are thought to have died, Paddy Coulter fell to thinking. The stark images that western reporters sent back home triggered Live Aid, the biggest charitable event the world had ever seen. But how accurate a picture did they portray? Coulter, who has died aged 78, was then the head of communications for Oxfam. But in 1989 he shook the aid world by writing a piece in the New Internationalist that launched a powerful attack on aid agency fundraisers for their reliance on “starving children” imagery and ignoring the indispensable work that local partners did.
In Ethiopia in 1984, Coulter revealed, Oxfam had 108 employees, of whom 100 were Ethiopian. Yet only white faces ever appeared on television. Almost 30 years before it became fashionable to complain of “white saviour syndrome”, Coulter drew attention to the distorted picture that was being created of what he called “whites to the rescue of blacks”.
His first thought for challenging this was to arrange media training for Oxfam’s black workers in Ethiopia. Then – to keep the celebrity-hungry media happy – he arranged for the actor Glenda Jackson to go out to Ethiopia to interview them for ITN. Coulter issued a plea for aid agencies to stop seeing fundraising as more important than educating the public. But the appeal fell on deaf ears.
Coulter was not po-faced about this. He was a man of japes and jollities who had been a founding trustee of Comic Relief. But in the 1990s he resigned from its board, after 10 years, over the same issue – two decades before David Lammy made the same complaint about Comic Relief. A film about a street children project in Addis Ababa focused on the actor Julie Walters with her arm around a little boy doing his homework by the light of a hurricane lamp. The film editors had removed empowering footage that showed the achievements of adolescents in the project. Coulter objected but was overruled by the Comic Relief fundraisers. He resigned saying: “I, for one, would rather accept a smaller return and have a more ‘educated pound’.”
Truth-telling, and the ethical dilemmas surrounding the portrayal of the truth, were key to Coulter’s long career, in which he played an important role in repositioning NGOs as a major force for change on development. He was born John Coulter in Belfast, and grew up in the market town of Ballynahinch, where his Presbyterian father, Percival, was a cattle dealer and butcher, and his Quaker mother, Eileen (nee Hobson), a primary school teacher. Though he was schooled at the Methodist College Belfast, where he was head boy, his first link with the developing world was through a Catholic organisation, the Catholic Institute for International Relations (CIIR).
After reading classics at Queen’s College, Oxford – where he indulged himself with the idea of becoming a professional musician in bands with 60s names such as the Pooh and Aardvark – he set off in 1971 with CIIR to teach in Ethiopia alongside Angela Cotterill-Davies, the love of his life, whom he had married in 1969.
By this time – to the consternation of his Protestant family – he had fully embraced the nickname Paddy, which the impoverished wit of English undergraduates had conferred upon him. Throughout his life Coulter waggishly played on this dual identity, mischievously teasing Catholic colleagues with faux-indignation for their papist proclivities. At his local, the Rose and Crown in Oxford, he would routinely upbraid the landlord for the shortcomings of England’s Six Nations rugby team, indeed any team bar the Irish. His capacious sense of fun, leavened with an engaging self-deprecation, meant he was a constant provoker of laughter.
After teaching for two years at the Catholic Mission in the Ethiopian town of Nazareth, he and Angela moved to Yemen, where he ran a volunteers’ programme and became country director for Oxfam. Then, back in Oxford, he became Oxfam’s head of communications.
Having been awoken to the way that the western media distorted the reality of life in the developing world, he moved to the International Broadcasting Trust (IBT) in London. There he spent a decade lobbying the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 to improve the quality of the programmes they made about the global south. At IBT he produced more than 100 programmes on global development and environment issues for mainstream TV, including the BBC series Under the Blue Flag, which in 1996 won the United Nations Correspondents Association Gold award.
In 2000 he was appointed OBE “for services to development awareness”.
His next move to improve the quality of truth-telling saw him switch in 2001 to become director of studies at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University. There he mentored mid-career journalists from all across the world with his characteristic mix of wisdom, warmth and wit. It won him friends from around the globe.
Throughout his career, Coulter straddled the worlds of media and development. In 2007 he became a partner in the Oxford Global Media consultancy, working on a range of communications strategy assignments for international organisations, but also worked with the Oxford Poverty & Human Development Initiative on a pioneering new approach to global poverty reduction, which revealed that the countries making the fastest inroads into poverty are some of the poorest – with much more sluggish progress by middle-income countries such as India, which have the largest number of poor people.
With a huge, ebullient zest for life, and an indefatigable appetite for activism, Coulter was also a trustee of a wide range of charities, including Oxfam, the Scarman Trust, the Media Trust, Practical Action, Cafod and Unicef UK. He was a governor of two local schools and a governing body fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford. Two of the charities of which he was most proud were Broadcasting Support Services UK, which offered one-to-one support to viewers distressed by TV programmes, and the human rights organisation Article 19, which documents censorship and defends freedom of speech across the globe. He served as chair of both organisations.
Coulter laid the groundwork for many of the major development initiatives of the 1990s and beyond, says Kevin Watkins, the doyen of UK development thinkers. He created effective media strategies that resonated and engaged with the public – but which also focused on transforming the agenda to one which nurtured the empowerment of poor people. He was a rigorous journalist and a political radical with a profound commitment to free the voice of the voiceless.
He is survived by Angela, their daughters, Rachel and Alice, and four grandchildren, Laurie, Ted, Jamie and Lois.
• Paddy John Hobson Coulter, development pioneer, born 11 July 1946; died 3 November 2024
