We’ve all seen it: the picture of the impoverished, dark-skinned woman bearing a sickly child with a stoic but deeply depressing bearing. This is the tool in trade for advocacy groups and fundraisers.

I rail against such advocacy tools in my work, constantly, in part because these images can actually harm. Policy towards women and children become driven by emotion rather than experience. Funding, program design, and targeting are distorted as a result.

Now I find myself falling into the same trap. It’s an eye-opening experience.

Last week our funding unexpectedly fell through for one of our program evaluations in Uganda–a post-conflict women’s economic empowerment and leadership program, where we are planning to assess the effectiveness of an income-generation program and self-help group program not simply on income generation, but on general empowerment, leadership, domestic violence, child health and education, and a host of other factors.

So, I have spent the week bombarding my colleagues at various foundations, NGOs, Embassies, the World Bank, and UN agencies for a new sponsor. I’m hopeful. In the course of my rainmaking efforts, however, I find myself writing new proposals for new audiences, especially funds and foundations for women’s development. And I find myself falling into The Trap.

Let me back up a little. Three colleagues and I just ran a large survey of women and girls in northern Uganda, including several hundred women who were abducted by (and later escaped from) the rebel group, often as adolescents. About a quarter of these returning women were “married” in the bush, almost always forcibly, and about half of these forced wives bore children to their captor husbands.

The presiding myth in Uganda is that these forced mothers (alternatively, “child mothers”) are traumatized, stigmatized, cast out from their community, and impoverished and vulnerable beyond all others. The forced child mother is an icon of the aid industry in Uganda. Donors are crawling over themselves to offer money, schools, and support for these women. The only downside? It’s not true.

It’s true that these women are impoverished, vulnerable, and desperate. But so are their fellow women. The vast majority of women returning from the rebel group are welcomed into their families and find as much (or as little) employment and support as anyone else. Some have problems reintegrating–heart wrenching, difficult, important problems that deserve assistance.

But redesigning entire programs and strategies around this one small group is, I argue a mistake. When you look at who has received aid in our survey sample, actual need (serious injuries, emotional distress, family exclusion, illiteracy, chronic unemployment) not only has little association with aid, people with these needs are actually less likely to receive assistance. The strongest predictors of aid: having been abducted, and being a forced mother, irrespective of actual suffering.

Back to the present. Me writing the proposal. What I should say: all women in northern Uganda have been strong and resilient in the face of violence, war and adversity; when they have scraped together small amounts of capital and skills they have done great things with them; that local Ugandan social workers have designed a program that will help young women harness their strengths; that we have have developed a strategy that will provide these women with some of the critical inputs they lack–starting capital, business training, business networks–and let them help one another to do the rest; that the most vulnerable women are those living with HIV/AIDS, with war injuries, with family conflicts, and with too little income for the many children and orphans they support. This should be enough.

What I feel would be more effective: the child mother card; the traumatized, stigmatized mother from the awful bush who WE can SAVE.

The Trap.

So far I have stuck with the strength story. I’d be a hypocrite if I did not. And I would be wrong. But man, are all the fundraising incentives I face ever skewed in the other direction.