..."It's really like offering poison coated with sugar."...

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1987628,00.html

A Masai teen in Kisaju, Kenya, wears a T-shirt featuring soccer player Didier Drogba. Donations of used clothes can have an adverse effect on fragile economies
Spencer Platt / Getty Images


In the history of foreign aid, it looked pretty harmless: a young Florida businessman decided to collect a million shirts and send them to poor people in Africa. Jason Sadler just wanted to help. He thought he'd start with all the leftover T-shirts from his advertising company, I Wear Your Shirt. But judging by the response Sadler got from a group of foreign aid bloggers, you'd think he wanted to toss squirrels into wood chippers or steal lunch boxes from fourth-graders.

"I have thick skin, I don't mind, but it's just the way they responded — it was just, 'You're an idiot, here's another stupid idea, I hope this fails,' " Sadler, 27, tells TIME. "It really was offensive because all I'm trying to do is trying to make something good happen and motivate people to get off their butts, get off the couch and do something to help." (See TIME's photo-essay "Commerce Comes to the Aid of Haiti.")

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Sadler has never visited Africa or worked on a foreign aid project. To his critics, his pitch seemed naive with its exhortation, "Share the wealth, share your shirts — we're going to change the world." Millions of Africans who have no trouble getting shirts, and who never asked Sadler for a handout, might object to the idea that giving them more clothes will change the world. Stung from watching people donate old, useless stuff after the tsunami and earthquake, aid workers bristled. "I'm sorry to be so unkind to someone who has good intentions, but you don't get a get-home-free card just for having good intentions. You have to do things that make sense," says William Easterly, an author and New York University economics professor who is a leading critic of bad aid. "If a surgeon is about to operate on me, I'm not all that interested in whether he has good intentions. I hope he doesn't have evil intentions, but I'm much more interested in whether he knows what he's doing. People have a double standard about aid."

But why gang up on a guy who just wants to help clothe people in Africa? First, because it's not that hard to get shirts in Africa. Flooding the market with free goods could bankrupt the people who already sell them. Donating clothing is a sensitive topic in Africa because many countries' textile industries collapsed under the weight of secondhand-clothing imports that were introduced in the 1970s and '80s. "First you have destroyed these villages' ability to be industrious and produce cotton products, and then you're saying, 'Can I give you a T-shirt?' and celebrating about it?" says James Shikwati, director of the Nairobi-based Inter Region Economic Network, a think tank. "It's really like offering poison coated with sugar." (See a video of the Haitian schools supported by Ben Stiller.)

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1987628,00.html#ixzz0nlbv1vtP


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