As the World Vision/NFL 100,000 T-shirts controversy swells on (now with a post on Freakonomics), know that research shows T-shirt shipments are bad aid.
If your eyes glaze over at the thought of academic journals, I can sum them up for you on this matter in one sentence: The evidence is solid that T-shirt donations are bad for local economies.
For those of you wanting to go a little more in depth, read on.
One of the best known and most referenced articles on the subject is “Used-clothing Donations and Apparel Production in Africa” by Garth Frazer. There’s a gated version of the article here.
Frazer set out to explain why African economies haven’t advanced beyond basic manufacturing. He concluded that one major factor prohibiting the development of major textile industries is used-clothing donations by consumers in industrialized countries.
That is, if you box up your old T-shirts and take them to Goodwill, you may actually be inadvertently undermining the development of clothing production facilities in Africa.
Why?
Because with a huge supply of cheap apparel that is ready for sale, there’s no need to build factories to produce more. These are not insignificant effects.
“Used-clothing imports are found to have a negative impact on apparel production in Africa,” wrote Frazer, “explaining roughly 40 percent of the decline in production and 50 percent of the decline in employment over the period 1981-2000.”
In other words, clothing imports result in job loss for people who could probably otherwise lift themselves out of poverty.
Frazer is dealing with used clothing, of course, but there’s little reason to think that new clothing would be any different, especially since World Vision will be distributing it for free. In fact, free clothing donations undermine the secondhand clothing markets that provide what employment does exist in the sector.
Daniel Slesnik tackles the problem of in-kind goods more generally in “Consumption and Poverty: How Effective are In-Kind Transfers?” (also gated).
Slesnik does not study the developing world here, but rather looks at programs designed to tackle poverty in industrialized states.
He finds that, in order for in-kind transfers to be effective at poverty alleviation, the recipients have to be getting appropriate aid that actually solves their problems, and they have to place as much or more value on the in-kind transfer as they would on cold, hard cash.
How is this relevant for World Vision?
It suggests that any sort of in-kind donation that is not highly targeted and valued by recipients is a waste of effort, money and resources.
As Bill Westerly points out, this gets pretty messy when we take into account the cost of actually getting the shirts to the recipients. If $A isn’t less than $B, then it’s a big mistake.
These are just a couple of examples of the body of research that clearly shows the negative impact of clothing donations on developing economies. There’s just no way World Vision can honestly claim that these facts are unknown or that the impact of a clothing donation is unclear.
If you’re really interested in this topic, I’d also recommend writing to Loomnie and begging him to let you read his excellent dissertation on the secondhand clothing trade in Nigeria.
Laura Seay is an assistant professor of political science at Morehouse College in Atlanta. This column first appeared on her blog, Texas in Africa.
Laura Seay is an Assistant Professor of Government at Colby College. She studies African politics, conflict and development, with a focus on central Africa.