My host mom, Mama Muhire, took me to the market to buy rain
boots. We’re just getting into the rainy season in Cyangugu and the steep hills
that carry you from one part of town to the other easily turn into mud chutes
after just a few minutes of the aggressive pounding rain. My trusty Chacos,
worn for years up mountain summits and through Canadian Lakes, just won’t cut
it in the sludge that is Rwandan mud. I need boots.
Unfortunately, I am white. When I go to a market I will
automatically be given a higher price than something costs. Mama Muhire tsk-ed
and mmm-ed at the seller, but he was determined to charge me double for the
boots. She walked away, telling me that she would come back later without me to
buy the boots.
While we were in the market—a multi-storied building with
various goods on each floor—Mama Muhire took me through the clothes section to
browse. She held up dresses to both herself and me, siphoned through baby
clothes to search for things for Mukire, and chatted with the women selling the
goods. It was just like shopping with friends in America, except one of these
similarities was unexpected. I was surrounded by piles and piles of American
clothes….in Rwanda. Each seller’s section of the market was defined by the
narrow walking paths in between feet-high mounds of clothing. Women sat in
these mounds, sometimes partially buried underneath them, and held up clothes
for you to look at. They sorted through the piles and pulled out items to lie
on top of their mountain. Some clothes sported familiar logos from Western
companies, some of the brands were the same as I owned, and much of the writing
on the clothes was in English.
Now, okay, I should have known that this was coming. I know
that many charities and organizations find a great deal of satisfaction from
sending used, unwanted clothing from America to countries “in need” of the
secondhand goods. I’ve been in Rwanda for months now, so I’ve seen people walking the streets in shirts I know are from America—after all, did that young man
really go to “Gerry’s 50th Birthday Bash!” or does that young girl
really believe that “Blondes are Better in Southern California”? I think not.
However, it was something else entirely to see the piles of these clothes in
one large room.
For those of you who are unaware about this phenomenon of
t-shirts (and other clothes) pouring into the developing world, allow me to
give a brief overview. This information is from an article that a professor at
my Alma Mater wrote while she was a lecturer at Duke University[1].
Dr. Shah writes about Gifts in Kind (or GIK), which are “services or goods
(usually goods) which are donated and distributed in the name of international
aid, charity, and development.” She assigns a second name to these donations:
SWEDOW—or Stuff We Don’t Want. Most often these are clothes that are rejected
from secondhand stores in America—think Goodwill or Salvation Army—or are
clothes produced in response to an undecided event, most often sporting events.
Last year, the Seattle Seahawks played the Denver Broncos in the Superbowl.
Living in Washington, I saw t-shirts almost immediately after Seattle’s victory
surrounding me. But for every shirt that proclaimed the Seahawks world
champions in a sport that’s only played in America, there was one produced that
said the same about the Broncos. These now-incorrect t-shirts can’t be sold in
a country that knows of their inaccuracy, so charities such as well-known World
Vision sends these shirts to developing countries.
Most of the clothes I’ve seen in Rwanda, however, aren’t
championship shirts for a losing team. Many are clothes that Americans or other
Westerners donated to charity stores. Shannon Whitehead explains about this process
on her website[2]. Americans
donate about 4.7 billion pounds of clothing each year, and only 10% of these
clothes are fit to be resold in American retail stores. There are a myriad of
uses for the remaining 90%—from textile recycling to ending up in landfills—but
one common place these unwanted clothes ends up is in the markets of
Sub-Saharan Africa much like the place where my host family buys its clothes.
The clothes are sent from America to Africa in huge container bales where local
retailers then purchase them. These clothes are sold in markets, and the
profits are used to purchase another bale. This seems pretty
straightforward—the retailer buys from a supplier and then sells it to make a
profit to continue buying from a supplier. However, the key point here is that
the supplier isn’t a local factory or textile plant giving jobs to local
community members—it’s the family that does spring cleaning and gives three
bags of clothes to Goodwill, or my housemates and me who, during move-out after
graduation this past May, took anything we didn’t want in our house to the
local donation center. The supply for these African retailers relies on Americans buying too much.
Does anyone else see the issue here?
Whitehead
quotes Professor Garth Frazer from the University of Toronto who says that “no
country has ever achieved a sustainable per capita national income (at a level
associated with a developing economy) without also achieving a
clothing-manufacturing workforce that employs at least 1 percent of the population.
For some context, Rwanda has one major textile production company, UTEXRWA. To
employ 1% of Rwanda’s 11 million people, this company would have to employ
110,000 people. It’s website says that it employs 740[3].
Okay, so
there’s an issue, but what do we do about
it? People aren’t going to stop donating their unwanted clothing, shirt
manufacturers aren’t going to stop producing both team’s names on championship
shirts, and companies aren’t going to stop taking these clothes and selling
them in developing countries. At least, this won’t stop any time soon.
And here’s
the other complexity of this issue—the people in Rwanda who buy these bales of
clothing rely on their profits to send their children to school and buy food
for dinner. If the supply were to suddenly be cut, there would be nothing to
replace it with and many of these women would suffer for it. The systems aren’t
in place for a textile industry to replace the demand of donated goods with
locally produced clothing—and even if there were, the prices would likely be
much higher than they are now.
It’s a
complex issue, and not one that I have an answer to. However, I plan on
exploring these issues deeply throughout the year and sharing my thoughts with
you. I know this post ends with a certain level of pessimism—that the problem
is complicated and there’s no easy answer—but this is the world of
international development. It’s sometimes frustrating and unfair and seemingly
unsolvable, but there are also many brilliant people working very hard to make
this planet a better, more equitable place.
I welcome
any thoughts you may have about this issue of aid-gone-wrong. Look for further
posts in the future with more thoughts on international development in a
Rwandan context.
1 Sha, Ami V. "Shirt Off Your
Back: Stuff We Don't Want." Encompass
Ethics Magazine Spring 2011: 16-18.
2 http://shannonwhitehead.com/what-really-happens-to-your-donated-clothing/
3 http://utexrwa.org/company-profile/
