In Praise of Sweatshops

A sweatshop.  Cool.  Kinda.

What is Mama Pamba going to look like when it is finished?  Will it resemble a sweat shop?

Sweatshops are cool.  I like sweatshops.

Well, kinda.  Let me explain.

How do you leverage an extremely poor country out of poverty?  How do break them out of the poverty trap?

The short answer is that you empower women.  Time and time again we see wonderful things happening when women are empowered.  Key performance indicators such as HIV prevention, GDP increases, and even political stability are tightly coupled with women's rights.

So how do you empower women?  One way is to give them some sort of disposable income.  Something that they can make choices with.  If you do not have enough money to feed yourself and your family, then you'll be forever stuck in the poverty trap.

Some people will drink away their disposable income and spend their lives perpetually drunk. Some will gamble it away.  Some will start a business and fail.  And some will start a successful business which will feed their families and create even more jobs that will feed more disposable income to people and the cycle starts again.

One way for women to get a disposable income is to work in a sweatshop. They are not paid "western wages": that is not feasible, practical, or even desirable.  But they are paid a wage with which they can make choices.

The sweatshop should - of course - respect basic human rights.  The workers (most often females) should be allowed to:

• Work reasonable hours
• Have regular breaks
• Go to toilet whenever they want
• Be free from sexual harassment and violence from their bosses
• Be allowed to form workers' unions
• Afforded a share of the profits (radical I know...)

Many of the sweatshops around the world do not - alas - have these rights in place.

If all these rights were in place, then maybe the word "sweatshop" and all its negative connotations would no longer be appropriate.

We need a new name for places that :

• Gainfully employ women
• Returns profit back to the workers
• Prioritises human rights

How about instead we call them "places of empowerment"?

Better yet let's call one of them "Mama Pamba" and start making a meaningful difference.

TV Article on Ivanhoe Mining's Struggle to Set Up on Tablas

You would think some bad press would actually take their share price down...






I'm still cynical about this.  It's good that people are standing up for themselves and the governor is opposing it.  But when the check books start coming out, people's moral base tends to erode.

We here at Meaningful Volunteer are going to continue to make a noise and do what we can.

Sign the No Mining on Tablas Petition

Tablas Island

A lot of people have been asking me what they can do about the upcoming mining operations on the island of Tablas in the Philippines.  The mining will almost certainly be an environmental disaster.

One easy thing you can do right now is sign this petition.

Tricky situations for volunteers with no easy answers

Meaningful Volunteer is about to roll out a system where we present future volunteers with a series of difficult situations that they might come across during their placement.

There are no easy answers to these questions.  They are all based on situations that actual volunteers have been in.

The questions are designed to get the volunteer thinking about the situations before they arrive. There are no wrong answers.

The questions are shown below.  What would you do?

• An elderly man comes up to you. He is obviously sick. He claims to have AIDS and will die without your help.
  
  What do you do? 

• A local in the village is starting to show a romantic interest in you. They are about your age and seem quite serious.
  
  What do you do? 

• A local man has four wives (not uncommon in Uganda) and upwards of twenty children. He says he cannot afford to send his children to school and wants you to help him.
  
  What do you do?

• A young girl in an English class is having difficulty forming words and is often absent in class. Further investigation shows that she has a serious infection in both ears and her tongue appears to be stuck to the bottom of her mouth.
  
  What do you do? 

• It is the end-of-year exams time in your placement area.  Teachers are split up and assigned to different schools to prevent cheating.  Some teachers are not required to supervise and just remain at their own school.
  
  You learn that one of the teachers is texting the answers to her colleagues.  The colleague is intercepting students as they take bathroom breaks.  They call them aside and quickly scribble the answers on the student's arm.  They are not being at all secretive about it.
  
  What do you do? 

How Not to Build a School(s)

Computers in use in Buyaya

Have a look at this piece over at Voluntourism Gal.

It is the tale of three schools.  One that was being used and operating fine, a newer one that was built that made the first redundant, and a third that was half finished.  And all three schools are built on the same half acre property!

Part of the problem with building the second and third school was that they never talked to the community about what was actually needed.

The school that Meaningful Volunteer is building in Uganda is needed.  Meaningful Volunteer communicated with practically every villager, and conducted an extensive census of Buyaya - the target parish.   We learnt the following:

• Practically no child under the age of nine can recognize a single letter
  
  
• Practically no child under the age of twelve can read a triplet word (dog, cat, hat, man...)

And it didn't take a census to know that computer literacy was next to nothing.

This is why the school in Buyaya is focusing on English and computer literacy.

Is aid destroying or saving Africa?

Is aid good or bad? 

Is sending trillions of dollars into sub-Saharan Africa a waste of time?  Should we pull out and let Africa and other developing nations fend for themselves?

Jeffrey Sachs - author of the End of Poverty and director of the Earth Institute thinks it is not a waste of time.  Sachs campaigns tirelessly for the poor and and calls for nations to fulfil their Millennium Promises and contribute 0.7% of the GDP to the poor.  i.e. for every one hundred dollars that the a country earns, 70 cents is given to aid.

As Sachs says

The costs of action are a tiny fraction of the costs of inaction. And yet we must carry out these tasks in a context of global inertia, proclivities to war and prejudice, and understandable skepticism around the world that this time can be different from the past. 

Check out the first chapter of Sachs' book here and an interview with him here.

Peter Singer - an Australian philosopher and author of The Life You Can Save - agrees with Sachs and makes the following argument:

1. If you saw someone in immediate danger, you would unquestionably be obliged to rescue that person even at some personal cost. For instance, you would save a drowning person even if you had to ruin your expensive clothes in the swim. 

2. Even if you don't realize it, there are desperately poor people in Africa and elsewhere who are in mortal danger comparable to drowning, and they could be rescued if you offered a little aid.

According to Singer, not saving a drowning child because it would ruin your expensive suit is as morally repugnant as not saving a child's life in Africa because it is too expensive.

Sachs and Singer are not without their critics though.  Many have pointed out that even in Singer's parallel between a drowning child and a starving child holds, it still raises the bigger question of exactly who to give your hard earned dollars to.

To Oxfam? Save the Children? The UN?  How do we know these organizations are legit and that our money is being used efficiently?

Dambisa Moyo - an Zambian economist - has radically different ideas.  She wants all government aid cut from Africa in five years.  She is critical of Singer's approach as it is very much focused on the donor, rather than the recipient.  In Singer's model, the donor's guilt ends as soon as they put their check in the mail.

This is not good enough for Moyo.  She argues that this detached giving does more harm that good and leads to a charity state with only illusionary gains made.  Moyo's views are further expanded in this piece.

Check this out for a comparison of Moyo's book ("Dead Aid") and Singer's book ("The Life You Can Save").

And then there is William Easterly, author of The White Man's Burden - which is a scathing attack on Jeffrey Sachs' approach.  Click here for Easterly's review of the End of Poverty. He is also has serious problems with Singer's approach.

Easterly favours the Africans looking after Africans approach.  He feels that as aid is withdrawn, market forces will kick in and all will be well.

But do market forces apply to someone without disposable income with which to make a decision with? If you're in a poverty trap where you don't have enough money to feed yourself, then how can you expect to "vote with your dollars"?

Sachs and Singer vs. Moyo and Easterly.

Who has it right? What do you thiunk?

Why Giving is a Bad Idea

Giving is Hard

I recently found the below article. It is a very interesting read and highlights the complicated art of giving.

It is written by Daniela Papi of www.pepytours.com

Malcolm

---

In the rural Cambodian district where we work at PEPY, most people were drinking directly from the local pumps.  We had the water tested and found high levels of bacteria so we identified what we believe to be the best and most affordable filter and decided to try to get these used in the community.  We saw that there was a man in a town 10km away who had begun selling these in his shop and we were able to purchase them and have them delivered to our target area to be sold for the same price at $11.50.

We invited someone from the organization where the filters are made to come explain how they work, how they are made, and how best to take care of them. The teachers were given charts with this information and were taught how to then present this information to anyone who was purchasing a filter.

The filter program worked well and the teachers were able to get over 150 water filters into local homes. The price for the filter is not insignificant, but the community had seen the results of having clean water as we had been using the filters in the local schools and had drastically increased attendance at school as absences due to sickness went down. We were excited about the benefits these new filters would have on the overall community health.

Then a foreign funded group came though, looking to “help the poor people” of the area. They began selling the same filters at $3 each, far below what they had paid for them.

In one day, without knowing it, they actually greatly HARMED the potential for health increases in the area. They thought they were “doing good” by giving things away, or subsidizing them, but instead, without knowing much about the area, they:

• damaged the market potential for both our teacher’s filter sales program and the nearby shop owner
  
  
• built mistrust as the community now thought the filters really should have been much cheaper or that they should hold off on buying them as someone might come give them one
  
  
• did not do the training/education necessary to actually help people understand how/why they work - so people are not taking care of them, thereby undermining the power of the very filters they distributed
  
  
• created a situation where the richer (all relative of course) people no longer want that product. It is now viewed as “cheap” - subsidized to the poor people, so it must not be good, in their minds. Those who can afford it have now been saving up for the nearly $20 filters being marketed by Korean groups which are much more high tech looking but actually do not remove bacteria from the water, but with a higher price tag, no education coming with the product, and community trust damaged, some are using their very limited budgets to buy a product which is often essentially one month’s worth of income and not effective.

In this case, “giving things away” took away the very thing they were trying to provide: a chance to have clean
water