Aid Watch Rerun: A suggestion for the 1MillionShirts guy

NOTE FROM THE EDITORS: Over the holidays, we'll be publishing reruns of some of our posts from the first 2 years of Aid Watch. This post originally ran on April 28, 2010, and was one contribution to a controversy that erupted on the internet when aid workers got wind of an amateur aid effort called 1 million shirts. We will be back running new content starting tomorrow, January 4th.

Here’s the back story: A young American entrepreneur wanted to use his powerful social media profiles to do good. He hit on the idea of convincing people to pack up all their unneeded T-shirts, throw in a dollar for shipping, and send them - 1 million of them - somewhere in Africa. He partnered with two charities, applied for 501(c)3 status, and voila, a new cause was born: 1MillionShirts.

Yesterday, professional aid workers, academics, and researchers responded vociferously to this idea. Take a look at these blog posts for more details, but for our purposes we can break it down to two reasons why 1MillionShirts is a poor idea:

1. It’s terribly inefficient. One million T-shirts are heavy, and shipping and customs cost  a lot, likely more than it would cost to produce those shirts locally. Plus, cheap donated clothes flood local markets, undercutting local textile industries.
2. It’s just not needed. There are many serious health, economic, social and political problems challenging different African countries today, but lack of T-shirts isn’t one of them. This project idea, like many bad ones, clearly came from thinking “what kind of help do I want to give” rather than “what kind of help would be most useful to some specific group of individuals.”

So it’s safe to say that Jason, the  guy behind 1MillionShirts, is not an expert in giving aid to Africa. But maybe he IS an expert in something.

He is  an expert in reaching people through social media. We can conclude this because Jason makes his living from companies that pays him to wear their T-shirts for a day and spread videos, pictures, blog posts and tweets about it to their networks—see iwearyourshirt.com. As one of the testimonials on their website puts it, “They are funny, creative guys who really know how to promote you and your products by wearing your shirt.” Another one: “Gotta love a guy who wears a shirt, gets great exposure for the company whose shirt he’s wearing as well as himself, and who manages to turn it into a business.”

After Jason’s do-gooding was met with such a barrage of criticism, he apparently offered to axe the 1MillionShirts campaign if someone could come up with a better idea.

So here’s our suggestion: Why doesn't he use his own specialized expertise to help get the word out that giving cash is better than giving stuff. I bet if he put his mind to thinking about creative ways to spread that message, he could knock it out of the park.

And if the 1MillionShirts guy doesn't feel that spreading this important message satisfies their desire to do good in the world, he can still follow the advice of many people who devote their professional lives to thinking about problems like these, and donate cash to a trusted charity with local knowledge and experience working to solve some specific problem—just so long as it isn’t African shirtlessness.

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Update: Alanna Shaikh has written a definitive rebuttal to 1MillionShirts and Jason's reaction to criticism- see it here. Update 2: See also the open letter from Siena Antsis. Update 3: A perspective on the broader meaning of the 1MillionShirts fail from Christopher Fabian of UNICEF's innovation team. Update 4: This blog post has been edited at Jason's request to indicate that only Jason (and not Evan, with whom he works on iwearyourshirt.com) is involved in the 1MillionShirts campaign.

TIME magazine covers 1Million Shirts

Jason Sadler, the guy behind 1MillionShirts, didn’t know what he was up against:

Little did Sadler know that he had stumbled into a debate raging in the aid world about the best and worst ways to deliver charity, or whether to give at all. He crashed up against a rather simple theory that returned to prominence after failures during the 2004 Asian tsunami and the Haiti earthquake: wanting to do something to help is no excuse for not knowing the consequences of what you're doing.

The TIME magazine article published today, by Nick Wadhams, a Nairobi-based journalist, offers some closure to the bloggers, aid workers and aid watchers who have been following this debate since it broke out two weeks ago: Sadler “no longer plans to send the shirts to Africa. He says he will find another way to use the T-shirts he collects, possibly for disaster relief, giving them to homeless shelters or using them to create other goods.”

In addition to Bill Easterly, Kenyan Economist James Shikwati, and the aid worker and blogger known as Tales from the Hood, Wadhams quotes Kenyan journalist Rasna Warah:

"Africa is the greatest dumping ground on the planet. Everything is dumped here." Adds Warah: "The sad part is that African governments don't say no — in fact, they say 'Please send us more.' They're abdicating responsibility for their own citizens."

Read the whole thing here.

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See our previous blogs on the subject here: A suggestion for the 1MillionShirts guy Nobody wants your old T-shirts

And see an exhaustive collection of posts about 1MillionShirts here.

Nobody wants your old T-shirts

UPDATE 4/28 10:45 am answering the "be a man" video: see end of this post I guess our great Alanna Shaikh post "Nobody wants your old shoes" (2nd most popular post of all time) did not quite reach everybody. Or maybe the parallels between old T-shirts and old shoes were not widely appreciated (HT @texasinafrica)

A new clothing-themed charitable campaign from the guys behind lucrative social media marketing exercise I Wear Your Shirt is looking to get unwanted T-shirts out of your closet and onto the backs of a million people across Kenya, Uganda, DRC, Ghana, Liberia, Mozambique, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Sudan, Swaziland and South Africa.

The 1MillionShirts project, launched this month, is asking for used (but decent) T-shirts to be sent in with a one dollar bill to help with container costs. The shirts will then be shipped to Africa to help clothe folks in need.

The guy in the video also asks for $  from each of us because it is very expensive to send containers full of bulky low-value T-shirts all the way over to all those places somewhere in Africa. Test question: why might this fact help explain why this is "one of the worst advocacy ideas of the year" (in @texasinafrica's words).

UPDATE 4/27 10:45 am: @iwearyourshirt posts an angry video attacking me and other "Internet trolls" for daring to criticize him, challenging us to come out from behind our computers to call him on the phone directly and "be a man."

Laura has put up a constructive alternative suggestion to #1millionshirts in response to the, um, "be a man" challenge.

I of course completely agree with Laura.

As far as how to have the debate on 1 Million Shirts, it's perfectly legitimate to have a public debate on Twitter or any other forum on a very public advocacy idea that is out there. That the only acceptable alternative for @iwearyourshirt is to get a personal phone call is to suggest that public debate is not legitimate and that the design of aid projects should be negotiated in private.

Sorry, pal, that's not how democratic debate  and accountability works.  I'm sorry if you feel blind-sided by this debate, but the burden of proof was on you to check out your idea before you made it so public to a large audience.  To me, that's what it means to "be a man", oops I mean, "be a human."