Barefoot on Broadway (Warning: gross feet pics)

Vivek Nemana is an NYU graduate student and a student worker at DRI. I’ve been working at DRI long enough to recognize bad aid, and yet my skin still tingles when I watch the TOMS Shoes’ One Day without Shoes video. I know, I KNOW…but I just can’t help being swept away by montages of beautiful young people “taking action” set to a backdrop of a dramatic Matisyahu song. So I bared my feet for the cause:

Sure, this whole event really just helps TOMS sell more shoes, and sure, it was cold and raining in New York, and sure, I solicited bewildered stares, watched mothers shield their daughters from me, and possibly contracted hepatitis, but wasn’t I raising awareness about the real, complex challenges facing developing countries? Because wouldn’t African people hate to be shoeless on a rainy day in the Village, too? Also, do you think I could be a foot model?

TOMS, a for-profit shoe company, likes to use highfalutin’ NGO buzzwords like “accountability,” “awareness” and “change” in its marketing. It just published its first “giving report.” Which is fantastic…except that the campaign reinforces the stereotype that Africans are so pathetically destitute that they need anything we can give them, while allowing us to ignore both the condescending implication that the only hope for the poor is our charity, and the negative impacts of gifts-in-kind on local economies.

I also attended a One Day Without Shoes event held by the TOMS Shoes club at NYU. When I prodded my fellow students a bit about why they supported TOMS, the main message I came away with (and here please note my sample size n=2) was that people should buy the shoes because, with little time and disposable income to spare, it’s an easy way to be charitable with the things we do already.

In a way the attitude itself makes sense – it’s a fundamental economic principle -- but it manifests itself in a giving model (and this goes for BOGO and gifts-in-kind in general) that runs backwards. Instead of taking a fundamental problem that people face – say, unsafe conditions for children – and thinking of what they need to help solve it, this model takes a solution – shoes – and staples it to some problem that people have. And by attempting to view the whole spectrum of issues through this single-dimensional proto-solution, it’s easy to forget about all the unintended consequences.

It’s obvious that the TOMS aid-vertising works, that it can successfully generate a huge grassroots-style movement of well-intentioned people by not only playing into their sense of justice but also providing them with a way to “do something.” But, as I ended my own half-hearted participation in One Day Without Shoes, I remained unconvinced that easy aid could ever be good aid.

What I am certain of, however, is that nobody should EVER have to walk around barefoot in Greenwich Village.

A tryst with TOMS

Vivek Nemana is a graduate student in economics at New York University and works for DRI. I remember wanting to save the world when I bought my first (and only) pair of TOMS Shoes. I was a freshman at NYU and involved in a handful of Save the Child Soldiers/Darfur/Fair Trade student clubs. With TOMS, just $50 of my (parents’) money would buy two pairs of shoes – one for me and one for a poor shoeless child somewhere – plus raise a few dollars for one of these clubs. Besides, those shoes were hip.

Looking back—and looking around me now at the high TOMS saturation on campus—I realize that TOMS Shoes is extremely well-marketed, extremely popular, bad aid.

TOMS follows a Buy-One-Give-One (BOGO) model where a customer pays for both pairs of shoes. But buying poor children $25 shoes is simply not cost-effective. Donating clothes to the poor in poor countries is not the same as, say, donating winter clothing to the homeless in New York. For one, shoes don’t cost $25 in the areas where TOMS donates; local shoe salesmen will sell footwear for much, much less. While TOMS insists their giving is considerate of the local economy, they don’t explain how. At its worst, local shoe merchants can’t compete with the continual influx of free shoes. (TOMS produces its shoes in China, Argentina and Ethiopia and gives them in 24 countries.) It’s funny how TOMS can call itself a “movement” and yet get away with offering very little information on the movement’s business practices or measured impact.

Consider how else you could spend those $25 you invested. If the aim of wearing shoes is to prevent soil-borne diseases such as hookworm, then $25 would go much further if invested in sanitation. You might give to an NGO that builds latrines, for example, which serve more people and last years longer than a pair of shoes. (For an extensive explanation of these and other problems with the TOMS model, read Peace Corps volunteer Zac Mason’s blog or the Good Intentions are Not Enough blog.)

So why did I buy TOMS that day? I’d venture that my personal reasons weren’t all that different from hundreds of other college kids like me. We come to college wanting to do good. At the same time, we want to buy cool things. So it’s exciting when these two come together, and we get the chance to give back as we consume. TOMS is literally a prime example of what Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek calls “cultural capitalism”: you combine acts of goodwill with acts of consumption (Zizek sees this as a sort of personal redemption for being a consumer).

We buy TOMS Shoes or Fair Trade chocolate or poverty-fighting water bottles because we genuinely want to help. But in the frenzy of do-gooder consumption we stop thinking all the way through. We fail to ask how our money will help, and we overlook how our good deeds might actually do harm. We forget that what we want to do for others might not be the same as what they really need.

It’s too convenient to hand our credit cards to businesses that promise to do good; making a real difference also requires information, accountability and careful consideration. We talk extensively on this blog about NGO accountability. Shouldn’t customers ask the same of their favorite social entrepreneurs?

-- Photocredit: Flickr user loveandmusic18