Based on a very unscientific sampling of the foreign aid and development blogosphere, three issues have dominated most of the discussions lately in this community devoted to fighting poverty and improving lives worldwide:
- The uprising in the Middle East.
- The push by some in Congress to cut deeper into the foreign aid budget.
- World’s Vision plan to give NFL Superbowl T-shirts (of the losing team) to poor people.
Flickr, americanistadechiapas
Superbowl 2011
I will focus only on the last issue of the T-shirts, leaving aside for now the first two topics which may be more important but are often, in fact, not very entertaining.
It’s much more interesting to pick on a large do-gooder organization for doing something apparently ill-conceived like donating to poor people more “stuff we don’t want” (dubbed SWEDOW or GIK, gifts-in-kind, by the development cognoscenti).
I should add, in the interest of full disclosure, that I was one of those who jumped on the outrage bandwagon about World Vision’s loser T-shirt donation scheme. Continue reading