I’ve started a tally for the number of times I see someone wearing an item of clothing that comes from Toronto, my hometown.
Second-hand clothing is a ubiquitous market item in Zambia. Vendors get weekly shipments by the heap. It’s pretty amazing what gems you can find by sifting through the piles (someone I know found a 2 dollar pair of Birkenstocks).
I hadn’t really given this too much thought until my friend, Ann Simmons, brought to my attention how contentious an issue the second-hand clothing trade in the South is. On one hand, flooding the markets of developing economies with cheap second-hand clothing can suppress local textile and garment industries, analogously to how agricultural dumping affects local food production. At the same time though, second-hand clothing creates a lot of employment through its own value chain—transport, cleaning, reconstruction and styling, retail—not to mention that consumers benefit from the availability of low-cost and durable goods.
When you look at the impacts of the trade, do you choose to look at consumers or producers, or can you evaluate the benefits and detriments holistically?
Since I’ve started thinking in terms of value chains, I’ve started to disaggregate what the term “poor” means to me. The constraints a rural farmer living in poverty faces are not necessarily the same as those faced by an urban labourer, or a peri-urban artisan, living in poverty, though all are equally valid. (You can expand it even further of course—throw in gender, education, the list goes on.) For any given intervention, there are differing impacts for players at separate points in the system—and it’s unlikely that the impacts will all be positive.
I guess thinking about things in this light has really reminded me that there’s no panacea for poverty alleviation; addressing poverty requires multiple projects, multiple approaches, multiple targets. And it requires a lot of cooperation and open sharing between the different stakeholders who are orchestrating these efforts—development organizations, governments, and the private sector alike.
Anyway, some reflections I never thought a Toronto Blue Jays cap would inspire!
I’ve started a tally for the number of times I see someone wearing an item of clothing that comes from Toronto, my hometown.
Second-hand clothing is a ubiquitous market item in Zambia. Vendors get weekly shipments by the heap. It’s pretty amazing what gems you can find by sifting through the piles (someone I know found a 2 dollar pair of Birkenstocks).
I hadn’t really given this too much thought until my friend, Ann Simmons, brought to my attention how contentious an issue the second-hand clothing trade in the South is. On one hand, flooding the markets of developing economies with cheap second-hand clothing can suppress local textile and garment industries, analogously to how agricultural dumping affects local food production. At the same time though, second-hand clothing creates a lot of employment through its own value chain—transport, cleaning, reconstruction and styling, retail—not to mention that consumers benefit from the availability of low-cost and durable goods.
When you look at the impacts of the trade, do you choose to look at consumers or producers, or can you evaluate the benefits and detriments holistically?
Since I’ve started thinking in terms of value chains, I’ve started to disaggregate what the term “poor” means to me. The constraints a rural farmer living in poverty faces are not necessarily the same as those faced by an urban labourer, or a peri-urban artisan, living in poverty, though all are equally valid. (You can expand it even further of course—throw in gender, education, the list goes on.) For any given intervention, there are differing impacts for players at separate points in the system—and it’s unlikely that the impacts will all be positive.
I guess thinking about things in this light has really reminded me that there’s no panacea for poverty alleviation; addressing poverty requires multiple projects, multiple approaches, multiple targets. And it requires a lot of cooperation and open sharing between the different stakeholders who are orchestrating these efforts—development organizations, governments, and the private sector alike.
Anyway, some reflections I never thought a Toronto Blue Jays cap would inspire!
Posted 1 year ago View Larger Image
