Rich Stupart interviews Tal Dehtiar, the founder of Oliberté Footwear.

IF TOMS SHOES giving free footwear to shoeless Africans seems a little problematic, how about another shoe company trying to make a difference, well…differently?

Matador: Can you tell me a bit more about how you have embedded the company in local structures and economics, and what informed this approach?

Tal: I saw too many times that the right economics weren’t being focused on. The insight I gained from my previous experience of working in developing countries, including running a charity — MBAs Without Borders — is that while knowledge is key and important, the best long term solution for local development is hiring and focusing on hiring locally from the start.

That is one of the key reasons we’ve succeeded with our models — we don’t bring foreigners in to say, “we know better, listen to us.” We find the best and brightest locals that are very capable and provide them the tools; education-wise and financially, they’re the best to represent Oliberté locally.

Click here to read the rest of this interview.

We recently came across this video by DevEd, which raises some really interesting and valuable points regarding the role of relevant education in empowering communities.

Before you run off to do good, it’s worth stopping to consider some ethical basics.

Nobody decides to travel halfway around the world to spend weeks or months of their life undermining a local community. But voluntourism – like that famous quote about the paving on the road to hell – often comes close. The debate about the practice, like most things in life, is far more ethically nuanced than many organisations facilitating such experiences often let on.

Voluntourism has gained an appeal amongst travelers with a wide range of motivations, time, and skills, from volunteers in organised groups such as the Kiva Fellows to handfuls of backpackers stopping off for a week in Siem Reap. The appeal of wanting to get involved in ‘making things better’ for local groups, orphanages, schools or other projects is the glue that holds many different strains of voluntourism together. And the ground on which fierce debates have raged for a few years already on whether particular flavours of voluntourism are helpful, ethically bankrupt, or simply benign.

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Maybe their hearts were in the right place. Maybe not. Either way, these are solid contenders for the title of “worst attempts at helping others since colonialism.”

1. One million t-shirts for Africa

Aid circles employ the cynical acronym SWEDOW (stuff we don’t want) to describe initiatives like Jason Sadler’s 1 Million T-Shirts project. Sadler had admittedly never been to Africa, and had never worked in an aid or development environment before. But he cared a great deal, and came up with the idea to send a million free shirts to Africa in order to help the people there.

Like some sort of lightning rod for the combined venom of the humanitarian aid world, Jason found himself pilloried across the web in a matter of weeks. Everyone from armchair bloggers to senior economists spat fire on his dream until it eventually ground to a halt. In July 2010, Jason threw in the towel and abandoned his scheme. And somewhere in Africa, an economy sighed in relief. 

Read the rest of this article here.

Cooking classes, cultural performances, massages, orphanage visits, adventure, festivals – this is the complete list of things to “Do” in Siem Reap, per the city’s Wikitravel page. Over the years, orphanage visits have seemingly become part of the Cambodian travel experience. As the popularity of visiting and volunteering at orphanages continues to rise, so does the controversy surrounding it. Some say it is an excellent way to make a positive contribution to the country. Others fear that well meaning voluntourists may be doing more harm than good.

Earlier this year, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) reported that while the number of Cambodian orphans has decreased, the number of orphanages has rapidly increased. UNICEF says that the number of orphanages jumped from 153 to 269 in the past five years. Only 21 of those are run by the state; the rest areprivately operated.

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It's strange that at this week's World Economic Forum the designated voice of the world's poor has been Bill Gates, who has pledged £478m to the Global Fund to fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria, telling Davos that the world economic crisis was no excuse for cutting aid.

It reminds me of that dark hour when Al Gore, despite being a shareholder in Occidental Petroleum, was the voice of climate change action – because Gates does not speak with the voice of the world's poor, of course, but with the voice of its rich. It's a loud voice, but the model of development it proclaims is the wrong one because philanthropy is the enemy of justice.

Am I saying that philanthropy has never done good? No, it has achieved many wonderful things. Would I rather people didn't have polio vaccines than get them from a plutocrat? No, give them the vaccines. But beware the havoc that power without oversight and democratic control can wreak.

You can read the rest of this article here.

“Imagine an NFL coach,” writes Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, in his important new book,Fixing the Game, “holding a press conference on Wednesday to announce that he predicts a win by 9 points on Sunday, and that bettors should recognize that the current spread of 6 points is too low. Or picture the team’s quarterback standing up in the postgame press conference and apologizing for having only won by 3 points when the final betting spread was 9 points in his team’s favor. While it’s laughable to imagine coaches or quarterbacks doing so, CEOs are expected to do both of these things.”

Imagine also, to extrapolate Martin’s analogy, that the coach and his top assistants were hugely compensated, not on whether they won games, but rather by whether they covered the point spread. If they beat the point spread, they would receive massive bonuses. But if they missed covering the point spread a couple of times, the salary cap of the team could be cut and key players would have to be released, regardless of whether the team won or lost its games.

Read the rest of this article here.

I watched the below presentation from Ray Anderson on www.ted.com a couple of days ago and it was an unexpected inspiration. From the above quote you may think that Ray Anderson is an environmentalist. And perhaps he is, but he is also the Founder of the worlds’ largest carpet tile manufacturer Interface Inc.

In 1995 Ray came to the realisation that business and industry were the largest contributors to the decline in the environment as well as the only hope to save it. He set out on a mission of sustainability – to provide an inhabitable planet for Tomorrow’s Child...

Read the rest of this article and watch the presentation here.

Whether it’s spending time at an orphanage in Cambodia, or helping build houses in Haiti, ethical tourism, or voluntourism, seems pretty morally unambiguous. 

What could possibly be wrong with helping the unfortunate? 

This feels even more the case when we are personally involved in making the difference, rather than throwing coins in a collection tin thousands of kilometers away.

The result has been a boom in tour companies offering voluntourism opportunities in a wide range of destinations, catering to all levels of commitment. 

Read the rest of this article here.

"It is one of the great testaments to the intellectual — and moral, and spiritual — poverty of American society that it makes its most intelligent young people feel like they're being self-indulgent if they pursue their curiosity."

https://chronicle.com/article/What-Are-You-Going-to-Do-With/124651/