In the past month I have seen three different aid agencies request donated goods to send overseas. This is always an appealing idea because it makes you feel like you’re really helping while at the same time recycling things that are no longer of any use to you. Unfortunately, it often costs more to ship goods than to buy them locally, and inappropriate donations can do more harm than good. The following are five questions you should always ask before donating.
- Is the donation appropriate for the local climate, culture, and religion?
- Do they actually need the donation?
- Are the goods available locally?
- Will the people receiving the goods be able to afford to fix or replace the donated item?
- Will donating this item do more harm than good?
1. Is the donated item appropriate for the climate, culture, religion of those you are trying to help?
Far too many examples of inappropriate donations came from the tsunami. Winter hat, coats and gloves to southern Thailand. Pens that didn’t write and so were donated as a tax write off. Canned pork and skimpy clothing donated to Muslim communities. Dog food donated to feed children (we can only assume that the donor thought the children were starving to death). All of these were not only a complete waste of money on the donors part, but some of them were offensive as well.
2. Do they actually need it?
A church group once invited me to help them with a care package they were sending to the needy in Thailand. I declined when I saw what they were sending; cloth diapers and diaper pins, and baby bottles. Thai’s don’t use diapers or bottles.
Thai’s dress babies in a shirt but leave them bottomless. This meant that I had a general policy of never picking up a baby. I was also roundly teased on more than one occasion because, as everyone knows, “Baby urine is clean”. Although occasionally unpleasant, there are advantages to this method. Children are potty trained at an extremely young age and don’t suffer from diaper rash.
Bottle are also rarely used, and only by those that are well-off or married to a foreigner. Everyone else breastfeeds, even working women. My neighbor baby sat for a nurse who worked at the hospital a block or two up the road. The nurse came to the house several times a day to breastfeed her baby. Bottle feeding would require either a breast pump and refrigeration or baby formula. If they could afford either of those options they would be wealthy enough not to need donated bottles.
Recently an aid group posted a request for thousands of donated used bras to ship overseas. The reason given for needing the bras was that they were hard to get locally. It may be that bras are not readily available because women don’t generally wear them, I wouldn’t know where to go to buy a burka in Utah.
3. Are the goods available locally? – if your donating overseas.
An aid agency has just been formed to ship new and used flip flops to developing countries. Although flip flops are regularly worn in many countries, they are also readily available. In Thailand flip flops were so omnipresent that 7-11 sold them in a variety of sizes and colors for about two bucks a pair.
Transporting used flip flops would be very expensive once you factor in the cost of shipping goods from your house to the aid agency, from the aid agency by sea or air to the country, and from the port to the actual people that need them. In the end it would cost far more than buying new ones at 7-11.
After the tsunami, a group of students shipped donated school supplies to Thailand. The person picking them up paid more in clearing customs and shipping them to the affected area than he would have if he’d bought them from the local marketplace. Purchasing goods locally puts money into the economy. No only does the person selling it to you make a little profit, but they will likely order more increasing sales at the factory as well.
4. Will the people receiving the goods be able to afford to fix or replace the donated item?
Imagine if Russia donated cars to your state to help during the financial crisis. You might be thrilled to receive a free car (although the US car manufactures and dealerships will not be thrilled that their market was undercut) until the first time you had to repair it. The owners manual printed in Russian won’t be too helpful, and it will be difficult to find a mechanic or spare parts for the vehicle.
Items like imported pipes may not work with local systems because of differences in threads or diameters based on inches, not centimeters. If the pipes are broken they cannot be replaced, nor can the system be expanded. If you decide to donate bottles and formula, can the women afford to buy more when the donation runs out?
5. Will giving this item do more harm than good
Unfortunately, we often know so little about the effects of our donations that you may not be able to answer this question.
After the tsunami, due to media hype and a desire to help, hundreds of people donated clothing. So many clothes were donated to India that truckloads of them were just dumped alongside the road. They became a choking hazard for the local cattle and government staff had to be diverted from the recovery effort to dispose of the donations.
Food aid can undermine the local farmers or shopkeepers. Shipping in food and giving it away for free may destroy what little market there was for food (see the posting Should the Maersk Alabama Have Been There in the First Place for more about this).
Consider donating within your own community
Although it is tempting to donate goods to help people overseas, it is usually cheaper and better to buy goods in that country. Instead of sending over your bras and flip flops, hold a community garage sale and donate the proceeds. Or contact a local aid agency and see how you can best help out within your own community.
Related posts:
A contest to find the worst examples of in-kind donations
The most useful in-kind donations
Sending sports equipment to needy children may seem like a good idea, but is it…
Should the Maersk Alabama have been there in the first place?
Is International Aid Making Things Worse?
Other Resources:
Interaction: How to Help
Center of International Disaster Information (CIDI): Guidelines for appropriate International Disaster Donations
The World Reuse, Repair and Recycling Association (WR3A.org) is a trade association formed to address these kinds of questions. We are currently consumed completely by the questions around exports of used electronics (digital divide orgs vs. anti-dumping enviros). I have found my MBA degree usually answers more questions than my international relations degree, but the time in Peace Corps was invaluable. http://www.youtube.com/results?search_type=&search_query=ewaste&aq=f This is a link to our "Fair Trade" video, a response to all the legislation banning export of all used electronics (first in CA, now proposed nationally).
This discussion board is a fantastic idea! There are a group of us working post-disaster response and evaluation and I am thrilled you have started this up. I hope it gets wide participation and coverage (I will share with many). More comments about medicines a topic near and dear to my heart. 1. Donate only essential medicines. Most donated medicines are not essential medicines-- as described by WHO list and good data on this from MSF and Management Sciences for Health. Essentially, medicines like cough syrup, anti-histamine syrups, and other liquids are heavy, a mess and detract from what is really needed. 2. We trained nurses, physician assistants, and physicians in many other countries and they learn about essential medicines and usually do not have access to expensive antibiotics. These medicines arrive and may or may not have their instructions with them-- in English. The health workers and patients get them and often cannot read the labels or warnings. The drugs are impossible to look up and are not available the following week. Thus, the health workers are unable to know what they are giving to patients. Health workers and patients need labels and materials that are in their language and can be adjusted for the specific patient. We needed good plastic bottles with good lids more than anything. 3. We learned the hard way that labels coming with large donations may not be accurate (to put it nicely). We got a 50 gallon drum of blue pills from a US donor that was labeled as ferrous sulfate tablets-- routinely given for iron deficiency in children and pregnant women. We used them for awhile but then decided to have them tested to be sure they were still chemically active. Turned out they were not iron tablets but pyridium (urinary antiseptic used to treat pain of urinary infections). We had unknowingly been given people something that was not helping their iron deficiency which can be life threatening but were exposing them to an unnecessary drug of no value. Fortunately, it is quite safe but does cause urine to turn bright orange and may have scared people. 4. The most difficult drugs are those for chronic diseases. These are expensive and usually need a "system" or program to dispense them. In disasters patients receiving treatment for epilepsy, high blood pressure, diabetes, tuberculosis, AIDS/HIV, depression, schizophrenia, methadone maintenance, cancer chemotherapy or palliative medicines have few options and end up without their medications. Most relief agencies do not provide strong pain medicines, the stigma against mental health is such that few programs or agencies deal with it and no one donates drugs, and even the more routine medical treatments for "accepted" medical illnesses like hypertension and insulin are very hard to find since aid programs emphasis is on trauma care and infection only. We need to locate programs that are up and running that have the system and means to provide these medicines and then make sure they get them-- partners in health has been doing it for TB and HIV they would be who I would start with to ask about getting these services in place and assured. Then donate the funds for those groups to purchase what they need. Ditto to what has been said by many.... find people who know the ground and the people and help them do more better. Thanks!