TOMS Shoes and its Negative Impacts as a Humanitarian Aid Organisation - Essay Example

And of course, this is exactly what TOMS shoes does. This program targets children in Africa with an intention to help curb some health issues associated with lack shoes in Africa. However, this humanitarian model for TOMS has economic impacts on the African continent. Apart from not being able to solve the issue it is meant to solve, it gives rise to at least two economic problems. The assumption on which the argument against aid is based on is that these poor people would be able to buy the locally produced shoes if the local enterprises were supported and helped to get the technology to produce cost-effectively and thus transfer these cost savings to the local people.

This however, as Glennie (2009) argues, is not necessarily entirely true because aid programs such as TOMS shoes program operate under the presumption that the beneficiaries would not afford to buy their own shows even if they were produced locally and sold to them cheaply. The argument about this can be a philosophical one and depends on the perspective one decides to take. As Easterly (2007) says, humanitarian aid in Africa has for a long time been accused of crippling economic growth in the African continent.

For instance, the results of a research done in 2008 indicated that the donation of second hand clothes to African nations proved to be responsible for the reduction of employment by at least 50% in the respective industry (Favini, 2013). Growth experts have also indicated that the only real opportunity for growth is the support of local manufacturers in order to create jobs for the many jobless people in the continent. What aid programs such as the TOMS shoes buy-one-give-one program are doing to Africa is that they are flooding the local economies with free items which have been made outside the continent, thus killing off market for