Little Dresses for Africa<\/a> will see to it that they\u2019re shipped off to African orphan girls who would otherwise be wearing tattered, ragged clothing.<\/p>\nAnd I know that many of these projects fall into the category of \u201cwell intentioned but not actually helpful.\u201d \u00a0The clothing that gets deposited in the bins int he grocery store parking lots, if it\u2019s not enough for the thrift stores which buy and resell it, gets shipped to Africa and has been blamed for destroying the local fabric industry. \u00a0For all manner of other items, the cost of shipping exceeds the cost of buying the product locally, or simply isn\u2019t of any value to the Third-World poor, and does nothing to help build their economies.<\/p>\n
What bugs me now is that I can\u2019t find anything that really talks about the impact of LDFA on Africans, for good or bad. \u00a0Perhaps it\u2019s too new \u2014 though it started in 2008, perhaps it\u2019s really only grown recently \u2014 or still too small for a journalist to consider worthwhile writing about except as a feel-good piece. \u00a0But I\u2019ve tried Little Dresses for Africa controversy, Little Dresses for Africa criticism, Little Dresses for Africa waste, and other search terms with no success (the last of these brought up articles on how to make the dresses with as little wasted fabric as possible).<\/p>\n
And maybe it\u2019s not such a bad project \u2014 if it\u2019s in the context of a church group learning about Africa, for instance, and non-sewers gaining useful sewing skills, and if the distribution of those dresses is done in a manner that communicates to the recipients that the maker cared \u2014 even if a Chinese factory could mass-produce pillowcase dresses at a lower cost than buying the pillowcase itself. \u00a0But I\u2019m not so sure.<\/p>\n
What do you think?<\/p>\n
Update: \u00a0It\u2019s been nearly two years since I wrote this post, and in the meantime, I\u2019ve learned about an organization which takes the same impetus of using sewing skills to help others, but with a much more useful end result \u2014 resuable menstrual pads. \u00a0They\u2019re called Days for Girls, and from what I can tell (and wrote about here<\/a>), they do great work.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"You\u2019ve probably heard of them: \u00a0make a pillowcase dress, or two or two hundred, and Little Dresses for Africa will see to it that they\u2019re shipped off to African orphan girls who would otherwise be wearing tattered, ragged clothing. And I know that many of these projects fall into the category of \u201cwell intentioned but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-548","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
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