How Donated Clothes Hurt Kenya

While traveling in Western Kenya last year, I met a man in the city of Kisumu, who calls himself "Tom Tourist." Tom is a self-taught aquatic biologist who grew up in the hills near Lake Victoria. He recalled hunting zebras and antelope with a bow as a child. Today, the wildlife on dry land is almost completely gone.The lake still harbors crocodiles, hippos, Nile monitor lizards and a variety of birds. The fish are declining due to a combination of pollution, over-fishing and the effects of invasive species.

We spent a day motoring around together in a boat on Lake Victoria. While stopped in a lake-side village, we saw these people selling used American clothes. With the exception of the Maasai, everyone I saw in Kenya was wearing western clothes. Most of it comes from free donations of used clothing in the US and Europe by well-intended people. The clothing is bundled into bales and sold at very low prices through a series of middle-men until it arrives in Africa.

As Tom explains in this very short video that I filmed, these donations have destroyed the Kenyan cloth industry and erased much of their culture. Weaving cloth and sewing clothes used to be a good business that helped Kenyan women support themselves. That whole part of their economy has been destroyed. For thousands of years, these smart, capable people clothed themselves as needed. They don't need our help.

Tom also told me a story about how years earlier he met a Norwegian woman who had hired him to act as a guide for the day. She looked at his shoes and said that they looked exactly like her brother's shoes that he'd gotten rid of several years before in Norway. He removed one of them for closer inspection and the brother's name was still written on it. The Norwegian tried to buy the pair to bring back home and present to her brother.

Tom refused to sell them.

"I really like those shoes," he said.