Stop donating t-shirts to Africa

Two students Flip

Schellekens and Duco Vollebregt have, like many, taken it upon themselves to save people in Africa. Their initiative is to collect t-shirts used during the Owee, as well as other unwanted clothing, pack it and ship if off to Africa where ‘Clothing is very much wanted’. I have no doubt that

Schellekens and Vollebregt are well-intentioned but I would like to convince them and every student engaged in such projects, to seriously consider that these short term, band-aid projects are part of a wider process that is inflicting long term damage to development and dignity of Africa.

When I first came to Europe to study at TU Delft, I started to understand why there were so many aid and charity programmes in Uganda, where I come from, and most other African countries. A Nigerian author, Chimamanda Adichie, describes what I observed as ‘The Danger of a Single Story’. The news coverage Europeans see regarding Africa contains certain keywords – poverty, starvation, AIDS – and as a result the reality of an African for most Europeans is a miserable one. I assume this is one of the main reasons such charity initiatives keep popping up. I am not saying these problems do not exist, however, this kind of thinking is comparable to me basing my perception of Dutch people solely on marijuana-smoking and Geert Wilders. Its just plain silly.

While people like Schellekens and Vollebregt are basking in good feelings from charity initiatives, they miss the numerous negative effects these initiatives have on the very people they are trying to help, I would like to point out one related to donated t-shirts. In Zambia, second-hand donations like your Owee t-shirts are called Salaula. The idea was that cheap clothes meant families could save money spent on clothes to buy other goods. However, mass influx of Salaula led to the collapse of the local Zambian textile industry – leaving lots of people jobless. They could buy cheaper clothes but did not have jobs to afford food let alone cheaper clothes.

Everybody needs to stop this notion that Africans are poor, helpless people who need to be given unwanted t-shirts, food or underwear. More importantly, I hope Schellekens and Vollebregt rethink their project and donate all t-shirts sports teams in TU Delft instead. There are many ways to help Africa, but sending unwanted t-shirts is not one. When thinking about development projects, the initiators should reflect beyond clichés and ask themselves if they are not possibly doing harm in the long term.

Emmanuel Mulom alumnus of TU Delft and from Uganda

For more information on negative effects of donating t-shirts look at goodintents.org/aid-debates/1-million-shirts-campaign

If, as former British Prime Minister Harold Wilson once famously said, “a week is a long time in politics”, then five years certainly is for both a politician and TU Delft’s internationalization process. It was five years ago that Mark Rutte, now the new Dutch Prime Minister but then a rather plodding State Secretary for Education, came to Delft to meet with a group of TU Delft students in a cramped, stinking-of-stale-beer room above a bar in Delft centre. Rutte had been invited by Aegee (Association des Etats Généraux des Etudiants de l’Europe / European Students’ Forum) to a ‘discussion evening about international education’.

At the time, like Rutte himself, TU Delft’s internationalisation process was rather unimpressive, still suffering from growing pains. The university was certainly ambitious and aggressive in its drive to attract more and more international students to Delft, but many of those international students were dissatisfied, charging that the university had promised more than it could deliver and feeling as if they weren’t getting their money’s worth, citing a string of grievances ranging from metal can (i.e. space box) housing to overpriced visas, delayed work permits, scant part-time job opportunities and the inability or unwillingness of some academic staffers to speak English.

Since then however TU Delft’s internationalization process has continued to mature and improve from year to year, much as, one assumes, Rutte has, to the point that now both the politician and the process are successes by any measure. TU Delft is now a fully fledged international university, while Rutte will soon be exchanging discussion evenings at Delft’s Wijnhaven café with talks at the White House, although one hopes Obama is more generous in his opinions than one international student quoted in the original Delta article about that discussion evening, who said: “I know Mr. Rutte, more than once I’ve been to discussion evenings with him. There’ll be no discussion, there’s never a discussion with this guy. For sure he’ll be asked tough questions and he’ll reply by avoiding answering, ignoring the question, changing the subject or doing all three.”

Budget cuts
Last week, Dutch Queen Beatrix formally asked Rutte, leader of the Liberal (VVD) party, to form a cabinet backed by the Christian Democrats (CDA) and the Freedom Party (PVV), the party of anti-Islamist populist Geert Wilders. Mr Wilders’ PVV will support the minority cabinet but will remain outside the government; nevertheless, the VVD and CDA hold only 52 seats in the 150-member Dutch parliament and therefore must rely on the PVV’s 24 MPs to pass legislation.

Rutte, meanwhile, wasn’t very popular with international students that long ago night in Delft and he isn’t likely to be with the general Dutch public either, as his new government plans to make budget cuts of some 3.2bn euros for 2011, and some 18bn euros over the next four years, with spending on healthcare, education and government workers all being cut in a drive to reduce the budget deficit.

Rutte has since appointed Marja van Bijsterveldt (CDA) as his Minister of Education, Culture and Science (OCW). Van Bijsterveldt, a nurse by training who will preside over expected steep cuts in education, must now also contend with a recent call by Dutch technological universities and research institutes to remove the science and technology portfolio from the Ministry of OCW and shift it to the newly created, and presumably better funded, Ministry of Economic Affairs, Agriculture and Innovation, in order to prevent the scientific research and innovation portfolios from being split between two ministries.
“These two subjects cannot be separated. The shifting of portfolios between ministries must not be allowed to result in a fragmentation in decision-making regarding science and innovation,” said Jos Engelen, chairman of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO).

Meanwhile, TU Delft’s student union, the VSSD, has expressed dismay at the education plans of the VVD and CDA, which call for Dutch students who encounter delays in graduating of one year to pay 3,000 euros in extra tuition fees and have their free OV public transport cards taken away. “There will be a high price to pay for making bad choices of subjects to study, for training for a top sport or for participating in student association boards,” said a VSSD spokesperson.

To read the original Delta article on Rutte’s visit to Delft, published on June 2, 2005, click here: www.delta.tudelft.nl/14597