Woman Friendly Condoms that Help Africa

My ad concept for L. condoms.

Here's a cool thing:

Peace Dividend Trust's excellent Elmira Bayrasli recently blogged for Forbes about a woman named Talia Frenkel who is starting a new condom company, called "L.," marketing to women. They aren't female condoms, but the marketing isn't aimed solely at men either, and the condoms won't include certain ingredients (glycerin, paraben) that can irritate women's skin.

Frenkel is also employing the widely disrespected (among aid workers) Tom's Shoes model. For every "L." condom you buy, one will be given away in certain African countries where there's a ton of HIV and not that many condoms. Buy one, give one (BOGO).

As we recover from The Big Kerfuffle* in which the NFL and World Vision defiled the developing world's dignity by sending them American football merchandise, its nice to hear about a product that might fit with the occasionally misused BOGO model.

(To be fair, the NFL/World Vision weren't doing BOGO, they were using a Gift in Kind model, which also gets a lot of deserved smack-talk. Also, Tom's Shoes didn't invent BOGO.)

So why will BOGO for condoms be less of a scam than BOGO for shoes?

Because shoes can be made anywhere. The countries that receive donated Tom's Shoes definitely have their own cobblers, and when the cobbler's customers start getting free shoes from Tom's, the cobbler's out of a job. This violates the number one principle-that-Aid-Workers-copied-off-of-Doctors'-papers: Do No Harm.  If BOGO programs like Tom's Shoes are giving away things that could be made in-country by locals, they're not helping.

But condoms can't be made everywhere, and they definitely don't work as an individual or family enterprise like shoe cobbling and hair-cutting do. Sending condoms abroad with a buy-one-give-one program might mildly curb the profits of stores that sell condoms. But no stores sell only condoms, whereas many cobblers only make and repair shoes for a living. Plus, it sounds like some countries just run out of condoms and can't get replacements for months on end sometimes.

Side note: 700,000 condoms got heisted out of a shipping container last week! There's a huge condom black market, which includes counterfeiters that make shoddy merchandise.

Places with condom factories should help out places without condom factories, especially if those places without condom factories also have a huge AIDS problem.

So, this looks like a good idea to me.  Plus, as Forbes pointed out, L. brand condoms won't evoke the Trojan war at all. And lets face it, isn't it a little rape-suggesty to have a condom brand alluding to a device that was used to sneak soldiers inside the enemy walls so they could come out at night and brutalize everyone?

*Note: The Big Kerfuffle is how the NFL/World Vision t-shirt controversy was described over on Tales from The Hood. I liked it. So I used it too :-)

Updated to include links to the author of the post that inspired this post (Elmira Bayrasli) and to Peace Dividend Trust.

The Raging Volunteerism Debate

A lively debate on the merits and demerits(?) of aid/development related volunteerism is occurring in the aid/development corner of the blogosphere. As a current international volunteer and erstwhile domestic (U.S.) volunteer, I basically have to blog about it too right?!

This is a multifaceted discussion, and this post would get boringly long if I tried to hit every point. In some parts of the debate, bloggers have treated volunteerism as a sort of systemic problem in the world of international aid and development. There's a better way to look at this issue!

Let me persuade you:

Several questions make up the core of the discussion:
What is volunteerism? Why do people volunteer? Are volunteers useful, useless or downright harmful to the orgs where they work? What are the defining relationships between volunteers, paid workers, amateurs and professionals? Why do orgs offer volunteer positions? And, as Crystal Hayling of the Center for Effective Philanthropy puts it, “Whose Volunteer Experience is this Anyway?"

In asking that last question, Hayling was asserting that volunteering should be an altruistic pursuit.
“It is not about you!” she imagined exclaiming to her friend who had planned a volunteer outing to Cambodia with her teenage kids, only to have the locals thwart their good time by taking leadership in a construction project away from the (oh so construction savvy?) teenagers. The kids were disappointed and turned off by volunteerism after the experience.

To Hayling, the idea that the kids would want control and decision making power in their volunteer experience indicated that something was wrong. They should have been doing it to help the locals, not for themselves.

I doubt anybody has ever embarked on a stint of volunteering with purely altruistic motives. Volunteer positions frequently offer perks like travel to distant lands, interactions with exotic cultures, and in a time of rising unemployment (in the U.S. anyway), something to do for a few months while you’re jobless anyway. The question that comes to mind is “what’s wrong with volunteering because of the benefits you can reap?”