Haiti Doesn T Need Your Old T-Shirt Analysis

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What Should We Do for the Poor?



Focusing on different perspectives, Charles Kenny’s “Haiti Doesn’t Need Your Old T-Shirt” and Tate Watkins’s “How Oliberte, the Anti-TOMS, Makes Shoes and Jobs in Africa” both discuss the ways to help the poor. Kenny pays attention to the way of donation while Watkins cares about the enterprises’ behaviors toward the poor. By comparing these two essays, we can come up with a better solution for helping the poor---giving loans. Giving loans to the companies in poor countries can boom indigenous economy, making up the shortcomings of other solutions.
Kenny’s essay “Haiti Doesn’t Need Your Old T-Shirt” mainly talks about a common global phenomenon: Donations. To be specific, the author provides example of Super Bowl XLV. NFL produces both teams’ T-shirts before the Finals and “donates the losing team’s shirt to the charity World Vision”. (Kenny, 8) Using a rhetorical question “Everyone wins, …show more content…

Oliberte is a footwear company that “makes premium shoes in Africa using African materials”. (4) Dehtiar, the founder of Oliberte, founds the company because his “African friends kept telling him they were tired of charity---what the continent needed was jobs”. (61) Therefore, Oliberte establishes the company, hires only Africans, and uses raw materials in Africa. After introducing Oliberte, Watkins turns his focus into TOMS, “a footwear brand with a humanitarian bent”. (32) They also have their own way to help the people in poverty. They give out free shoes when they sell shoes. Then, the author starts to use other people’s opinions toward these two companies without giving out his own position. The opinions presented in the essay are mainly partial to Oliberte. “Donations can pressure local shoemakers and vendors”. (41) Moreover, Oliberte focuses on quality which is an advantage for

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