Oliberté: A Shoe Company That Is Changing How We Think About Foreign Aid

Although the main purpose of foreign aid is to help impoverished nations get out of poverty, most traditional foreign aid programs are actually doing more harm than good to these nations. Instead of creating sustainable economic development opportunities, such as job creation and funding for local entrepreneurs, the most popular foreign aid programs today are giving aid in the form of donations which has proven to be ineffective, and often counterproductive.

As mentioned in Poverty Inc, a powerful documentary released in 2014 that explains the problem with mainstream foreign aid programs, giving donations to an impoverished nation for an extended period of time has proven to be destructive to local economies. The main reason for this is that locals start to become dependant on the donations provided, leaving little to no incentive for local entrepreneurs to start businesses as they cannot compete with the free aid pouring in. As a result less jobs are created and an even higher dependency on foreign aid emerges.

If instead the goal was to empower local entrepreneurs, or create fair job opportunities, people living in impoverished nations will be able to earn a decent living and eventually bring themselves out of poverty, making it a much more sustainable and practical form of foreign aid.

One Canadian company that is going down this path is a Toronto based footwear company by the name of Oliberté. Founder and CEO Tal Dehtiar is on a mission to make Oliberté a model for other more popular brands to follow by showing that it is possible to earn a healthy profit in the footwear industry while also benefiting local communities, something that the footwear industry is notoriously known for disregarding.

The World’s First Fair Trade Certified Footwear Manufacturer

In the footwear and textiles industry it is common to find major corporations taking advantage of poor nations for their lack of human rights and low cost of labor. These same companies have also been known to source materials from low cost distributors without any concern of how ethically the materials were produced.

For Tal Dehtiar this was an unacceptable reality so he set out on a mission to make a footwear company in Addis Ababa Ethiopia that would create fair job opportunities for the community instead of taking advantage of them. He also makes sure to only purchase natural and sustainable materials from nearby nations to support the local African economy.

As a result of setting out on this grand mission, Dehtiar decided to make Oliberté the first Fair Trade Certified footwear manufacturer in the world. Fair Trade is a third party certification that requires paying a membership fee and meeting stringent guidelines of fair and ethical behaviour towards employees and sourced materials. It is no easy task to become Fair Trade certified, especially in the footwear industry which requires more than 40 precise guidelines to ensure the certification is valid.

How Oliberté Is Providing A Form Of Aid That Works

Becoming the first Fair Trade Certified footwear company in the world was just one of many challenges that Dehtiar faced when starting Oliberté. As part of being a socially responsible business, he was also looking for a way to make his company a form of aid that would actually help poor communities instead of push them further away from economic prosperity.

Having experience in the foreign aid environment for a few years prior to starting Oliberté, Dehtiar was aware of the biggest flaws with the system, allowing him to make the following changes in order to make a form of sustainable economic development that works.

Creating job opportunities

One of the major flaws of charity as a form of foreign aid is that no jobs are created. Therefore, poor communities in Africa receiving charity get stuck in a downward spiral of generational poverty that becomes very difficult to get out of, creating further dependence on the charity that got them there in the first place.

Dehtiar realised that with Oliberté he had the opportunity to open a fair trade factory in Ethiopia so he can provide safe and ethical jobs for struggling families. This is a much more long term solution as it allows the employees to provide a decent living for their families, including a good education for their children, so that the generational poverty can come to an end.

Eliminating their dependence on charitable donations

In the donations based model, charities provide money, medication and other supplies that are vital for survival. This is ok in a disaster relief type of situation but as a long term solution it can be very dangerous. Often times, these supplies diminish, leaving these families with no option but to wait for a replenishment.

Dehtiar wanted to get rid of this dependence on long term aid by providing families with the means to take care of themselves. In order to accomplish this, Oliberté reinvests some of it’s profits into the creation of more factories and jobs. Therefore as time goes on more factories and jobs will be created allowing Oliberté to pull even more families out of poverty, instead of making more families reliant on a broken system.

Final Thoughts

Oliberté is definitely making some big changes in the way we think about economic development strategies. This concept works so much better than just providing aid in the form of donations, which has been the case for several generations now.

A big problem with most current aid programs is that they are making massive profits off of the hardships of impoverished nations so there is little incentive for them to change. As consumers, we need to stop falling for the advertising tactics of these big NGO’s and come to the realization that donations just don’t work as a long term solution, even though it may sound like a good idea. The best thing to do if you really want to help people in need is support brands like Oliberté that are creating fair and ethical job opportunities for people that have been stuck in generational poverty for far too long.

Lets make a change by voting with our dollar, the only vote that counts

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