Have you ever heard about Toms Shoes? For each pair of shoes they sell, Toms Shoes provides one pair of shoes to a child in need. The company is founded on the basic principles of social entrepreneurship. Instead of looking at profit from a strictly economic point of view, social entrepreneurs seek to solve a social problem and to create social changes using their business.
Toms Shoes have by 2012 handed out over one million pair of shoes in 25 countries. However, social entrepreneurship is probably best known through Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohammmed Yunus, the founder of Grameen Bank and developer of the concepts of microfinance.
Microfinance is financial aids such as loans and savings accounts, adapted to those who do not have sufficient liquidity to access the ordinary banking system. An important part of microfinance is the concept of microloans, wherein small loans are given with the intention of supporting or sustaining a business, alleviating poverty, or strengthening women’s rights by making them economically independent.
Microloans are not uncontroversial. There exist good examples of microloans abolishing extreme poverty and making medical care more accessible. There are also good examples of them allowing more children to go to school and stay there longer. At the same time there is no conclusive evidence that microloans in general cure poverty. While many benefit from them, for some they become a trap wherein new loans are given to pay for old debt. Criticism has been directed towards banks deploying high interest rates and using coercive methods to ensure repayment. Eternal loan and debt cycles in combination with an aggressive market have been linked to suicides.
Several microloan institutions direct their services toward women. The underlying thought is that women’s equality and independence is enforced by economic power and freedom. Paradoxically, studies have shown that women’s decision making are not necessarily affected by microloans. Likewise it has been shown that women retain control over small loans, while men in the family take over the larger ones. Women then become the risk takers of loans controlled by men.
Returning to the shoes. It all began in Argentina in 2006. Blake Mycoskie was handing out free shoes for a beneficial association when he got a revelation. He created the enterprise Toms Shoes. Tom is short for tomorrow and the name stems from the basic idea that “shoes offer a better tomorrow”.
Behind Toms Shoes lies the recognition that too many children walk too much barefoot. Some children need to walk several kilometres each day to reach clean water and medical care. Walking barefoot increases the risk of attracting infectious diseases such as elephantiasis, a disease Mycoskie himself names as one of his motivations for starting Toms Shoes. In several countries shoes also serve as a status symbol, and many schools require shoes as a part of their uniforms. No doubt lack of shoes is a health problem, but it is also a foundation for social stigma and exclusion from education.
In 2011 Mycoskie expanded the concept behind Toms Shoes and created Toms Eyewear. A pair of purchased glasses gives a pair of glasses, sight corrective surgery or other sight related medical aid to a person in need. Toms Eyewear is an effort to aid children. It also highlights an important issue in developing countries, namely the differences of sight quality between the men and women. A reason for this is that men are often the primary caretakers in the family and for this reason getting priority over women when it comes to medical care.
Social entrepreneurship can both be criticized and celebrated. Microloans are meant as a way to help the poor, but may be exploited by actors on the market. Toms give us—the consumers—the power to help people to survive and live, simply through buying our everyday commodities. Do we realize the extent of the power we have as consumers, and how this power can be used to create social change?
14 November 2012
