Othering a Problem, or Why I Hate Buying for Charity

This is a recently aired commercial for Pampers diapers in which the company promotes purchasing its product by the fact that they will donate one vaccine to a child for each pack of diapers purchased.



This whole idea to buy things for charity, that problems happen to 'other' people overseas in different clothing, and that white people are the ones who can solve other people's problems by just buying shit is just so ridiculous.

First of all, if your concern is the health and safety of children perhaps you should re-think buying disposable diapers and/or perhaps donate money directly to a charity doing work you consider important for this cause. Yearly, $300 million is spent on diaper disposal (this doesn't include diaper production) and on average children use 5,000 diapers until they are potty trained. I bet $300 million buys a lot of vaccines, or other things, like clean drinking water and educational services.

Second, the United States doesn't do such a good job of vaccinating its own children. Case in point: I'm currently working on a community quality of life report for my region. I am working on health indicators, and just received information about 2007 vaccination rates for this area. My county has a 55.7% vaccination rate for adequate vaccinations for 2-3 year olds. So I don't see how this is just a problem for children in other countries, it is a problem for children in the United States. Now, state by state the vaccination rates are generally in the 90th percentile, according to the CDC, but obviously there is a lot of variation from community to community, as I have found out. Furthermore, the state-wide vaccination rates are often based on interviewed samples, and thus do not represent the total state population.

But I guess it's just more palatable for consumers if the issue of child vaccination is contextualized as a developing world, non-white people problem. If consumers do care, they can conveniently just pick up some diapers and somehow expect to help other people. What ever happened to just giving money to charity? Like with breast cancer 'branding', I often wonder how much actually goes to the designated cause and how money and resources could be used more efficiently by just being given to the charity or organization directly.

If you read the fine print on the commercial, you will see that US $0.05 is donated per package of Pampers to buy a vaccine. FIVE CENTS. A consumer could just buy generic diapers, save a buck and donate that dollar to UNICEF and then UNICEF can provide 20 vaccines. But if consumers were told this and decided to save their diaper money and donate money directly, Pampers couldn't market themselves as the 'ethical' diaper company and make money off the fact that they donate to UNICEF.