User:Allisonshields

Using Wikipedia, I hope to create and/or review pages involving global poverty. I am especially interested in the effect of poverty on children. I love that Wikipedia allows a community to work together so everyone can gain knowledge and understanding of social issues. I contributed to Wikipedia in the fall of 2012 and look forward to continue doing so in the spring of 2014 as part of my course work in Human Development in Global and Local Communities.

I am glad to see you are tackling it. There is an enormous literature on the Fair trade debate page and the fair trade impact studies pages, and the discussions over the years show the issues. The problem is that people who are enthusiastic keep deleting this research and put on what they have gleaned from advertisements. And as the advertising strategy is to sell emotion, the feel-good effect, (not unreasonably) the advertising campaign is weak on facts. It invites people to imagine what fair trade does. And people put in what they imagine. The research by people trying to find what is really happening does not support this imagination. We aid professionals are only too well aware that most of aid is a waste of space, if not actually harmful. It is the 10% or so of aid that makes a big difference that justifies the aid programme. And Fairtrade does not even claim to make the difference that a small to medium high payoff aid project makes. So absolute rigour is needed for anything regarding aid and global poverty. Best wishes.AidWorker (talk) 12:56, 11 November 2012 (UTC)