Lisa Ann Richey

Bono's Product (RED) Initiative: corporate social responsibility that solves the problems of ‘distant others’

Abstract The Product (RED) initiative was launched by Bono at Davos in 2006. Product RED is ‘a brand created to raise awareness and money for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria by teaming up with iconic brands to produce RED-branded products’. With the engagement of American Express, Apple, Converse, Gap, Emporio Armani, Hallmark and Motorola, consumers can help HIV/AIDS patients in Africa. They can do so simply by shopping, as a percentage of profits from Product (RED) lines goes to support the Global Fund. In this article we examine how the corporations that are part of this initiative use RED to build up their brand profiles, sell products and/or portray themselves as both ‘caring’ and ‘cool’. We also show that, more than simply being another example of cause-related marketing (like the pink ribbon campaign or the ubiquitous plastic armbands), RED engages corporations in profitable ‘helping’ while simultaneously pushing the agenda of corporate social responsibility (CSR) towards solving the problems of ‘distant others’.

New actors and alliances in development

‘New actors and alliances in development’ brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars exploring how development financing and interventions are being shaped by a wider and more complex platform of actors than usually considered in the existing literature. The contributors also trace a changing set of key relations and alliances in development – those between business and consumers; ngos and celebrities; philanthropic organisations and the state; diaspora groups and transnational advocacy networks; ruling elites and productive capitalists; and ‘new donors’ and developing country governments. Despite the diversity of these actors and alliances, several commonalities arise: they are often based on hybrid transnationalism and diffuse notions of development responsibility; rather than being new per se, they are newly being studied as practices that are now coming to be understood as ‘development’; and they are limited in their ability to act as agents of development by their lack of accountability or pro-poor commitment. The articles in this collection point to images and representations as increasingly important in development ‘branding’ and suggest fruitful new ground for critical development studies.

Buying into development? Brand Aid forms of cause-related marketing

Consumers, partnering with corporations and celebrities, are forming new alliances in international development through what we call ‘Brand Aid’ initiatives. At a time of shifting relationships between public and private aid, commodities are sold as the means of achieving development for recipients and good feelings for consumers simultaneously. In this article we first formalise our conceptual model of Brand Aid at the triple interface of causes, branded products and celebrities. Then we conduct a systematic empirical analysis of contemporary Brand Aid initiatives, including three in-depth case studies of ‘Win One Give One’, toms shoes and Product (red). We argue that these not only use imaginaries of development to sell products to Northern consumers but also engage in the work of a ‘story factory’ – producing truths about international development and consumer engagement that make development appear simplified, manageable and marketable. We conclude that, in Brand Aid, the problems themselves and the people who experience them are branded and marketed to Western consumers (through celebritised multimedia story-telling) just as effectively as the products that will ‘save’ them.

Trips and Public Health: The Doha Declaration and Africa

The Doha Declaration on the TRIPs Agreement and Public Health (2001), aimed at improving access to medicines, especially for HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis in developing and least developed countries, has not yet been used for compulsory licences to import generic medicines or for expanding production for export to poor countries. By analysing HIV/AIDS treatment in Uganda, this article discusses the variety of TRIPs-related channels for ensuring drugs for domestic treatment, and argues that emphasising the restrictive nature of TRIPs provisions fails to grasp the scale of the obstacles involved. Lack of domestic resources leaves African countries dependent on donor financing, which in turn constrains their ability to exploit international trade provisions.

HIV/AIDS in the Shadows of Reproductive Health Interventions

Abstract In December 1999, the Tanzanian president declared HIV/AIDS a national disaster. By the time the National Policy on HIV/AIDS was released in 2001, an estimated 750,000 women of reproductive age were infected. Yet in spite of the impact of HIV on reproductive health, AIDS and reproductive health programmes are still thought of and implemented through separate channels, to the detriment of both. However, although AIDS remains in the shadows of reproductive health interventions, the lack of AIDS talk does not lessen the impact of the disease on peoples lives. During the course of my participant observations in maternal and child health/family planning (MCH/FP) clinics collected during 25 months of fieldwork in 10 clinics in Morogoro, Ruvuma and Kilimanjaro Regions, I rarely heard about AIDS. This article attempts to analyse why. Historically competing bureaucracies in MCH/FP and gender and development are not easily unified with a vertical HIV/AIDS control programme under the umbrella of “reproductive health”. HIV/AIDS cannot merely be inserted into existing family planning programmes, re-named “reproductive health” programmes. As the AIDS epidemic is transformed through new technologies, reproductive health policy and priorities will be called into question and force us to look at the state of the African health care system, networks of care-giving, and how individuals and communities fail when there is no socio-economic safety net.

Women's Reproductive Health & Population Policy: Tanzania

Population policies have rarely been linked to economic policy, although the promoters of economic liberalisation also support the embrace of population policy as important to the economic wellbeing of African states. Using a case study from Tanzania, I argue that population policies with a limited focus on fertility reduction may continue to be successful in the context of post-adjustment African health care systems, but policies that aim for the larger goals of improving womens reproductive health will be severely limited. Tanzanias donors and lenders promoted Neo-Malthusian types of population policies aimed primarily at reducing childbearing as a partial solution to the countrys economic crisis. However, in the mid-1990s, the international discourse on population shifted toward a new dependent variable of ‘womens reproductive’ health. The notion of reproductive health reunites population and development issues in the context of basic health care provision. Improvements in the reproductive health of Tanzanian women will require more than simply the effective provision of contraceptives. This article argues that the challenges of improving reproductive health are unlikely to be met without a revitalisation of public health care provision in African countries.

The Lazarus Effect of AIDS Treatment: Lessons Learned and Lives Saved

During the treatment decade of rolling out antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) in African clinics, new social meanings have been created, and they link local people living with HIV/AIDS to Western communities in new ways. The health of African “others” has taken a central, new, and perhaps quasi-religious role in Western societies. Working on behalf of humanitarian organizations to combat modern emergencies is the contemporary embodiment of an ideal, pure notion of “the good” that is not linked to “old religion” but mimics many of its dispositions and practices. This analysis is based on empirical data gathered during fieldwork as participants and observers in a Catholic AIDS treatment clinic and through interviews with service providers in Uganda. We use these data to think both creatively and systematically about the meanings and limitations of pastoral power and therapeutic citizenship.

(PRODUCT)REDTM: how celebrities push the boundaries of ‘causumerism’

(PRODUCT)RED™ (hereafter RED) is a cobranding initiative launched in 2006 by the aid celebrity Bono to raise money from product sales to support The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. In this paper we argue that RED is shifting the boundaries of ‘causumerism’ (shopping for a better world) by enrolling consumers in ways that do not rely on accurate knowledge of the products or specific understanding of the cause that The Global Fund engages but, instead, rely on a system of more general, affective affinity between the ‘aid celebrities’ who are behind RED (such as Bono) and the consumers who buy iconic brand products to help ‘distant others’. While in many other forms of causumerism, labels or certification systems ‘prove’ that a product is just, in RED, aid celebrities provide the proof. From the consumer point of view both labels and celebrities provide a similar simplification of complex social, economic, and environmental processes. At the same time, we argue that there are important distinctions as well—labels and certifications are ultimately about improving the conditions of production, whereas RED is about accepting existing production and trade systems and donating a proportion of sales income to help distant others in Africa. The iconic brands sitting under the RED umbrella also play an important role as they offer a consistent and known venue for channeling consumer affect. We argue that celebrity validation, backed up by iconic brands, facilitates at least three shifts in the realm of causumerism: from ‘conscious consumption’ (mainly based on product-related information) to ‘compassionate consumption’ (mainly based on the management of consumer affect); from attention to the product and its production process toward the medical treatment of the ‘people with the problem’ (AIDS patients in Africa); and from addressing the causes of problems to solving their manifestations.

Brand Africa: multiple transitions in global capitalism

Africa is often left out of mainstream discussions of emerging trends in the global economy and the business of ‘development’. Whether on the basis of misplaced romanticism, stale Afro-scepticism, or a presumed ‘lack of data’, disengagement with Africa has significantly limited the debates on political economy in a global context. Yet, scholarly interaction on how Africa is understood within the constellation of new forms of engagement, termed ‘brand aid’, suggests that Africa is central to understanding the multiple transitions that are taking place within global capitalism. Helping distant others, typically Africans, has become a way of constructing a postcolonial Western identity, producing a responsible form of corporate engagement in the market, and selling products at the same time. The proposed interventions by Africanist scholars promise to spark a lively debate that crosses ideological boundaries about how we can raise questions that effectively critique the manufacture of Africa that is both material and symbolic as a way of selling the inequalities of global capitalism. This debate/forum arises from selections from panel discussions at the European Centres for African Studies (ECAS 4) Conference in June 2011 and the Association of American Geographers’ Annual Meeting in April 2011. The first intervention by Richey and Ponte outlines the concept of ‘Brand Aid’ as a new way of linking commerce with global do-gooding that has Africa at its centre. What such shifting notions of aid and globalisation can mean for understanding Africa in the changing landscape of global capitalism is taken on in Cheru’s intervention. The next piece, by Abrahamsen, analyses the symbolic meanings of what ‘Brand Africa’ might actually mean for Africans and for scholars. Harrison’s intervention grounds the current trend of ‘what can Africa do for you’ in its symbolic history of interconnected images. Then, Mercer points the critique toward experts themselves: how the performance of public and private aid rests on particular and new forms of expertise. Among the most attention-grabbing and surprising of the new Africa ‘experts’ and brand managers, the phenomenon of celebrities and their dogooding is analysed in the next intervention by Brockington. Finally, the forum editors conclude with some reflections on the contemporary traders in the buying and selling of Africa as a commodity.

Celebrity-black: the meanings of race and performances of aid celebrity outside the mainstream Hollywood/UK circuit

This article studies the intersection between race, culture and celebrity in the context of Danish ‘aid celebrities’ by analysing the radicalised ‘celebrity persona’ of the Gambian-Danish A-list actress, singer, director and comedian Hella Joof. The analysis pays particular attention to her performances as Fairtrade Ambassador and as host in an annual aid telethon Danmarks Indsamling. These performances of the ‘aid celebrity’ position are read against the backdrop of the cultural constructions of race and celebrity in the Danish context, and of Joof’s own performative interpellations of these throughout her career. The article posits that a celebrity figure like Joof can be read as occupying a liminal position vis-à-vis Danish relations to ‘Africa’, which comprises a particular celebrity position: ‘celebrity-black’. The analysis shows how the cultural meanings of both celebrity and race were troubled by Joof’s performances during the telethon show, which was split between performing the figure of ‘the African woman’ and Danish ‘cultural insiderness’. The article concludes that unlike the US context where the category of ‘black celebrity’ has been analysed as connecting to a particular social group, the Danish cultural context and the cultural imaginaries around race in this context illuminate the fluency of the celebrity sign. Hella Joof is not a black celebrity, she is ‘celebrity-black’ – a cultural insider who can, via her celebrity position, simultaneously embody ‘Danishness as whiteness’ and ‘the African other’.