Description
Poverty porn” is defined as the practice of using highly disturbing, sad images of poor people for the purposes of eliciting an emotional response in order to generate more charitable donations. Some justify this approach because the use of depressing images of poor children has been proven to lead to increased donations, which are needed to do impactful global health work. Others say it exploits poor people’s conditions and uses their suffering for financial gain.For example, the photo below generated $23 million between 1980-1984 for famine relief in Ethiopia, and was heralded as a huge marketing success:What do you think about this controversy? What are the benefits of this approach? Is this practice unethical? What could be done to encourage more responsible marketing in global health?
