This is about the Green brothers’ sock-and-soap company that funds a maternal hospital in Sierra Leone. The Good Store. Before anyone reads it wrong: I am not saying don’t support ethical businesses, and I am begging you to keep giving to charity.
What I’m actually asking is smaller and weirder. I want my American friends on Facebook to tweak your news settings so you learn more about what’s happening in Africa, and in this case, Sierra Leone.
I just read a painful piece about how many Americans don’t think Sub-Saharan Africa has electricity, and how many of us think the more than 45 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa are one country called “Africa.” If you’re picturing a jungle, then of course your first thought is “yes, we need these two white dudes to fix this,” even though they have no background in health policy. The picture in your head decides who looks like the right person for the job.
Another example I’ll write about is Charity: Water, run by a former nightclub promoter who now takes a $350K salary to lead it. Is he a bad person? Of course not. But is this the smartest way to approach the trillion-dollar effort to get people clean water in a way that lasts? No. It’s a larger cultural thing Americans have: we don’t really believe subject-matter expertise matters. We think all you need is a big heart and good intentions.
I’m writing this because I’m doing a series of essays called “The Moneyball of Poverty Reduction,” and when you actually look at what organizations like the World Food Programme and UNHCR are doing, the lesson is simple: let the experts do their job. More on those two in future articles.
For now, one ask. Follow one Sierra Leonean news outlet. That’s it. The piece is below:
Charity Fills the Hole. It Never Asks Who Dug It.
Good Store’s model is not wrong; it’s incomplete in a way that quietly protects the thing that’s killing people.
The Maternal Center of Excellence sits in Kono, Sierra Leone’s diamond district. For two decades the district’s largest producer, Koidu Limited, extracted from that ground, and Kono’s visible legacy, as one local editorial put it, is a kimberlite debris pile, dirt roads, and a hospital paid for partly by Americans buying socks (Engage Salone). That’s the whole story in one image: charity is filling a hole that extraction and captured public money dug, and it fills it without ever asking who dug it. Kono’s own leadership has been faulted for failing workers during the 2025 Koidu shutdown (Sierra Leone Telegraph), which is exactly the local-accountability vacuum a hospital donation can’t touch.
Charity doesn’t carry oversight, and Sierra Leone shows what happens to oversight that works. During Ebola, Auditor General Lara Taylor-Pearce’s real-time audit found that roughly 30% of more than 84 billion leones (about $19 million) in emergency health spending from May to October 2014 had been disbursed without proper documentation; Parliament recovered at least 3 billion leones as a result (Wikipedia). On November 11, 2021, days before she was due to present the 2020 audit report to Parliament, President Julius Maada Bio suspended her and her deputy; the international body for supreme audit institutions formally objected to the removal process (INTOSAI/IDI). A tribunal delivered its report on June 12, 2024, recommending her removal, and the President accepted it (Politico SL). Sierra Leonean civil-society groups who analyzed the report concluded its findings were “neither supported by law nor proof,” noting among other things that one charge was never raised at the hearings (NMJD analysis). Her successor’s 2023 audit still found roughly NLe 233.78 million (on the order of $10 million) in losses across 157 public entities: ghost workers, procurement violations, unauthorized spending (Sierraloaded). The IMF ran a full governance and corruption diagnostic of the country in 2025 (IMF). So the institution that actually catches missing health money got decapitated. Good Store says it has given more than $13 million to charitable initiatives worldwide, with 100% of profits from the Awesome Socks Club and Sun Basin Soap going to Partners In Health (Good Store), and none of it is structured to notice.
The research backs “agency, not advocacy.” A set of six field experiments in Ghana and Uganda found citizens hold their governments no more accountable for aid money than for oil money, meaning aid behaves like a resource curse, not like taxes, but the same study found aid routed through NGOs that bypass government did better on accountability (de la Cuesta, Martin, Milner & Nielson). That’s the opening: Partners In Health is already a bypass channel. The missing piece is a channel that funds the watchdogs, the audit service, the investigative press, the Anti-Corruption Commission’s civil-society monitors, the way Good Store funds the ward.
The mortality number supports the argument too, if it’s used right. Sierra Leone’s maternal mortality ratio fell from 1,682 per 100,000 live births in 2000 to 354 in 2023, according to UNFPA, which credits national systems: PresTrack pregnancy tracking, decentralized blood banks, 85% of the population within 5 km of a health facility (UNFPA). The big drop came from government infrastructure functioning, not from any single hospital. So the honest sentence is: the thing that moved the number is the thing corruption erodes, and charity can’t defend it.
This is not a claim about Good Store’s own workers. Fulfillment runs through DFTBA’s facility in Missoula, Montana (Wikipedia), and there is no public evidence about their pay either way. The claim is about the model, where the evidence is strong: the GAO found millions of full-time workers at large employers rely on Medicaid and SNAP (GAO-21-45), that reliance has risen since 2020 (Senate HELP Committee), and it is spiking again for Amazon and gig workers this year (CNN). The resentment point then lands cleanly: an American subsidizing a warehouse worker through their taxes while that worker’s employer takes credit for a hospital abroad is the exact dynamic that turns people against “African charities,” and the charity becomes the scapegoat for a wage problem it didn’t cause.
So lead with the ask, not the critique, because the ask is small and hard to refuse. Good Store spends millions on outcomes and nothing on the conditions that make outcomes stick. One salaried person publishing Sierra Leone news daily to an audience of millions would have made Taylor-Pearce’s suspension an international story in 2021 instead of a footnote, and international attention is one of the few things that has ever protected an African auditor general. That’s agency: not asking Americans to feel more, but giving them something specific to watch. Five percent of surplus to the people who read the audits, plus one reporter, and the other 95% suddenly has a defender.
Sources: Engage Salone · Sierra Leone Telegraph – Kono · Lara Taylor-Pearce – Wikipedia · IDI/INTOSAI statement · Politico SL – tribunal report · NMJD analysis of tribunal report · Tribunal report – SierraLII · Sierraloaded – 2023 audit · IMF governance diagnostic · de la Cuesta et al. · UNFPA Sierra Leone · Good Store – Wikipedia · Good Store charity partners · GAO-21-45 · Senate HELP Committee · CNN