Lionel Stanbrook
Lionel Stanbrook has been Chief of Communications at the African Development Bank since 2016 and Senior Editorial Consultant since 2018. He was previously Communications Specialist at the World Food Programme, and Managing Partner at Clement Reputation, a communications agency based in Basel, Switzerland. He spent eight years as Head of Reputation Management at Syngenta GmbH in Basel and was previously Managing Director of PRM Consultants, a Brussels-based communications agency. Between 1991 and 2000 he was the Deputy Director-General and Head of Communications at the UK Advertising Association, after spending 10 years working as Political Adviser in the European Parliament and the European Commission in Brussels, including 3 years as the Speechwriter and Spokesperson of the President of the European Parliament. He trained as an advertising copywriter and journalist and studied at the University of Oxford, where he obtained an MA (Oxon) after reading Modern History and Languages.
Papers Published in World Economics:
Thrown Away Thrice: The global second-hand clothes trade expires on the beaches of Africa
Thousands of garment-making businesses throughout West Africa have been destroyed over the past few generations by his shabby international exploitation which was been hand in glove with the elimination of traditional garment-making businesses by aggressive European, US, and Chinese clothes manufacturing in factories located in Africa over the same period. The grim result is that Africans have fewer choices in domestically made clothes now than twenty, thirty, or even fifty years ago. Even the famous waxed cloth pagnes (kaftans or bou-bous) which seem quintessentially West African, are very largely imported from Europe (the largest production company is the Dutch VLISCO) although there remain important pockets of original African textile production, although unfortunately with products that are beyond the economic means of ordinary Africans. The shabby value chain in second-hand clothes starts in glitzy shopping malls in the most developed countries, with excessive and unnecessary purchases of clothes by consumers hungry for a new look.
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