She’s the poster child. She’s the role model. Her career is a dream that International Studies majors have at night.
Gayle Morris, a 1972 graduate of the University, returned Friday afternoon to the University to talk about her international career and economic-development work in Africa and Latin America in a lecture, titled “Bono, Beads and Beans: Reflections on Economic Development.”
“She is a role model for what a lot of students dream of doing with International Studies, and especially with a major from BGSU,” said Kristie Foell, director of International Studies.
Morris told the 24 students and faculty in attendance how to help economic development in their daily lives by just being “better informed consumers,” and buying fair-trade items.
Consumers should make sure the regular products they buy – like rugs, coffee, soccer balls and tuna fish – are made without slave labor.
Certain items have an “Eco-Label” or “Rugmark” label, a sign to the consumers that no illegal child labor was used in the process of manufacturing. Morris said that Starbucks sells only one kind of coffee that is “fair-trade,” but consumers can request it.
Other ways that students can help the drive for economic development is to intern in low-income countries, helping with trade co-ops in the communities.
Morris currently helps with a coffee co-op in Costa Rica. After she received her master’s in Latin American history and moved to Nebraska for a Ph.D. in agriculture economics, she lived in Costa Rica for one-and-a-half years to work on her dissertation research about coffee producers.
In Costa Rica she developed connections, and now is a coffee distributor for a co-op of 40 families in the country. Although the coffee may be slightly more expensive, consumers know it’s not made by slave labor and that it’s straight from Costa Rica.
Morris currently teaches economics at Edinboro University in Pennsylvania, but has spent her previous years traveling to other countries for a development-consulting firm.
The institution gets money from the U.S. government and then hire Morris to travel to the countries and find where it was best to send U.S. aid, she said.
The firm she worked for tries to “identify aid and redirect it to grassroots projects that provide work for the people, marketing it as something that will make them money,” Morris said.
She discussed how economic development firms are interested in merchandising for the billions of international low-income families. This includes packaging household items – like aspirin – in smaller forms so they are less expensive.
“It’s important to look at developing countries in a slightly different lens,” she said.
And those in poor communities should be seen as value-conscious citizens and entrepreneurs – not victims or charity cases, Morris said.
Morris was the first BGSU alumna to speak as part of the International Career Network, a student-run organization which prepares students for productive careers in other countries.
The organization is open to any major, and meets on Wednesdays at 7 p.m. in the Career Center, located in the Saddlemire Building.