The Growing Shoe: Pastor Kenton Lee Invented An Expanding Shoe That Can Solve Poverty Issues

Designer, inventor and Pastor Kenton Lee created the Shoe That Grows, an ingenious pair of expandable shoes for children that easily morph and grow in size and have a lifespan of around five years.

The idea came to Lee one day when he was walking to church while working in Nairobi, Kenya with HIV/AIDS orphans, and saw a young girl in her Sunday dress, but with shoes that were way too small for her.

"I'll never forget it. One day I was walking down a road with a group of kids from an orphanage where I was staying," Lee told the Daily Mail. "Next to me there was a girl in a white dress. As I looked down, her shoes were so small, and as I looked around, there were so many other kids with shoes that were too small for them."

The innovation was a collaboration between Lee and the company Proof of Concept. Together, they came up with a design for a shoe that expands in the front, the back and the side. 

This project was overseen and launched by Because International, a charity for which Lee is also the executive director.

The shoes cost between $12 and $30, depending on the size of the order, and could be a cost-effective and simple way of saving millions of lives from easily preventable diseases, such as parasite infections.

The Shoe That Grows partners with other organizations on the ground in Ecuador, Haiti, Ghana and Kenya to get the shoes to those who need them most.

Toms Shoes has participated in a similar initiative through their One for One program, which gives a child in need a pair of shoes for every purchase. They've given away 35 million to date.

However, some have argued that Toms' lack of durability (people have reported a lifespan of anywhere between 2 weeks and 2 years) and inefficient business model mean their initiative is not actually all that effective. 

And, of course, the shoes don't grow with the kids wearing them. The feet of children between the ages of 2 and 3 years-old, for example, grow roughly two full sizes a year, so normal shoes don't last long.

The hope, then, is that the Shoe That Grows will offer a more sustainable solution to what is a straightforward problem.

When something as simple as the absence of shoes can take a child's life, there's no excuse not to try and fix this.