Cost is the price for something of value. The two don't have to be correlated. I suppose where money is not involved, you might say the the costs are the repercussions.
By traditional usage of the word dumping, donating use items doesn't qualify. It's not being done to gain a non-competetive economic advantage. It's a semantic issue though: decide you want to construe the word a bit more abstractly and you can make it fit.
Lexical and semantic issue aside, freeing up local resources (people's time) to focus on education and learning higher level skills seems a reasonable plan. Not unlike what a family does when freeing up the time of it's youngest members to focus on learning. Of course in the context of foreign aid to a country, it presumes you don't just air drop in supplies for basic needs and leave it at that. If you're really interested in bootstrapping a population to a higher quality of life, you have to still ensure that learning etc. are available along with the capital infrastructure to create businesses and industries that utilize that learning. I'm not sure the developed world, when lending a hand to less developed countries, always gets that second part right.
