Fair Play

Why Empowering Women and Artisans is Key to Sustainability at Scale

Words by Theanne Schiros

When brands look to scale their production and increase revenue the traditional model, built on a colonial mindset, is to look for cheap labour overseas to produce goods for a Western market. However, this exploitative set-up isn’t sustainable for anyone involved.
Not for those at the source nor the consumer at the end. Real solutions at scale must be built around sustainable development. They must be inclusive and rooted in local needs, resources and culture. They must give voice to communities long marginalized by colonial models and at their core, they must include women. When looking to incorporate the empowerment of women and artisans into building environmentally and socially conscious supply chains, the slow fashion movement—which emphasizes craftsmanship, fair wages, and the use of fewer resources—can offer a proven template of how to scale sustainably. 

But, how do we translate these principles into relevant, accessible models for sustainable development? We can do this by starting small, prototyping well and expanding to scale. By finding good partners with diverse experiences who understand the complex barriers to building resilient communities, businesses, and ecosystems. 

I was fortunate to have found such a partner in Mariama Camara, an entrepreneur and humanitarian from the Republic of Guinea when our orbits overlapped at a fashion and sustainability event at the UN headquarters in New York that I was attending with my students from the Fashion Institute of Technology. 

Mariama is the founder of Mariama Fashion Production, the leading African handmade textiles and accessories company working with local artisans to produce sustainable products for international brands, and co-founder of There is No Limit Foundation (TINLF) with her sister Aissata Camara. TINLF is a non-profit promoting entrepreneurship, health, sanitation, education and advocacy to communities in need. What started as an impassioned conversation between two women about the importance of collaboration has become a partnership for empowerment. Mariama and I teamed up to create a model that empowers African artisans, particularly women, to invest in themselves and fuel global prosperity through education in natural dye practices and global partnerships. 

The waves of companies from the East and West setting up factories and seeking cheap labor in Africa, combined with the prevalent prejudice that textiles from developing nations should be cheaper, make it increasingly difficult for artisans to get a fair-trade value for their wares. This economic pressure in some of the most impoverished regions is pushing many artisans to work with synthetic dyes. Without chemical training or pollution control, synthetic dyes contaminate limited water supplies in regions where water scarcity is already a pressing issue. 

Through partnerships and education, Mariama and I are striving to remove synthetic dyes from the African market, replacing it with colour from abundant, natural resources. Our aim is to build models for economic development rooted in dignity, craftsmanship, and the skills and culture of the community. We took our first physical steps towards these goals when we traveled together to the village of Modiya in the Kindia region of Guinea in April 2018. There, with a community of 300 women from TINLF’s Association of Women Tie-Dyers, we harvested plants, collected discarded onion skins, avocado seeds and skins for dye baths, collected buckets of water, and began our natural dye training. We created more than 100 different colours from 14 dye baths created from plants and food waste; shifting hues for an expanded palette with soda ash from the wood fire, acids from local fruits and tea leaves, rusty nails, and scraps of copper wiring. 

We brought the botanically dyed textile designs created by the women artisans to the Fashion Institute of Technology, where emerging designers will create a collection. The project will showcase all of the people involved in creating the garments from start to finish, by name and portrait. The Fashion Revolution question of “Who made my clothes?” is made transparent at every stage, in a model that connects a community of women in Guinea and emerging designers in New York City, and, with the help of Mariama Fashion Production, to a global marketplace. 

With our partnership, we want to build an accessible model for inclusive development in a framework defined by environmental boundaries and a basic social justice foundation—including access to education, water, health, and a global voice. One that can be replicated across the entire African continent, and around the world. Our training program provides a platform for peer-to-peer learning where participants share their skills and knowledge with one another and connects artisans with international partners as a means for increasing participants’ economic standing. 

Education, rooted in gender equality and supported by partnerships is critical to reversing climate change, building resilience to its effects and to sustainable development at scale. Investment in women and artisans is an investment in the future. 

Theanne is a professor of science at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York.

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