EcoAfrica Social Ventures

I am thrilled to tell you all, that here in Zimbabwe, at a Chitungwiza City Council meeting last Friday, 3.5 hectares of land was officially approved to be handed over to Eco Africa Charitable Trust, our Zimbabwe based sister charity organization, to develop as a new Crafting Center.

Although I was assured by our local director who has been nurturing the process along, that this was a rubber stamp exercise, I couldn’t help but have some anxious moments until the meeting actually took place. (This is, after all, Zimbabwe).

I am having an exciting time here working on the plans which now are becoming quite ambitious. With the enthusiastic involvement of some high level participants here in Zim the vision of the project is expanding.

Back home in New York, to those of you who participated in the defining and writing up of our evolving purpose – thank you. We are now focused on the two entities based in the USA that are essential to keeping our mission alive in Zimbabwe.

Eco Africa Social Ventures
A US based 501c3 Non-Profit that directly funds and supports an artisan handicraft center in Zimbabwe. The cooperative produces high quality handmade paper-crafts for the specialty gift market around the world. In 1998, the founder of Eco-Africa began training artisans in the paper making/paper crafting production process, and by 2003 established a crafting center near Chitungwiza, the largest urban township in Zimbabwe. The center since then has trained several thousand mostly-female artisans and today is directly supporting around 150 artisans, both on campus and around the country with income producing work enabling them to care for their families. Eco Africa also supports a wide range of infrastructure needs including; craft training, day care, daily hot lunches, and monthly food parcels. Eco-Africa continues to operate in Zimbabwe and serves as a symbol of hope despite unthinkable economic and social hardships faced by its people (i.e. 94% unemployment and 231 million percent rate of inflation).

Helping Hands For Africa Inc
A U.S.-based for-profit corporation with a social mission. Formed in 2007 Helping Hands for Africa serves as the marketing and distribution channel for handicrafts and art produced by Eco-Africa’s artisans and lately other Zimbabwean artists and crafters. The mission of Helping Hands is to help revitalize the broader crafting industry and ensure a viable growth market for Zimbabwe’s world-class crafting culture. Helping Hands for Africa finances the costs of overhead, materials and production of Eco Africa’s paper craft center. HHA exports the finished crafts to market and oversees the marketing and distribution of these and other Zimbabwe art through a range of sales channels including community sales events and retail gift markets. Together with other forms of seed funding donated by HHA, 10% of net proceeds of all retail sales are donated back to Eco-Africa to help support the vulnerable crafting center infrastructure in Zimbabwe.

The exercise of re-defining our mission helped me focus on what our vision has become here in Zim since the wonderful donation of land from the municipality of Chitungwiza.

Our objective over here in Zim is to build our new Eco Africa Crafting Centre to become a nucleus and a lynchpin to help revive and resuscitate the world class crafting culture of Zimbabwe. We will be including a Craft Training component and may even approach various art schools in the USA such as Parsons School Of Design to offer a graduation certificate, a route that might lead to many educational channels of support. The concept is already attracting some powerful local supporters here. One of the reasons is as follows.

Last week while talking to some sculptors at HIFA - (Harare International Festival Of The Arts) where I attended the final four days, I started to learn for the first time how much of a terrible setback the arts and crafts culture took several years ago when, during a spate of political unrest thousands of artists and crafter’s homes and work places were bulldozed and destroyed (“Operation Clean Up The Trash”) including much of the bodies of work they had built up and had been living off. Apparently most of the artists went underground, many just gave up and became builders assistants and suchlike, or left the country.

I believe the positive reaction I am getting to this concept of a broader-based Crafting Center in Chitungwiza (where a large proportion of artists and crafters live and work), is because we can make a huge difference by providing a place of renewed hope for the Zimbabwe crafting world. There needs to be a concerted effort to bring back the arts and crafts culture to what it was. International bodies with centers here such as the foreign embassies, the UN, the EU all have funds set aside for grass roots capacity building improvement projects such as this.

A key component will be a crafting school where people of all ages can come to be trained in arts and crafts.

We will include areas for Shona sculptures, basket weaving, sewing and embroidery, metal work, wood carving, wire and bead art, and various other uniquely Zimbabwean art skills. Our own Eco Africa Paper Makers and Paper Crafters will benefit greatly as it will include larger, more well planned workshop buildings, and secure storage for their finished products and materials. All participants will benefit from a day care center, a food growing garden, and accommodation for volunteers from around the world.

The Center, (the land of which includes some stunning balancing rock formations), will be built village-style among the rocky outcrops and be built of natural stone and thatch and include creative local art features that will call upon tribal architectural concepts and decorative arts. Already we have help offered by both a New York architect and a local design luminary.

It’s thanks to all of you through all of your inspiring and generous contributions of your time, skills and wise advice, and of course funding, that we are growing something really wonderful on both sides of the world. We hope to continue to inspire more of you to actively participate in our mission.