Crafting Change for Rwanda's Artisans

A few years ago, I accompanied a friend to the crafts market here in Kigali, Rwanda. He had been coming and going from Rwanda for years, but he always needed gifts. And they needed to look African. Trouble is, he told me, "Rwandan handicrafts suck."

That's been the prevailing opinion among most tourists and expats I've met in Rwanda. Come here to see gorillas, I often hear, but buy your souvenirs in the Nairobi airport. The most jaded will add, "All this stuff is just made in Kenya and Uganda and shipped in anyway."

But if you spend any time traveling Rwanda, you'll see isolated artisans producing amazing work. So recently, a team of U.S. volunteers and Rwandan entrepreneurs banded together to open a shop that's challenging the common wisdom on Rwandan handicrafts — and putting money in the pockets of crafts guilds (known as cooperatives) that haven't yet been able to reach the market.

The shop, on the busy road leading to the center of action in the capital, is called Rwandan Nziza. It's a showcase for the Rwandan Fair Trade Association (RAFTA), a cooperative of cooperatives. RAFTA works with 23 cooperatives, and they produce everything from the well-known traditional Rwandan crafts, like agaseke baskets with elegant sloped lids, to innovations designed to appeal to the Western market, like grocery bags in bright African fabrics that you can crumple up and zip into the shape of a heart. There's traditional crafts you hardly see unless you travel on the right rural road — small pitchers made out of smooth, rounding pewter; perfect, tiny clay pots; detailed and delicate needlepoint. And then there's totally new hybrids, like the batik designs of a young Rwandan who lived in Senegal and learned textile arts. (If you see batik in Rwanda, I'll bet the price of the item that she made it.)

For someone who's been shopping in Rwandan craft markets for a long time, the array is stunning. It's also inspiring: these are 23 coops whose artisans, for a variety of reasons, hadn't had access to the major markets (tourist or otherwise) in the capital before. What's more, it's a project of volunteers: four expats who sat on a porch one night and talked about the amazing craftsmanship they'd seen around the country and lamented the lack of such quality in Kigali. Two months later — literally — the store was born.

It opened with $12,000 in donations, and $3,000 investment, but the key, those involved say, is that this isn't charity. It's business: Coops who don't make stuff people want to buy won't make money, and it's expected they'll drop out. Others who work in a style or at a level of quality rewarded in the marketplaces will thrive. All will get 100% of the profits and pay some of them back to RAFTA, to cover store rental and staff. But the expats don't make a salary; this is full-on local enterprise.

And the coops take it seriously, to judge by the focus group I sat in on a recent weekend. A group of about 12 women showed me and two other expats — a woman from Sweden and a man from the U.S. — their textile product samples. They were working in four fabrics, but their designs exhibited a creativity I don't often hear praised here. Some of it worked; some of it didn't. But the point of the focus group was to gauge the market. They wanted to be competitive in the souvenir sector; so they imagined, designed and then market-tested those of us who buy souvenirs.

Rwandan coops are open for business. And my walls are all the more beautiful for it.

Photo Credit: cliff 1066