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About Us

 

Hadithi line is an initiative of the community based organisation Hadithi Crafts Support CBO. We started in 2014 selling handicrafts from a few groups of female artisans in Tsavo. We currently (2023) support 65 women groups and over 1800 women...


 
 

Our vision

 

Hadithi handicrafts provide an income for people living in a vulnerable ecosystem. By purchasing crafts, customers are helping to conserve a threatened forest full of wildlife, as well as helping some wonderful women escape poverty in their daily lives in a dry area in south-eastern Kenya.
Your purchases have a far reaching impact.

❥  Future

They offer a way to preserve beautiful traditions like weaving baskets and beading jewellery, by allowing them to evolve alongside modern market and economic developments. More than this, it provides a learning platform for younger generations to continue some of the practices of their forebearers.

❥  Empowerment

Most importantly, it gives people the ability to sustain their families. Most if not all the money that ladies receive goes straight to education, health and nutrition for the entire family. The ladies making handicrafts get the practice that leads to skills, satisfaction that leads to self-esteem and encouragement that leads to initiative. A feel of a future…

❥  Sustainability

They provide an alternative to environmental destruction: an alternative to poaching vulnerable wildlife (elephant, zebra, giraffe…), or cutting down forest for charcoal, timber and farmland.

❥  Change

The sales are reducing the reliance of the artisans upon farming, which is itself unreliable due to scarcity of rain in this semi-arid area.

 


 
 

Our way

 

  Stronger together

Hadithi Crafts is a community based organisation (CBO) representing a number of women’s groups which make high quality handicrafts in south-eastern Kenya. The CBO was started in 2014 with 24 women groups from 14 different villages in Tsavo ecosystem, representing 520 artisan women... 

By september 2022, Hadithi crafts sells the crafts from 65 women’s groups, empowering over 1800 women from 20 villages. These numbers are still growing. 

❥  Support the artisans

Hadithi crafts plays a supportive role for the women’s groups by building their capacity, improve the quality of their products, improve sales through joint marketing efforts, source materials for the groups, teach new techniques and provide workshops in business and other important skills to improve their lives overall. 

The Hadithi team is currently six women strong. They are processing the many orders, sourcing, distributing, purchasing, training, sampling, running the projects and so on. They are all locally and fulltime employed by the CBO (two of us are daughters of active basket weavers!). Many extra jobs go on behind the scenes at our head quarters from splitting sisal to macrame of bracelets - we always employ extra hands at a fair wage from the women groups.

❥  100% dedicated

All of the profits from sales of Hadithi Line, as well as any money received from donations, are used only to offer support to the women’s groups.