Partying To Change The World

Published: March 14, 2010

Reprinted from: http://bit.ly/czAptV

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Maybe the most common question I get from readers is: What can I do?

They’ve read about malaria, or mass rape, or AIDS orphans, and they want to make a difference. Should they call the White House? Write a check? Howl in hopeless despair?

There’s never a perfect answer, but here’s one ingenious approach: Throw a party!

Let’s back up. In 2004, a Colorado woman named Torkin Wakefield, a Peace Corps veteran with a lifetime of experience in aid work, was temporarily living in Uganda. Her daughter, Devin Hibbard, then just out of graduate school, came to visit, and they strolled together through a slum in Kampala, the capital.

They stumbled upon a woman named Millie Akena making jewelry beads out of trash paper outside her mud-walled home. They bought a few necklaces from Millie, for about 75 cents each.

Over the next few days, mother and daughter received many compliments on the necklaces — especially when they explained where the beads came from. Jewelry from garbage!

Hmm. A gleam in their eyes, Torkin and Devin returned to the slum, asked Millie to gather her friends and bought up more than 225 necklaces.

American friends loved the beads. So Torkin and Devin, with their friend Ginny Jordan, formed BeadforLife. It’s a nonprofit seeking to promote entrepreneurship through an international jewelry manufacturing operation.

They returned to Uganda to work with the women on improving jewelry designs and assuring quality. To cut costs, they asked friends traveling back to the United States to smuggle bags of necklaces in their suitcases.

Then they began marketing the jewelry through bead parties in the United States — a bit like Tupperware parties. Typically, one woman invites her friends, and they come to her home to buy necklaces, bracelets and earrings for between $5 and $30. Last year alone, Torkin says, there were 3,000 of these parties, attended by about 100,000 people.

”It’s not a handout; we’re totally opposed to that,” said Devin, who is now based in Uganda for the project. ”This is a symbol for us of women really working hard.”

BeadforLife recruits women who are earning $1 a day or less, and who seem particularly hard-working and entrepreneurial. Once enrolled, they get training in how to cut strips of scrap paper, roll them tightly, glue them and seal them — and, presto, a beautiful bead.

The beads are not painted, and their color comes from the paper itself (with writing sometimes faintly visible). Magazine ads and aid group brochures are prized for their rich colors. Torkin remembers wincing when she saw women making beads from brochures explaining how mothers can prevent AIDS transmission to their babies. ”I just hope that someone had looked at them before they were cut up,” she said.

Bead makers earn about $200 per month, half of which is deposited in brand-new savings accounts (one huge problem for the world’s poor is that they lack a safe way to save). The women are also encouraged to trade their beads to the program for antimalarial bed nets, condoms, deworming medicine and family planning supplies.

The centerpiece of the 18-month BeadforLife program is training bead makers to start small businesses. They get coaching in business management, and some learn trades like making jam or raising chickens.

The bead makers get about $600 to open their own shops or start some other small business, and after a year and a half they graduate and new bead makers are enrolled. The aim is not to create lifelong jewelry manufacturers, but to turn women into bustling entrepreneurs.

These days, Torkin and Devin are no longer smuggling their merchandise (it turned out that the necklaces weren’t subject to American duty, they say, so subterfuge was unnecessary). Their biggest challenge is how to manage $4 million in annual jewelry sales so that it makes the most difference.

Tags: Africa, BeadCircle, Beaders, BeadforLife, BeadParty, Boulder, Colorado, Curriculum, Empowering Women, Half the Sky, New York Times, Nicholas Kristof, paper jewelry, poverty, Poverty Education, sustainability