history

In 2008, I visited the Kireka Rock Quarry for the first time. Located in the hillsides above Kampala, it was a sight to behold. A rocky surface dug into a deep pit where young men carried heavy blocks of stone on their backs up the hillside. Women sat on dusty ripped khangas breaking the stones into gravel. At the end of a 12-hour day, they made USD 1-2.

After meeting a group of women who had been displaced by the war in Northern Uganda and were working on the quarry, I decided to experiment and see if social media (mostly blogging) could help them raise funding to start their own business. I started by setting-up the Women of Kireka/NUWECHI website, creating a Facebook account and raising individual donations. Of course, landed on another continent, realizing this goal became much more difficult.

Enter Project Diaspora (PD). I met TMS Ruge, Co-Founder of Project Diaspora, in Kampala in 2008. Along with Tracy Pell, also Co-Founder, Project Diaspora immediately took on the project and rapidly transformed it into a whole other initiative. Discussions with the women revealed that they were already breaking into another market: crafts-making. While making paper beads is nothing original or groundbreaking in Uganda, it was something they knew how to do well. It also meant they could keep their main source of income on the quarry if business was slow or a flop.

Running with this idea, Project Diaspora has helped brand the women’s work as the “Women of Kireka,” a local community-owned business with a lot of potential. Now working with Ida Horner and Ethnic Supplies in the UK, the women have a growing market for their products. Over the past few months, they have demonstrated remarkable ease in making creative beads found nowhere else in Uganda and hunting for brightly colored paper to make brilliant necklaces, bracelets, earrings and jewelry bags.

Key to Project Diaspora’s assistance is helping the women understand how a business works. International quality control, designs and shapes for different audiences, reaching out to different companies by offering free samples and shipping around the world – all are small steps in the direction of creating a sustainable business model which depends on planned profit instead of international donors.

Working with the Women of Kireka and Project Diaspora has been a great experience. While we canned the original idea of a blog to raise international funding and awareness, we have helped the women start their own business and sell internationally. In Kampala, we arrange trips for locals and foreigners to visit the women and purchase beads on-site. We also hope to be working with local fashion designers to integrate the Women of Kireka products into fashion shows. In the long-run, the women want to start tailoring and move away from the quarry for good.

Of course, a project like this has its ups and downs. The highlight of the Internet is that a majority of these ups and downs are transparent. You can see how an idea progresses into reality. Because we have no large donors to account for, we can be public with our information and progress, whether for better or worse. It’s a working model that occasionally makes me blush with embarrassment (no one likes reading their writing from two years ago!), but – most of the time – helps me understand that change, well, does happen.

Please visit the drop-down menu for information on the Women of Kireka, purchasing beads, jewelry shots, quarry visits and internships.