It takes a village to get a product to the retail level, unless that village is cut off from the global marketplace. For the skilled artisans living in underserved parts of the world, economic access can seem as remote as the landscape.
Co-operative models set up by well-intentioned social enterprises, like Me to We, have done much to improve this reality. These grassroots systems help communities operate their own businesses, granting micro-loans and training local representatives to co-ordinate sales and distribution to a wider market.
In the best-case scenario, these communities begin to flourish with an influx of capital, self-sustainability, and confidence.
Hedvig Alexander came across a number of these business models during her 15 years in Afghanistan. Ms. Alexander, a former NATO army captain and diplomat in her native Denmark, had shifted gears to international development with a focus on building relationships between Afghani merchants and the international business community.
She quickly realized one of the major failings of economic development in the third world: Many people are poor because they’re isolated and when you’re isolated it doesn’t matter how smart you are or how wonderful your product may be.
Around the same time, she saw how the collusion of marketplace technology and Internet accessibility had done more to combat this isolation than decades of charity drives: 65 per cent of Afghanis now have cell phones, where wireless services are considerably less expensive than they are in Canada. If they don’t have the Internet at home, someone they know does.
“Technology took the world to the markets,” she says. “The time is ripe.”
The time was also ripe for her shift into e-commerce. In 2009, Ms. Alexander moved from Kabul to Ajax, Ont. to support her husband Chris Alexander’s political ambitions. Suburban domesticity didn’t suit her, but with a new baby at home and Mr. Alexander’s appointment as Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, she had to seek opportunities that would no longer require long stretches in conflict zones.
Considering how she could bring her skill set to bear, she launched a fair trade initiative that would import high-quality goods from areas with some of the lowest per capita GDPs. More importantly, she wanted to provide educational resources for her artisans to flourish as entrepreneurs in an international marketplace.
“I saw the artisans on the ground not at all understanding how to relate to the buyer and when you’re out there it seems so complex. They don’t understand the supply chain and how could they?” she says.
Ms. Alexander’s first move was to purchase a volume of handmade goods through her vast co-operative network and store the product in her garage. She photographed the merchandise – mostly tribal jewellery, bags, ceramics – and placed them online for sale.
But success in social enterprise doesn’t mean much to the retail world. And despite its foundation in social good, Ms. Alexander was still running a business. So she set about to learning her new business.
Part of that learning curve involved a better understanding of her clientele. While many fair trade organizations highlight the authenticity of their goods as their main selling point, Ms. Alexander didn’t want to crowd the market with more of the same.
"I would love to say our customers buy the product because of the story, but that’s not the way it works. If the product and price is appropriate to them, the story is just a bonus," she says.
For now, Ms. Alexander has hired Canadian designers to tweak designs that may not suit local tastes. It can be as simple as a shape or colour, or as involved as removing several pieces from a heavy ceremonial necklace to streamline the look.
Because of the extra work involved, her price point is higher than most with necklaces running anywhere from $34 to $781, but Ms. Alexander selects her product carefully and stands behind the quality of her choices.
Eventually she hopes Far & Wide's artisan toolkit will give her micro-entrepreneurs the guidance to make these design adjustments on their own. “Most of the time the skills are incredible, but the design is not. People living in a small village may not know what customers in North America want to buy,” she says.
The toolkit achieves much more than aesthetic suggestions, though, and it’s this instructional guide that has positioned Far & Wide to make impact in the fair trade market.
Each kit is illustrated, translated into local dialect, and broken down into chapters that intuit the real-life challenges facing women who want to launch their own business.
There are practical topics like finance management and how the organizational supply chain works, but more importantly, they anticipate the cultural sensitivities that may bar a woman’s entry to the market in the first place.
These are things that would raise numerous Western eyebrows, like how to approach your husband and elders for permission to start a business in places where patriarchal culture still keeps women all but chained to the family hearth. The toolkit also anticipates her domestic challenges in balancing a business with all her domestic responsibilities.
Literacy is also a barrier. Eighteen months ago, Ms. Alexander decided to produce a video that would make her toolkit available to women and men who can’t read. The videos, translated into Pashto, Dauri, and English, have been so successful she’s considering translations for the 11 other countries she services, including Ghana, Uzbekistan, Kenya, Colombia, and Sri Lanka.
Now that technology is more accessible than ever, she’s confident the women and men who need to see the videos will somehow find a way. “A business model like mine wasn’t really possible 15 years ago,” she says, “but now as soon as you’re connected to the global economy you can start to do something about it.”
So while e-mail, video conferencing, and text messaging are able to replace the need for constant travel in order to oversee her daily operations, Ms. Alexander has since adjusted to working in less exciting places.
“People who want to save the world – it’s much more fun to do the strategic work, to talk about it and go out into the field. Spending two months in a warehouse in Buffalo is not glamorous, but it has to be done because otherwise nothing else will work.”
Idealists, take note.
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