Cloth bag project coming up!

Travelling in (or living in) India, you'll see polythene bags on the ground absolutely everywhere. Even more important - burning plastic waste is a huge contributer to toxic air pollution in the country. Earlier this year, New Dehli announced a ban on singel-use plastic bags. Yesterday, in Khajuraho, cars with speakers drove around informing the population of a similar ban in the municipality. This made us very happy! This is great for the enivronment - but it also fits well with one of the new projects we are looking into.Vio in Friends of Khajuraho has invited us to participate in their upcoming "cloth bag project". We love this idea and couldn't say no to this! It still needs work and more planning, but this is something we want to help implement!

The idea is quite simple; to use old fabric/clothes to make shopping bags to replace plastic. The execution of this plan is not so simple though. Vio explaines all this (as she sees it at the moment) in Friends in Khajurahos blogg, but here is our short version (the "we" in this section is for the most part Vio and Friends in Khajuraho/other locals).

• We will train 2-3 local underprivileged women in sewing shopping bags - to start with. We'll need a local woman with the right skills to lead the project (Vio has someone in mind). The project leader has to be payed from the start. We could also use a volunteer, at least in the first fase of the project (contact us or Vio if you are looking for a different India-experience and think this might be something for you)
• The project leader, volunteer and the women involved will work on designs and production techniques to make durable bags that are practical in the everyday life in an indian household.
• The women will be given donated fabric/old clothes (from local donors, from us and Emmaus-France), and the equippment they need (Emmaus will even donate sewing machines to us).
• We will help the women sell their products in the local marked and develop/widen their marked. We will of course take no commision.
• As their skills develop, we will explore other products that can be sold locally (still made from donated fabric, this also makes it possible to produce cheap products for local low-income families). Better quality products might even be sold to tourist or abroad. We'll see how this goes!

This project aimes at being an ecofriendly project that empower local women and give them a chance to make a living and not be so dependent on their husbands (if they have one). We also hope that meeting up with other women through work will make them stronger and gain confidence.

So..... Ganpati are not on site for the daily work - what can we do from here?

• Contribute financially towards paying the project leader.
• Collect good quality fabric/thread and other supplies to bring with us, send or give to people who are travelling to India and are willing to stop by Khajuraho for us.
• Supporting Vio and Friends in Khajuraho in discussing ideas, products, strategies or whatever they want our input on or help with.
• IF the project goes well and we find products we think might sell in Norway - we can sell products through our website (or a designated website for the project) and/or talk to a few selected shops and try to convince them to buy our products.