Ashanti – A Living Project
During the spring in 2009 we traveled to west Africa to work as volunteers. While doing that we came close to a lot of poverty, and not surprisingly, one of the groups most exposed to it were unemployed women. To make a difference, being a volunteer, was much harder than we had first anticipated. From this stemmed the realisation that such voluntary contributions risk to face the problem of poverty from the wrong angle. A country like Ghana hardly needs a larger labour force, it needs job opportunities.
Because of this, we are now starting a project where clothes will be manufactured in Ghana, to be sold in the UK and Sweden. We hope that this project, in the long run, will create job opportunities that may give exposed women the possibility to an income independent of the benevolence of donates.
All surplus gained will return to the project. When a small scale business has become profitable, it will be time to realise the next step, which is to establish a company in Ghana that manufactures clothes with its own capital. Further ahead, we hope that the company will also function as a type of institute where women are given an opportunity to education and other support.
