The pros and cons of the culture of volunteerism in Namibia

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I was stunned to see that it’s been more than a year since I wrote a post on this site. Well, family issues did play a role in this lack of activity, as did a nagging awareness that social media is responsible for a catastrophic contribution towards global carbon emissions through its profligate use of electricity generated by fossil fuels. I am not a doom-and-gloomer when it comes to the many productive applications of social media – I am certainly an avid consumer myself, albeit (I hope) a discerning one – but I do try to rein in my use of it, and limit how many posts, stories and updates I contribute on various platforms.

(It’s also not escaped my notice, of course, that WordPress promotes the use of AI technology for the creation of images etc…”Down with this sort of thing” as they say on Craggy Island!)

However, the chief reason for a lack of webpage activity has been the fact that, perhaps more than at any other time in my life, I have been BUSY in ways I could not have foreseen this time last year. I continue to joyfully manage the Sew Good Namibia project on a volunteer basis, responsible for marketing and logistics while our four craftswomen create their wonderful designs (currently sold at 12 outlets around the country) to support their families. I’m also still writing the short stories that are regularly published in online journals and magazines – a second collection of which will soon appear in print (as The Limbo Circus) through the marvelous Modjaji Books.

However the principal reason why my days are filled with bustle and hustle is the incredible growth of the Promising Pages Pilot Initiative (PPPI) that was launched early last year. I have been overwhelmed by the success of the pilot phase since we kicked off with a few requests for book donations and suggestions for sites where we could put up suitable receptacles where ordinary Namibians could ‘Take a book. Read a book. Return a book’. As always, identifying dynamic individuals who understand a hypothetical idea and want to see it flourish as a practical enterprise entails expending a GREAT deal of time and effort with others who turn out to be time-wasters in the end. And, as I discovered with ‘Sew Good Namibia’, it’s critical to let a project develop organically in its own time, and in its own way, rather than imposing inflexible and unrealistic expectations on an untried concept.

In addition, each and every one of the thousands of books, pamphlets, journals, study guides, and magazines that have been given to the PPPI to date have to be assessed for suitability (older, pre-Independence materials, especially, will not pass muster in these more enlightened times and have been donated to the Katutura Community Arts Centre for use in installations and other artworks). Then these have to be categorised according to the the age of the readership and genre before being packed up ready for distribution.

At the time of writing we now have little library installations in disadvantaged communities in Okahandja and Hakahana, with others scheduled soon for the Physically Active Youth and Mammadu Trust premises in Katutura, Windhoek. The University of Namibia Main Campus also has two large bookshelves in place and regularly replenished with a wide range of fiction, textbooks, non-fiction and Africana. It was amazing to see how many faculty and students turned up for the official launch in March, racing to select some reading matter to borrow the minute the ribbon was cut on the shelving. More little libraries will be established at Groot Aub and Rehoboth, to the south of Windhoek, in the near future and plans for further expansion are in the works.

All this requires a great deal of time, effort, admin, petrol and schlepping, 7 days a week, which I am thrilled to have the hours and energy to still contribute right now. I’ve also expanded my circle of friends as generous donors and enthusiastic community members embrace the PPPI idea and help it to expand. An additional gift.

Promising Pages Pilot Initiative (PPPI) poster created in four languages widely used by Namibians

BUT. Namibia has a huge cohort of keen, articulate, educated and media-savvy young people currently looking for work. Our youth unemployment rate is almost 3 times the global average. It is unsustainable for PPPI to continue to be administered and run by one, unpaid volunteer yet this is how so many grassroots projects continue to exist in Namibia while expensive, pie-in-the-sky propositions receive extensive taxpayer funding only to sink without a trace. If the government and international funding bodies are serious about producing future generations conversant in a language that’s not the mother tongue for the vast majority of them, then movements – such as the PPPI – that increase access to English-language materials need to be formalised and then supported by appropriate institutions and development partners. Furthermore, local authors and creatives need financial support to produce books that reflect the lives of our young citizens, published in our indigenous languages for free distribution around the country.

The search is on for someone, or a group of someones, who can take the PPPI and turn it into a sustainable model for a nationwide network of fixed installations and mobile libraries while being paid a decent salary to do so. Let’s hope that by the time I check in again, this will have become a reality.

Bridging the literacy gap in Namibia

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Back in the mists of time, I wrote a section of this blog concerning how Namibian learners are leaving educational institutes with only a sketchy competence when it comes to the country’s only official language, English. At that time I was hoping to see a few manuscripts I had written get taken up and developed into materials that would help to bridge this gap. (See under: ‘Good and READy’.)

Nothing really came of this, finances being a familiar constraint, and I filed the whole idea under ‘seemed like a good idea at the time’. But a couple of things have happened fairly recently that reawoke my interest in seeing if there wasn’t a way to give disadvantaged Namibians (children, especially) access to reading materials that would otherwise not be available to them.

Firstly, I visited my family in a very rural part of Germany last year and noticed that, in the absence of the type of services that people in towns take for granted, the community had done some wonderful improvising. Not only were farm-fresh products available in tiny, weatherproof kiosks by the side of the road (with the eggs, jams etc. paid for through an honesty system) but a little cabinet filled with books had been installed by a bus stop so that people (chiefly adults) could take, read, and return any volumes that caught their eye. Why, I asked myself, couldn’t we have a similar little library movement in Namibia?

Secondly, at the start of this year, I read an article in our daily English-language newspaper by a perceptive man (apologies – I cannot find it in their online archives) extolling the virtues of school libraries for the role they play in introducing children to a reading culture. As I believe he mentioned, many of our most promising young school-leavers fail to progress to tertiary education simply because they lack proficiency in English, which remains the mother-tongue language for a vanishingly small percentage of our population. Yet establishing and stocking school libraries has historically been outside the capabilities of the relevant ministries.

It seemed to me that it would be a good moment to revisit the idea of a little library-type of initiative – especially as the movement seems to be gaining traction globally. (The US-based ‘Little Free Library‘ organisation, for example, has in excess of 175,000 sites across 121 countries, although for various reasons it would not be a good fit here in Namibia.) Fortuitously, at the same moment, I was put into contact with Alicia Dipierri (of the NGO ‘Umbrella Initiatives‘) and then I floated the idea with Anita Witt (of ‘Recycle Namibia Forum‘), both of whom are dynamic and enterprising women with energy to spare. They willingly got on board and so a small, informal team was established to push the idea forward.

A little library receptacle design will always need to be adapted to local conditions and preferably be positioned where members of the public will have unrestricted access. (Photograph on the left, copyright: Alicia Dipierri).

So, I put out a call to friends to see if they could donate a few second-hand volumes to kick-start the endeavour – and ended up with more than 500 books (!), mostly in English. Many are for adult readers but that’s actually OK; the idea behind what we are now calling the ‘Promising Pages’ pilot initiative is simply to get paper books into the hands of people who would not otherwise have access to them. We are also scoping a couple of sites in Windhoek where suitable receptacles could be installed and then monitored to assess whether there is actually a demand for this in practice.

This was our initial inventory in April 2024, when I first asked a few friends to donate books they didn’t want any more. 500 books take up a LOT of room and have to be stored away from mice, termites and other denizens of the veldt, where I live!

The ultimate goal – should the informal pilot prove successful – would be to hand off the Promising Pages project to a young, energetic Namibian who could help it to grow. This would mean approaching NGOs for funding so that the project can be led by a paid professional, rather than relying on volunteers. We are well aware, too, that there are significant gaps in the the materials we have received in terms of books in indigenous languages, and also those written by people of colour, so these would need to be purchased. And one day, wouldn’t it be great to have a small fleet of vans visiting outlying, rural areas once a month so that people – young and old – can swap the book they have read for a new reading experience? (Way back in the day, this was, in fact, how I learned to read – a mobile library visited the street where my family lived in southern England and my brother, sister and I eagerly dove in and replaced the books we had read with a new set. For free, because reading is a priceless asset.)

A sustainable model would also require that books are chosen and sourced in volume, rather than through the kindness of friends who are downsizing. One idea would be for big local tourism companies to ask their clients to pack a few books in their luggage to hand over on their arrival here – I think that most people visiting Namibia from the Global North are well aware of the poverty many Namibians must endure, and wish to help.

Watch this space to see how Alicia, Anita and I get on. And if you have any books you would like to donate, or want to purchase books for us to fill some of our critical ‘gaps’. then get in touch (+264 81 1271741).

2023 – A Most Remarkable Year…

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In the middle of 2023, it suddenly occurred to me that ‘Sew Good Namibia’ had evolved into an established and thriving business, almost without me noticing. I say ‘almost’ because handling the logistical and managerial aspects – essentially my wheelhouse – is now pretty much a fulltime job so I had gradually become aware that these tasks were taking up more and more of my time!

The penny dropped when a shop at the coast approached us to make a range of products specifically for their clientele of crafters, knitters and people who crochet. Up until this year, part of my role has entailed sending out many messages each month to potential stockists to find out if they would like showcase our products, a rather thankless task since many never even opened my DMs! Not only did the Wool Cafe in Swakopmund want to place a large order with us, they also insisted on paying the craftswomen UP FRONT for the custom-made items we sent. This was a first for us in Namibia – all our other local stockists took our goods on consignment, an arrangement that’s not without its drawbacks as in the past things have been stolen from outlets, or have been returned to us damaged or dirty, and it can be difficult to maintain accurate records of the stock held and sold at each store, too.

Not long afterwards, a second shop, the Rooi Dak Padstal run by Barkhan Dune Retreat also placed a large order with us, for which they were similarly prepared to pay immediately. This represents a significant change in our retail model since it is obviously preferable for the craftswomen to be paid for their hard work straight away, rather than waiting months (and sometimes even years!) to be rewarded for their labour.

We now have ten shops across Namibia that sell our upcycled, ecofriendly range. Over 2023, two had sadly fallen away but these were quickly replaced and augmented by others and thus the roster increased in size. Some outlets are very small and only shift a few items occasionally but it’s important that we maintain a presence wherever people looking for ‘local-is-lekker’ gifts, especially, might see our products and decide to make a ‘Proudly Namibian’ purchase.

Fairly early on in the development of the sewing initiative, the two chief producers and I took a decision to keep Sew Good Namibia at a micro-enterprise scale. We had all seen how – when projects grow too fast and too quickly – problems with cash flow, personnel and quality control come to take up far too much time and effort. Nevertheless, during 2023 we decided to hand off the exclusive production of our Budget Book Bags to a new member-in-training – Bianca Beukes – and are in negotiations with a skilled seamstress in Walvis Bay – Loide Kambida – for her to make a new product line of stuffed toys.

For several years, we have sat with an unsold pile of table runners like these. They are an example of something that was suggested to us as a potentially worthwhile product line, but which then failed to sell. Suddenly, however, people can’t seem to get enough of them and they have become a runaway best-seller at several of the stockists that support us.

All in all, we can look back on the year past (as well as at our income statements!) and feel a great deal of pride in how far we have come. We have ceased making fiddly, labour-intensive items, such as pencil cases, which were never a great success, and now just focus on a few things – chiefly bags – that we can make well, and at speed.

We are also now able to make regular donations of fabric we cannot use to schools and creatives (such as fashion students and people who make crafts for a living), which is a critical part of our ‘nothing goes to waste’ remit.

Onwards and upwards into 2024, as they say here!

The WORD has been HEARD?

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It’s now four years since Sew Good Namibia was launched – a long gestation period when you realise that it was back in 2016, when I visited Jakarta for the first time, that I started to think seriously about the impact of Western lifestyles on the global environment and how I could throw my energies into trying to live more sustainably, and get my fellow Namibians to do the same.

But when I began approaching local businesses and private individuals in Windhoek to share my ideas about turning waste into high-quality products that could be sold to improve the livelihoods of our poorest citizens, I sometimes felt as if I was talking in Martian or Klingon…

Cut to 2023 and it seems as if finally, finally, the message has begun to sink in here. Perhaps it’s the news footage of wildfires raging across Europe, or videos of Cape fur seals along our coastline ensnared in abandoned fishing gear but – better late than never! – it seems as if the country is waking up to the fact that we cannot continue to behave as if the fate of our planet is not our responsibility – individually or collectively.

Thus the last few months have seen a marked upswing in interest with regard to the work of Sew Good’s craftswomen. Indeed we now have six outlets selling our bags and household goods made from upcycled luxury furnishing fabric, with several more poised to stock our products in the near future.

We now receive regular messages from companies keen to supply us with unwanted materials that we can turn into new product lines – such as these burlap and jute coffee-bean sacks that Amory fashions into sets of plant-pot holders/storage containers (which became a best seller overnight). Donating to projects such as our’s doesn’t just solve a logistical problem for these businesses but burnishes their reputation as enterprises who get the ‘ecofriendly’ message and want to support the local-is-lekker philosophy.

I am now looking for a new project that can utilise more of the unwanted waste that comes my way now that Sew Good Namibia has finally hit its post-Covid stride and generates income month in, month out. One idea is to train people who are ending a custodial sentence to make small picture frames from wooden offcuts discarded by framing businesses. And I still want to link up hotels and accommodation establishments with a home industry group that can upcycle guest soaps – as has been done successfully elsewhere.

There’s a long way still to go. Namibian consumers are ready to embrace a greener lifestyle it seems but often they are faced with choices that are a compromise at best. I no longer bore people senseless talking about the scourge of plastic waste and similar issues (although the threat of climate change is one that still only really reaches one sector of the community apparently). But pointing out that buying an imported cotton or paper bag is not a viable alternative to a single-use plastic bag, or that industries that claim to recycle old clothes are often guilty of greenwashing can be tricky if someone is genuinely trying to commit to changing their purchasing habits and you don’t want to demoralise them with buzzkill

But the message is here, and it’s here to stay. I no longer believe that people are just shrugging and ignoring the small steps they can take to halt Earth’s destruction, nor are they suffering from eco-fatigue. The burgeoning green ethos is captured so beautifully in a quote I am seeing more and more online: Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.

Burying Our Heads in the Sand?

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A person working in any capacity to protect the environment quickly becomes, for better or worse, a spokesperson for the ‘green movement’ more generally. And, rightly, must be prepared to submit to scrutiny regarding their own lifestyles – not excluding the self-auditing that accompanies a bewildering number of everyday decisions.

The temptation to lecture people about their polluting habits or to correct misapprehensions they might voice about topics such as recycling, GMOs, renewable energy etc. can be hard to resist. But simply attacking individuals rather than building consensus towards meaningful, positive change is unlikely to result in the desired outcomes. Defensive people have a habit of acquiring selective deafness and just entrenching themselves further in their own little foxholes…

I’m often guilty myself of ‘Why don’t they just…?’ thinking too, when it comes to some of the seemingly intractable issues confronting our planet. Visiting SE Asia recently (yes, full disclosure, I didn’t get there on foot) I watched as a man – presumably hired by the hotel where I was staying – painstakingly swept up all the plastic bottles and other such debris that was dumped on the beach by the high tide every morning, then dug holes right there in the sand in which to bury this sizeable accumulation of non-biodegradable rubbish. His daily activities represented, in microcosm, much of the world’s attitude towards this particular problem: dump our trash out of sight and leave the consequences for another day.

Workers remove plastic waste from Kuta Beach, Bali in January 2021. The 30 tonnes of trash collected was later transported to a landfill site. Photograph from the CNN Travel website.

Yet in consuming foodstuffs portioned into tiny, single-use plastic sachets and polystyrene clamshells, and buying bottled water – all in the name of hygiene – I was, inevitably, contributing to the environmental degradation of an island with very limited capacity to deal with refuse management. What is the answer when we are confronted with dilemmas such as these?

It can be draining (and frankly downright unfeasible) to weigh the merits of each alternative over the many others available when it comes to trying to live more ethically, especially as companies get more clued up about how to deploy greenwashing as a marketing tactic. We eventually become jaded and view with scepticism the euphemisms and images wielded by advertisers we suspect are only paying lip service to environmentalism (see, for example: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220614-synthetic-or-natural-which-is-best-for-climate-and-health). This is especially true when regulatory bodies are still playing catch-up with respect to how vague claims to ‘holistic’, ‘wellness’ or ‘earth-friendly’ products can be evaluated against empirical (sometimes contested) research, and codified.

Do individuals (especially travellers hoping to have a relaxing holiday after the prolonged limbo necessitated by Covid-19) have the finances, time or inclination to always research and settle on the most eco-friendly option out of many – from choosing a reef-safe sunscreen to hiring an e-scooter instead of a conventional motorbike? And what about the trade-off for locals who must find a way to offer their goods and services at competitive prices – which often means eschewing those that are greener but much more costly?

I’ve been online now drafting this for an hour or so – ample time to make my own regrettable contribution to climate change (the electricity-hungry processes driven by social media and other internet-enabled communication mean that globally, netizens are responsible for a larger carbon footprint than the aviation industry). Does this make me a hypocrite? That would be for others to judge I suppose, but my own philosophy is that while it is ultimately the responsibility of governments to work together towards reaching binding agreements in time to pull us all back from the brink of climate catastrophe and to deploy their budgets in support of research and innovation rather than business-as-usual, we each have a part to play, in whatever way is realistic for us at the time, and using our skills and talents to the best of our ability.

When I used to write opinion pieces for The Namibian newspaper, my unofficial tagline was: ‘If you are not part of the solution, then you are part of the problem.’ Rather blunt, perhaps, but it did encapsulate how I believe that it’s not enough to gripe and throw a few dollars at an issue in order to assuage your guilt. Effective advocacy doesn’t have to be shouty and performative, either (in fact it’s my view that a good way to generate unhelpful pushback over literally any debate is to be intolerant of people who need some convincing to be swayed).

In essence, every gesture we make towards greener living – be it ever so seemingly insignificant – leads us away from the worst-case scenarios we can hardly bear to contemplate. As does every comment we drop into our supermarket’s suggestion box, every lift we decide to share with another car owner, and every written response we demand of our elected officials.

Organisations such as Greenpeace UK have been pushing for a ban on plastic food and beverage packaging and containers for years. While retailers used to insist that their customers preferred their fresh produce wrapped, public opinion and consumer behaviour are forcing them to switch back to loose fruit and vegetables, just as some governments have also been prompted to introduce bans on packaging such as this. Photo: © Angela Glienicke / Greenpeace

If we want to contribute towards a sustainable future, our own efforts need to be sustainable too. Not one-off, ‘look at me’ gestures filmed and posted ‘for the likes’ but small daily acts, often undertaken in private, and perhaps involving even some element of sacrifice or expense (which most of us can ill afford these days). What is unconscionable is sitting back and thinking that as individuals we have no power to turn the tide.

Playing catch-up

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It can very often feel as if my adopted country fell off the map when the rest of the world started using the Internet for basic transactions, research, entertainment and social communications. Many bills still arrive by mail in a post office box (or did before the pandemic) and – with huge swathes of the country still un-electrified – using wi-fi at home was historically a privilege reserved for the wealthier residents of bigger towns.

Add to that the fact that local competitors to Amazon have never been able to make inroads when packages cannot be guaranteed to arrive safely at a post office, nor is it possible to deliver to an unoccupied house given that tall palisades, electric fences, remote-access gates and large dogs tend to guard even modest homes and whole suburbs can be devoid of street signs – well, a physical trip to the shops or open market remains how most of us still get all our goods.

Coronavirus changed all that. We only experienced one full-scale national lockdown but with international supermarket chains sourcing nearly all of their products from overseas and cross-border transportation completely halted, suddenly the whole country was looking for new ways to access even staple products. And identifying and buying locally manufactured or home-grown goods suddenly became a necessity, not a novel experiment.

A veritable deluge of Namibian online shopping sites offering a ‘local-is-lekker’ consumer experience emerged, as it seemed, overnight. But good intentions didn’t get them very far when minimal thought or expertise went into their design and most fell away just as quickly as they had sprung up.

‘Sew Good’ now utilises an online marketplace platform called ‘Padstal’, set up (full disclosure) by my daughter, daughter-in-law, and a friend. They put many, many hours of work into conceptualising the platform and ‘test driving’ it before full roll out. Therefore many of the glitches that sabotaged their less-professional competitors were ironed out before Padstal started to accept uploaded products from vendors and open for business.

A padstal was originally a roadside farm stand selling all manner of local produce and handicrafts and indeed there used to be similar shops in the malls when I first came here in 1998. The new, 21st-century iteration allows consumers at home to place orders online and have them delivered in Windhoek and the surrounding areas – a real boon when we were all sheltering in place. It also, of course, provides the sort of free exposure and retail support that micro-scale enterprises like ‘Sew Good’ would not be able to finance on their own.

Marketing ‘Sew Good’ products with an online shopping platform gives customers a much better opportunity to view and compare products than we can achieve by posting them on Facebook and Instagram.

It does very much seem as if shoppers are still getting used to the idea… and it will take a while before we urbanites all abandon our habit of the weekly shop in crowded and expensive stores. But for ‘Sew Good’ – and other home-based industries we have been able to introduce to the concept – online shopping has allowed us to reach a much bigger pool of potential clients, who will be able to place automated orders once the economy picks up and people are once again looking to browse and buy non-essential items such as those made by our craftswomen.

Green Shoots in Tough Times

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The rain has blessed Namibia as it hasn’t done in a decade. The dams are full, the antelope families are fat, the trees are full of birds’ nests. There are even lakes in the desert….but although we are all just plain relieved to be free of the drought conditions that have prevailed for far too many years, the absence of the visitors that would bring a much-needed boost to the economy is a sobering reminder that the rest of the world is still stuck in the terrible suspended animation of Covid, 12 months old now.

Our statistics with regard to the medical impacts of the pandemic show that we have been the lucky ones so far, relatively speaking. But the economy was already in extremis before 2020 and the figures for businesses shuttered and people retrenched as coronavirus delivered the coup de grâce are far less salutary.

Many consumers, here and worldwide, pivoted towards purchasing locally sourced products last year – by force of circumstance as borders closed to imports, yet also by choice. But the ‘Good for Namibia’ initiative that was already established – the ‘Sew Good’ project – as well as others that were ready to launch have been victims of the diminishing purchasing power of the nation as every household found itself affected, in one way or another, by the need to scrimp and save for the long haul. The income from the sewing work is still enough to make a difference for the craftswomen, and we have even taken on another producer recently, but our sales have inevitably plateaued.

I continue to admire and celebrate the young Namibians (and a few not-so-young!) who are flexing their entrepreneurial muscles and adapting their business models to the straitened times. As well as those that are moving towards, and embracing, the concept of sustainable use of our precious resources. You only have to spend half an hour on Instagram to see that their hustle is being rewarded.

The creative women of ‘Sew Good’ continue to explore new ideas while waiting for our old markets to revivify. I am still hopeful that at some point too, when hotels begin filling up again, I can launch a long-incubating recycled soap enterprise. Namibia is officially ‘open’ (if you can just jump through a million hoops!) and we look forwards to the time in the not-to-distant future when we can share the bounteous year that nature has gifted us with our international tourist friends, too.

Lightweight safari scarves, each one unique, made by Julia Gomachas of ‘Sew Good’ from upcycled luxury embroidered and sheer fabrics

KINDNESS is the new currency

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We all have our own individual takes on how reality has changed since we became aware of Covid-19, wherever we are in the world. The first commercial flight in many weeks arrived in Windhoek a few days ago and with it, one assumes, the first overseas mail in a long while. My very out-of-date ‘New Yorker’ from earlier this year duly arrived in my post box and it reads, honestly, like a communication from another planet. Even those few short months ago, the pandemic was still a semi-abstract concept for people here in Namibia. In the city where it’s published, the writers and photographers covering the unfolding crisis for the magazine back in May were clearly aware that, to use that overworked word, they were dealing with an unprecedented catastrophe and yet, with the gift of hindsight, their words and images seem – now – to be wholly inadequate to the task of warning what might still be to come.

But over the past few weeks, as the infection rate has risen here at home and the government has responded with what seems to me to be pragmatic, consistent and effective leadership, it’s also been possible to see how – to use another cliche – the worst of times has brought out the best in people. And I’ve been truly humbled by the numbers of perfect strangers reaching out to the ‘Sew Good’ project specifically, and local producers and traders more generally, in an effort to assist in ways that uplift the most hard-hit and impoverished communities and forge connections that will endure and bolster the circular economy – whereby goods are exchanged and repurposed, rather than discarded and replaced anew – after the dark days are a receding memory.

In the ‘All Trousers’ section of this blog you will soon find the details of the businesses that have generously supplied us with donated fabric and other resources so that the craftswomen can continue to keep creating the bags and other items that help to support their families. However, I couldn’t resist including here a photo of the FIVE big boxes of large hessian coffee sacks delivered to town from the coast, for free, courtesy of Two Beards Coffee and Formula Couriers (https://www.facebook.com/twobeardscoffeeroasters/ and https://www.formulacourier.com/). Their selfless determination to see us supplied with a new type of material for upcycling so that we can add to the range of products we offer is just one example of the generosity flowing freely between Namibians right across country.

Green is in ‘Vogue’

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Magazines are ‘stuck on the truck’ currently, as we say here in Namibia – a nation that is compelled to source so many of its consumer goods from South Africa and where, at the time of writing, cross-border imports have pretty much ceased to exist. The copy of British ‘Vogue’ I recently picked up off a very empty shelf at the store (my guilty-pleasure luxury in these trying times) was an issue from way back in April this year so it represented a sort of distorted lens through which to view the recent, pre-Covid past.

With a (fairly new, fairly young) Editor-in-Chief in Edward Enninful OBE, and refreshing insights into the future of the fashion industry, I wasn’t surprised to see that the publication has created a new role, that of Contributing Sustainability Editor, in order to focus on the ways in which designers and manufacturers will be meeting the challenge of waste in a world growing increasingly conscious of the costs of instant-gratification consumerism.

The ‘Sew Good’ project recently received an amazing donation of hunters’ camouflage clothing, which was the starting point for the creation of this one-off shopping bag.

This growing global awareness has repercussions for all producers – large and small, industrial and artisanal – who work with fabric, as people begin to reject the purchase of throwaway items of clothing (and other such goods) meant to be discarded after one season.

The Namibian craftswomen of ‘Sew Good’ are increasingly turning their hands to commissioned items that embrace this ethos. When we started out, we just used donated luxury furnishing fabric to make simple, upcycled patchwork shopping bags – intended to replace single-use plastic ones. Now, Amory and Julia, who head the project, are imagining and producing a much wider range of stylish items, including ones that use the tiniest scraps of pleather – cellphone covers, for example – as well as others that would not look out of place in an upmarket home-furnishing store.

Using tiny blocks of colourful scraps, we were able to produce this gorgeous throw for style maven and influencer, Ms Martina Pieper (https://www.instagram.com/styledby_martina/?utm_source=ig_embed)

This has led me to think about how we can conceptualise what we do as we progress to selling unique products online for specific customers. It’s also clear that we need to make a wider range of goods for ‘small money’ for events such as @finkensteinbushmarket so that younger customers can purchase our items and cash-strapped locals can still treat themselves to something sustainably-made and truly lovely.

“BUY it because it’s beautiful

VALUE it because it’s eco-friendly

CHERISH it because it uplifts Namibian families”

The Quiet Retail Revolution

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I sometimes think that Namibia, my home for more than two decades, suffers from ‘littlest sibling’ syndrome. We look to other – bigger, richer, more ‘developed’ – countries and try to emulate them in a search for economic success, without really questioning whether we have enough in common with them to follow in their footsteps, given our limited human and natural resources, or whether it’s advisable to even attempt to do so.

Furthermore, we seem to think that anything transported to us from overseas just has to be better than the things we can make or grow at home; indeed there’s a certain cachet attached to the descriptor ‘imported’ when added to certain goods, despite the price – in environmental as well as cash terms – of bringing in so many items from elsewhere, specifically our ‘big cousin’ South Africa, that we could in theory begin to make at home.

Every year we churn out a huge cohort of IT graduates – because adopting new technologies is deemed the shortcut to the industrialised nation we aim to be – yet it remains pretty much impossible to do anything online apart from the most basic transactions; the platforms the nation contracts to use for simple tasks such as filling in a form or tracking a parcel are simply unfit for purpose. (Indeed, satisfactory Internet coverage remains just a fantasy when so many parts of the country don’t even have electricity of course.)

At the time of writing, most of the country is now returning to some kind of post-Covid normality, with a couple of welcome new developments that I am happy to see take root in terms of retail activities. The first is that people have been compelled to buy local products as the cross-border trucking industry ground to a halt and this can only be good at grassroots level for an economy that was in dire straits even before coronavirus hit. One international pharmacy chain was cynically selling small boxes of imported single-use face masks at the exact same (grossly inflated) price as the one-off emergency income grant that our poorest citizens could apply for and it was gratifying to see people eschew these for much more economical fabric ones sewn at home by groups such as ‘Sew Good’.

The community where I live – 3 housing developments situated in farmland just outside of Windhoek – initiated a marketplace in the bush one Saturday in June (literally, see the ‘Sew Good’ stall, below) where local producers could showcase their wares once the social-distancing measures were lifted somewhat. Many vendors who had made farm produce, condiments, bread or other baked goods sold out of stock entirely, emphasising the need for the type of locavore consumer mentality that’s been the norm in places like New York for a long time. ‘Sew Good’ sold many smaller items – people are essentially broke here and were not spending on bigger items generally – but also made lots of connections to potential clients that are proving fruitful subsequently.

The ‘Finkenstein Bush Market’ (https://www.facebook.com/finkensteinbushmarket/) was so successful that it is set to be a regular event that will enable community members and the wider public to socialise and shop in ways that had not been possible before, when many folks would just drive to the supermarket to re-stock their grocery shelves or hit the mall for a range of products that are not eco-friendly and do not contribute towards Namibian livelihoods.

Another, linked, effect of the Covid-19 crisis was that young Namibian entrepreneurs set about creating markets for their goods through platforms such as Instagram with, I’m told by one such craftsman, great success. People who wanted to source locally made items were suddenly inspired to link up with manufacturers whom they would probably not have been aware of even a few months ago, through the power of social media These emerging businesses have neither warehousing, offices, inventory nor overheads – apart from the price of a data bundle – and they simply take orders from customers who have seen photos of their handiwork online and offer hassle-free delivery as part of the service. Word of mouth and positive recommendations are the tools they deploy to grown their client base and their income. Good for them, and good for Namibia, of course!

Certainly, a year after ‘Sew Good’ was launched, we have some lessons to absorb from these smartphone entrepreneurs and this week saw the (tentative) launch of our own Instagram account (https://www.instagram.com/sewgoodnamibia/) where people can view and choose products that can then be delivered for free in town. As we take more orders and expand, this is going to be more effective than dealing with individuals via WhatsApp.

We have all realised a lot over the past few months in terms of the value of small-scale but personalised retail experiences. Plus the feel-good factor that arises from getting to know neighbours (in a conducive but decidedly low-tech environment in the case of the Bush Market) and supporting local businesses cannot be over-estimated. It took a crisis to get us all in touch with what really matters – spending time with real people, in real life – and I hope that the connections we have made, and will continue to foster, will prove to be long-lasting and productive ones.

There were ‘cat people’ at the inaugural Finkenstein Bush Market in June 2020 and this shopping bag design certainly grabbed their attention and made it our most ‘in demand’ new product.