A shot from the Edun fall campaign.
It had rained a few days before I arrived in Gulu, a rough-and-tumble city of nearly 150,000 in war-torn northern Uganda. So the fiery red clay dust, normally so thick in the air, was only starting to kick up as we bounced through bucket-deep potholes out into the bush, toward the village of Amilobo, about an hour away from Gulu’s center. Our party of 10 was on its way to meet a small collective of cotton farmers led by a 37-year-old woman named Aweko Joska. Stuffed into a battered jeep and van were me and another print journalist; a documentary crew; Ali Hewson; and a few staffers from the Conservation Cotton Initiative (CCI), a joint effort of the nonprofit Invisible Children and Edun Live, the T-shirt-manufacturing arm of the Hewsons’ fashion label, Edun.
Like an eco–American Apparel, minus the jailbait marketing campaign, Edun Live is taking 100 percent organic cotton, farmed by people like Joska, and turning it into T-shirts in a green factory in Uganda’s capital city of Kampala. Then it wholesales the blank shirts to bands (who sell them at concerts), clothing companies, and anyone else who asks. Since its founding in 2007, Edun Live has produced 700,000 African-made T-shirts. It’s what Hewson calls a “100 percent African grow-to-sew initiative.”
Joska (middle)
Joska’s collective, made up of extended family and neighbors, from teenagers to great-grandmothers, joined CCI last year—and in the next two years, CCI hopes to more than quadruple its number of affiliate farmers, from the current 1,097 to 8,000. The way it works is that the Ugandan government gives CCI organic cottonseed, which the group then distributes to its collectives. CCI also gives its farmers oxen to plow ancestral fields gone fallow during the country’s long-running civil war; support from agronomists; and a guaranteed local buyer, CCI itself, for every last cotton ball that can be plucked from those sticky, unforgiving stems. For all this, CCI is pretty small, with a core staff of seven, plus 14 satellite employees and farm coordinators working out of a three-bedroom house with unreliable plumbing in Gulu.
When we arrived at Joska’s village—late, as is so often the case when you’re traveling in the bush—she and her fellow farmers cheered, clapped, and ululated. Six months pregnant with her eighth child, Joska led us to a spreading shade tree, where we settled next to a cow nursing its tiny calf. There, one by one, the farmers explained, graciously, that this season they’d need more seed, and sooner, if they were to prepare for the unpredictable rainfalls. More oxen were required, too, because the farmers wanted to cultivate as much field as possible. And finally, as important as anything else, they asked for encouragement. After all the chaos and mistrust sown by internecine warfare, reminders of contracts signed and promises made count for a lot in Uganda.
Despite the challenges, Joska’s group, and others are like it, is beginning to thrive. The first harvest from her own one-acre plot netted 700,000 shillings, or about $350, which is close to the average per capita income in Uganda. (CCI collectives share resources and training but each member owns his or her own land.) The money allowed Joska to celebrate Christmas with her family for the first time since Uganda’s civil war began, more than 20 years ago, and to send her eldest daughter, Gloria, 19, to a good boarding school.
And next year, the money may be even better. CCI plans to put two cotton gins in the countryside, which means the farmers themselves will be able to separate the fiber from the seed. By ginning their own cotton, Joska and her group not only don’t have to find someone else to do it, but they get to keep—and sell—the by-products of the process: cottonseed oil and seedcake. The only stipulation CCI makes is that the farmers must keep everything organic, which in Uganda isn’t much of a problem, perhaps sadly. Due to a historic lack of resources, farmers have never been able to afford pesticides. Ugandan cotton, says CCI Program Director Claude Auberson, is “organic by default.”
When Bono and Ali Hewson first started Edun, in 2005, they’d planned to produce all of the label’s upscale denim and separates in Africa. (Trade for aid has long been Bono’s stance, one he’s put into practice in other business endeavors, such as Product [RED].) But local skill levels and unreliable distribution made manufacturing a more sophisticated line on the continent often impossible. That’s when the couple hit upon the idea of making something more basic: a T-shirt. The beauty of it, Hewson says, is that the whole shebang—farming the cotton, then processing, spinning, dyeing, and sewing it—can be done locally, allowing Ugandans to keep more of the profit. Hewson’s dream is to revive an entire industry, but that won’t happen overnight. In the 1970s, cotton accounted for 25 percent of Uganda’s exports (and 40 percent of its export earnings); now it’s 4 percent.
by Alexandra Marshall for Elle
more photos:
Seeds of Change: Edun Live in Uganda
Snapshots from Ali Hewson's economic independence effort
source:www.elle.com
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