Stitch

Stitch, Embroidery in South Madagascar Michael Rafferty, year 2 Illustration/social practice, WDKA

Stitch is a embroidery project set up in south Madagascar to help the women of a area called Saint Luce. The project was set up to help the women of the town specifically, as there were previously little to no jobs available for them. The men are nearly all fishermen, earning as little as €16 a month, not enough to support their family. The charity has been so successful that now a lot of elder men, married to the women, are being taught also, as the embroidery has become more lucrative than fishing.

Sarah Brown, an embroidery designer from the UK started the project back in 2011, she visited the area whilst on a conservation programme and saw the dire situation that the town and the women were in. Amour Paula, who started as a translator, but is now a crucial part of the business and helping train new starters has helped her since day one.

The business design is simple, first teach a small group of women to use the simple embroidery patterns that Sarah has designed herself and then sell the material around the more touristic parts of Africa as well as over the Internet to the wider world using Sarah’s business and fashion connections. Not all the designs are Sarah’s as she encourages the women to contribute their own designs and helps with creativity also.

The Project is a great example of open design; Sarah has given her designs to the community and taught several groups how to embroider. Once the women know how to embroider and have access to the materials, they are welcome to bring people into the community by teaching friends and family also. At first this did cause some social issues, as the men fishing were earning much less than their wives for the first time in the areas history. This was solved by letting some of the men get involved, but only those at a request from one of the original women, mostly husbands and sons.

Apart from financial gain, there was a hugely positive social impact for the women of the community; Firstly making a living and contributing to their families gave the women a huge boost of self-esteem, spending time in the studio with each other created a sense of community that had been previously missing, and led to some of the women opening up about problems at home as well as other problems in their lives. It also gave some of the widowed women security ¬-being part of a group that looks out for each other.

The group keep coming up with innovative ways to make the project more successful, from pitching a stall at Glastonbury festival, to hunting down more local products to add to their range. The team’s latest project has been to learn from another fabric maker in Madagascar about naturally dyed silk, with an expansion of another line of products, this could mean bringing in more people from the local area into the business, and more families sharing in this new revenue stream. ¬¬¬

Whilst trying to discover more about the local area online there is very little information about the place. Wikipedia recognises its existence but has nothing to say about it. A few travel bloggers have written about the area and all say something very similar, which is that there is very little there more than an amenities shop, and as many fishing boats as people. The area is split up into lots of village areas so nobody I found had stumbled on the project, and this may well be a nice thing so that the workers and go about making their work in peace and it being sold elsewhere, rather than the whole thing turn into a tourist attraction.

There are a few big conservation projects in the local area dedicated to helping the local plants and wildlife, and Stitch ensures that all the materials inks and everything else that’s used are from sustainable and ethical sources. Apart from this being important to Sarah and the others I think it is integral for business as their target market will most likely be very socially conscious.

At the minute the company is only seeing positive outcomes, however there was an initial bit of jealousy when it became apparent that these women were all of a sudden the highest earners of the local area. This was solved by the company branching out al letting people share in the prophet, but when a society changes and a balance shifts away from the traditional ‘bread winners‘ it can often create social issues, this is something Sarah and the team are conscious of and are working very carefully, trying not start any problems.

I learned about Stitch when visited by Sarah during my foundation year at Leeds college of Art, the institution she previously studied at. There is very little second hand information on the company apart from their own website: http://www.stitchsainteluce.org/.