Plan B

We moved to Maganja da Costa, the principal town of the district of the same name, in anticipation of the contracts materialising and were fortunate enough to be provided with accommodation by an ActionAid employee.

Our ideas for the project developed further and we decided to purchase a house to be used as a base for the women’s project.

The women in Mozambique wear colourful patterned sarongs called ‘capulana’ that are wrapped around their waists, used to carry babies on their backs and tied around baskets of produce to sell at the market. We had seen children wearing simple dresses made from these capulanas and thought that they would be marketable in Europe. They couldn’t be sold locally as the dresses would be too short for Mozambican women to wear; the profit margin would also be much greater if they were sold abroad.

Training the women to make dresses was our initial idea of how to make the project financially stable. The money made from the sale of the clothes was going to fund training for the women, build up a library and maybe in the future enable micro-financing.