Doug Dirks - Bagdha Nani Bala

In 1983, Shahjahan Miah, a project development officer for Mennonite Central Committee's Job Creation Program in Bangladesh, began employing working women from very poor families in Bagdha village near the town of Agailjhara in southern Bangladesh. Since hemp was a readily available crop growing in the area, Shahjahan arranged to teach the women how to make rope and twine from hemp. Nani Bala was one of the first women to begin learning how to make rope and twine. The little business soon found customers for bio-degradable hemp garden twine in Germany and England. Ten Thousand Villages in the U.S. and Canada also purchased some hemp twine. This provided work for Nani Bala and twenty of her neighbors in Bagdha.

The business remained very small until they obtained a very large order for hemp bath mitts and back scrubbers from The Body Shop in England in the late 1990s. Today, you can find woven hemp products made by the women at Bagdha Enterprises in The Body Shop stores all over the world, in the U.S. and Canada. Bagdha Enterprises has grown to include more than 100 women and they have a number of new export customers in Europe and Japan.

Nani Bala has been able to educate both of her daughters with the money she has earned while working at Bagdha Enterprises. One daughter is a supervisor at Bagdha (following in her mother's footsteps) and the other daughter went on the medical school and is a medical doctor in Bangladesh. Suraiya, product designer for Prokritee in Bangladesh, told us that she knows six women artisans at Bagdha who have daughters who are medical doctors. This is a tremendous accomplishment for a group of women who were among the poorest of the poor in Bangladesh only 20 years ago.

Category:

Nonprofits & Activism

Tags:

• Agailjhara
• Bangladesh
• Bagdha village
• Woven Hemp Shopping Bag
• Natural Hemp Washcloth
• 6614030
• 6614040
• Woven
• crocheted
• ten thousand villages
• 10000 villages
• fair trade
• artisan