Weaving The Future

This four-minute film takes you on a journey deep into the heart of one of the women’s weaving cooperatives we work with in rural eastern Kenya. Here you’ll meet women like Alice, Peninah and Margaret, who each offer candid insights into how basket weaving brings them independence in various forms. Images in this short film evoke a busy day in the lives of the weavers as they gather outdoors with their weaving projects, supporting one another as they work together to meet their latest basket order deadline. Food cooks in huge vats over log fires and handbags are hung on fences as mothers and daughters, friends and neighbours sit and stand, laugh and chat as their hands work skilfully over bundled lengths of sisal fibres. “Being part of the group has made my life more bearable” muses Margaret Ndululu Musyoki, chairlady of this cooperative. She and others break into smiles and laughter as they confess that basket weaving can be so absorbing that they sometimes even forget their own husbands for a while. The opportunity for women to earn a reliable income in a patriarchal society – through work that fits in around domestic chores and childrearing – simply cannot be overstated.