Hey there,
I'm Christine, and I'm the business development manager at edun LIVE.
One of the most fulfilling aspects of the work I've gotten to do here at edun LIVE has been my travel to many of the countries that "grow and sew" our t-shirts.
It's exciting to meet with farmers and factory workers and visit some of the most beautiful spots on Earth. I hope to share this with you, so I'll regularly update this section of the website with videos (additional ones can also be found on YouTube) and blogs about the latest trip. Hope you enjoy.
Best regards,
Christine
SPOTLIGHT: UGANDA, LESOTHO, and SOUTH AFRICA (April Trip)
April 11 – 20, 2007
I made another trip to Africa in April 2007. The purpose of this visit was to survey production processes and review social compliance standards in each of our factories.
Accompanying me were Michele Grear, Head of Production for EDUN, our sourcing agent in Africa, and a social auditor from the third-party monitoring organization, Verité.
I landed in Entebbe, Uganda on the night of Wednesday, April 11th and went to the Sheraton Hotel to meet the group. In Uganda, we make our 100% certified organic Super Natural t-shirts in Adam, Eve, Scion and Lamb. After a good night’s sleep (it was a long flight!) we proceeded to the factories.
Once there, we conducted our social auditing and spoke with the managers about production and logistics. During our visit, we interviewed factory workers, and Mitzi did a review of health and safety regulations and workers’ rights.
Learning about the cutting and sewing process
That evening, after the factory visits had concluded, we had dinner at an excellent Indian restaurant in Kampala, called Khana Khazana.
On Friday, we continued touring the factory facilities and interviewed our screen printer. We also had a meeting with President Yoweri Museveni at the State House. He is very supportive of foreign investment and wanted to meet us to get an update on how our orders were progressing. We were very happy to tell him that we are consistently maxing out the capacity of our factories in Uganda and that the managers were very willing to work with us to meet our social compliance requirements. We also mentioned that we would put additional orders through our facilities in Uganda if they had more knitting capacity – this is the bottleneck for us.
Factory workers walking (some dancing) homeward bound after the end of a shift
After our meeting at the State House, we had dinner with a representative from the Wildlife Conservation Society as well as a couple of farmers from the Kasese region in Southwest Uganda. At this meeting, we discussed a feasibility study we hope to conduct that will help local farmers transition from conventional (pesticide-heavy) cotton farming to organic cotton farming.
Learning more about pesticide use to help convert farmers to organic production
We left Uganda on Saturday morning and flew through Johannesburg to get to Durban. Since we had no appointments over the weekend, we spent our time exploring Durban, shopping and site seeing. The seaside was beautiful and full of great shops and restaurants.
One interesting story - during my free time, I went to get some coffee, and struck up an interesting conversation with the waiter. It turns out that he is trying to design his own line of shirts and jeans. He had been working at a major chain in South Africa but left because he disagreed with their sourcing strategies. When he learned that I was working for a clothing company, he immediately asked me if I was importing fabric from Asia. This is a major issue in South Africa right now, as Asian imports are wiping out the competitiveness of local fabric mills. When I told him about the edun LIVE ethos of grow to sew African, he was thrilled as that is exactly what he is trying to accomplish with his new clothing line. It was great to know that people see the importance of saving the South African apparel industry. Without a robust apparel supply chain in South Africa, thousands of jobs will be lost.
After exploring the sites of Durban for the weekend, we met Monday morning with the factory managers that make our unisex tee, Genesis. We toured the Durban facility, which houses most of the sales, pre-production and corporate offices. Most of the cut-and-sew part of the operation has been moved to another area of South Africa called Ladysmith. After touring the Durban facility, we drove to Ladysmith, which is about 2.5 hours north of Durban. Ladysmith is a very poor area, with over 50% of the population unemployed. However, the factory we use there is a marvellous facility – it has training programs so that employees can learn new skills and be promoted, is involved with community service activities, and prides itself on its health and safety precautionary measures.
A discussion of training practices at the factory
After the tour and discussions, which ended at about 7pm, we drove into the Drakensberg Mountains and stayed at a charming lodge called Little Switzerland. It’s nestled in the mountains and provides activities such as horseback riding, spa treatments and trekking.
Little Switzerland. No yodeling.
The following morning, we drove to Lesotho. The drive, which was breathtakingly beautiful, took us though the mountains and an area called Golden Gate. I had no idea that the landscape in this part of the country would be so breathtaking. I would recommend taking a drive through this area – it’s really incredible.
Golden Gate National Park in South Africa
We arrived in Lesotho at about 2pm, and visited a factory there that makes our Positively Black and Great White t-shirts in Adam, Eve, Scion and Lamb t-shirts. We also visited our printer (who prints our logos in the back of our tees). After meeting with these groups, we drove to a B&B called Cranberry Cottage in Ladybrand, South Africa. It’s really pretty and provides wonderful food as well as spa services.
The following day, we met again with our factories to gather and share additional production and logistics information. We then headed out and drove to the airport in Blomfontein to head to Cape Town. In Cape Town, we visited a couple of fabric mills. Unfortunately, they were too expensive for the edun LIVE wholesale market.
Thus concluded this trip to our factories in Africa in April. I will keep you updated on new trips.
SPOTLIGHT: UGANDA (February Trip)
Uganda is where edun LIVE makes its 100% organic cotton t-shirts. It is a beautiful country with many natural resources and is home to almost 30 million people. I would like you to come on the journey that I took while I was in Uganda in mid-February. It is such a beautiful peaceful place with amazing sites and people. Come with me as I tell you the story of my trip to Uganda.
I went to Uganda in February to attend at ceremony at our factory based in Kampala. The ceremony was to commemorate the first shipment of our t-shirts from Uganda to the United States under AGOA. This shipment marked the first export ever of a product made entirely in Uganda – this is Grow to Sew! It really is quite exciting to think that we created an entire value chain in Uganda that had not existed, and now you – wherever you are – get to wear a 100% organic shirt from Uganda that helped provide jobs to those who needed them.
Just a quick overview: Uganda’s economy is healthy and growing. Tourism has also been growing as people vacation to see Uganda's beautiful mountains, trekking opportunities and communities of mountain gorillas and other game. Also, Kampala, the capital of Uganda, is now quite modern, a bustling capital of this new Uganda.
The drive from the airport to Kampala
I landed in Entebbe on a Friday morning and took a car into Kampala. The drive into Kampala from Entebbe is beautiful as most of it is along the scenic Lake Victoria. Lake Victoria is the world's second largest freshwater lake covering an area of 67,850 sq km – about the size of the Republic of Ireland. It forms the headwaters of the River Nile, and two other countries share the waters of the lake – Kenya and Tanzania.
The drive took about an hour as there is a lot of traffic coming into Kampala. It’s a lively city with people starting their day, coming up to the car selling bananas (a huge crop in the country). When I arrived to the factory in Kampala, I was very impressed to see large tents set up (as the sun was out, and it was quite hot), under which were sitting the factory workers, dignitaries such as the U.S. Ambassador, and the President of Uganda, Yoweri Museveni, and the factory owners. President Museveni was thrilled to be part of the ceremony and loved the Grow to Sew ethos of edun LIVE. Museveni is quite open and supportive of foreign investment in general in Uganda.
Meeting workers at the ceremony
After the ceremony, I visited and thanked the factory workers who made our t-shirts. They were very pleased to be part of this groundbreaking event and said they hoped orders would continue to come in through the factory.
Next, a group of us headed down to the Southwestern part of the country to meet with a couple of the cotton farming groups. We drove for a few hours and spent the night in Mbarara. Mbarara is a rather large town in Uganda. It is often a place where people stop for the night when traveling to the Western part of the country. We stayed at a hotel in Mbarara and tasted some traditional Ugandan dishes for dinner. One popular local dish is matooke (bananas of the plantain variety) which is usually served tied up into a bundle of banana leaves and cooked to get a smooth soft and golden yellow mash. Matooke is served hot with all the banana leaves around to keep it warm and is often accompanied by Chapati, an Indian flatbread, which was brought into the country by the large Indian minority living in Uganda, and Luwombo, a stew of chicken, beef or nuts.
A taste of Uganda - literally - a conversation about Ugandan cuisine on the way to Kasese
The next morning, we left Mbarara and headed to Kasese. This gave me a chance to experience the landscape of Uganda, which is one of remarkable physical contrasts. Kasese is on the border of Queen Elizabeth National Park. The Park is breathtaking and home to a diverse ecosystem of grassy plains, tropical forest, swamps, lakes and volcanic craters. Not to mention the wildlife: lion, leopard, giant forest hogs, cape buffalo, elephants, and the Uganda Kob (to name a few). And this is all against the backdrop of the massive Ruwenzoris (the Mountains of the Moon).
A visit with farmers in Kasese
In Kasese, we met and spoke with two groups of farmers. They were very poor in bad living conditions with little hope for improvement. They lived in small huts, sometimes with 10-20 people in them and only one pair of shoes among them all. It was hard for the farmers to get transportation to water for the crops, and they had no training or equipment to use their pesticides (which were expired anyway). It is a pretty dire situation down there. We hope that we are able to help the farmers start with the organic farming so that they can make more money to feed clothe, and educate their children, and climb onto the ladder of development.
Understanding the difficulties farmers face
More information:
Uganda Ministry of Tourism
Travel Uganda
Uganda Tourism
Uganda Wildlife Authority