Saturday, December 17, 2011

Awava at the Wonderful Wonder Fair Gallery in Lawrence, KS!

Awava has lots of goodies at the amazing Wonderfair Gallery at 803 1/2 Mass Street in downtown Lawrence, Kansas! Stop by and grab some holiday goodness if you haven't already, and if you have, come get some more! We'll be doing a bit of restocking tomorrow for the days leading up to Christmas! Come support Awava, Wonder Fair, and all the other amazing local artists and artisans with amazingness on their holiday shelves!










Top Ten Positives from Africa!

Every Friday on our blog, we have a post called "Our Uganda Friday", which highlights positive things happening in Uganda, because we feel that all that comes out in international mass media about Africa in general is negative, negative, negative. The last few weeks we have missed our Friday posts, not because nothing positive is happening, but rather this holiday season has proven so positive that we haven't had time! I know, excuses, excuses. Luckily, however, the New Yorker has picked up our slack with this fantastic top 10 positives from the "Dark Continent"!

NEWS DESK

Notes on Washington and the world by the staff of The New Yorker.

DECEMBER 12, 2011

TEN BIGGEST POSITIVE AFRICA STORIES OF 2011


perm_2011-year-in-review_p154.jpg
Thinking back on media coverage of sub-Saharan Africa this past year, including some events that made my top-ten list of the major Africa stories for 2010, I got a little depressed. With all the doom and gloom of conflict and state-sponsored repression, it’s easy to forget the strides the continent’s residents make every day in business, technology, art, and politics. So, for this year’s list, I decided to choose positive stories that seemed especially auspicious. There are always caveats to any good news, but, for now, the good is outweighing the bad. Africa is a place that is impossible to reduce to any generalities, except maybe this one: it has an enormous amount of potential. Here’s why:
1. Africa is experiencing an economic boom. Africa is predicted to have the largest economic growth of any continent over the next decade, and the burst has already begun. As domestic industries, entrepreneurs, and foreign investors prepare to take advantage of this growth, the economies of at least a dozen countries have expanded by more than six per cent a year for six or more years. Ethiopia’s grew by seven and a half per cent this year. A number of big countries appear to be headed for ten per cent. And concrete middle classes are forming across the continent: as the Economist noted, sixty million African households have annual incomes greater than three thousand dollars. By 2015, that number is expected to reach a hundred million, a number almost equivalent to India’s today.
2. South Sudan gained its independence. It has been a long time coming. Two decades of civil war in the former unified Sudan left the southern half empty of people and resources, and broke. But, despite worries to the contrary, the Sudanese government allowed the independence referendum promised in a 2005 peace treaty to proceed, and South Sudanese voted in approval by a margin of ninety-nine percent. Tensions with Sudan over the border, oil, and the Nuba Mountains, notwithstanding, South Sudanese finally have a chance to rule themselves.
3. Ugandans staged Walk to Work protests in a movement partly inspired by the Arab Spring and rooted in rising fuel and food prices and overwhelming unemployment and corruption. (The movement was so named because of the hundreds of thousands of Ugandans who walk to work because they can’t afford fuel.) Why were the protests good news? President Yoweri Museveni has clung to power for a quarter century, while the opposition leader Kizza Besigye has competed tirelessly for his seat, losing three times in the past decade alone. As Besigye led thousands on the streets of the capital Kampala through tear gas and bullets, and protesters walked through the streets of other towns, it appeared that, for the first time in years, Ugandans were telling Museveni that enough was enough.
4. Two Liberian women won the Nobel Peace Prize. Though the timing was awkward—the political opposition complained that the announcement of the award, to President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf (the country’s first female leader) and the activist Leymah Gbowee, came right as Sirleaf was vying for reelection—much of the country found the recognition of the work of Sirleaf and Gbowee to be well-deserved. Gbowee is particularly impressive: during what looked like a hopeless civil war in the nineteen-nineties, her peaceful, all-women prayer protests, sit-ins, and appeals to rebels to sign a peace deal effectively ended the fighting.
5. Cell phones continue to change how Africans live. The devices have proven to be invaluable: health-care workers use cell phones to track and monitor pregnant women in rural Rwanda (where the number of maternal deaths is high) and H.I.V. patients in Kenya, and Kenya’s mobile banking system, which has been called the world’s most innovative, lets Kenyans pay bills, send remittances, purchase goods and airtime, move funds among accounts, and even take out and pay back loans for entrepreneurial ventures.
6. South African democracy took a turn for the interesting. During this past summer’s local government elections, Helen Zille’s Democratic Alliance party gained a surprising twenty-one per cent share of votes against the deeply entrenched African National Congress, which has ruled since the fall of apartheid. (Nelson Mandela was once its leader.) This is no small feat. The A.N.C., in spite of its corruption and multiple scandals, has held on to its dominance in part by invoking racial rhetoric and the spectre of the apartheid era, and has nearly turned South Africa into a one-party state. The D.A., led by a liberal white female politician who campaigns for multiracial progress, has had difficulty gaining voters across the racial divide. That may be changing.
And in other good news, President Jacob Zuma unexpectedly fired two top ministers and the police chief for corruption.
7. African innovation was celebrated for a third year at Maker Faire Africa. Emeka Okafor, a Nigerian, once said that he couldn’t understand why, in the tech realm, so little interesting and creative activity seemed to be coming out of sub-Saharan Africa. Curious about what good ideas from Africa looked like, he helped found Maker Faire Africa, where inventors from across the continent gather to showcase their wares—this October in Cairo, in previous years in Nairobi and Accra. The result has been astounding: mobile apps, seed-planting devices, solar-powered computer kiosks made out of recycled oil drums, paraffin lamps, and other technologies that, importantly, address the immediate needs of Africans.
8. The U.S. announced a new push for gay rights abroad. 2011 has been tough for gay and lesbian Africans—their living conditions in Uganda, Cameroon, Malawi, and South Africa, among other places, are growing worse, and Nigeria’s parliament is considering an anti-gay bill. But there is some positive news in this story, too. The U.S. government says it will use all diplomatic tools, including foreign aid, to influence nations that criminalize or mistreat gays. Uganda has already denounced the initiative, but Malawi’s government says it is reviewing its anti-homosexuality legislation.
9. (Some) progress in Somalia. Analysts told the Times that the African Union’s peacekeeping troops, drawn from several African countries and supported by U.S. funds, drones, and contractors, appear to be prevailing in the war against Somalia’s insurgents. The situation is still bad—five hundred soldiers have been killed so far and the Somali government has yet to build any real infrastructure—but the African Union remains optimistic.
Better yet, the rains have finally started in central and southern Somalia, easing both the drought and the famine.
10. Botswana as a global leader in fighting corruption. According to the just-released Corruption Perception Index, done every year by Transparency International, Botswana was ranked thirty-two out of the hundred and eighty-three countries included in the survey, and was up four places from last year and eight places since 2009. The country ranked over half of all European nations. Botswana has launched an intense approach to weeding out corruption by setting up a Directorate on Corruption and Economic Crime to investigate and bring prosecutions, and by drafting legislation that will protect whistle-blowers. Here’s hoping Botswana’s neighbors follow suit.
Illustration by Jim Stoten.
Read more from The New Yorker’s 2011: The Year in Review, at News Desk and at Culture Desk.

Wednesday, December 14, 2011

NEW PRODUCT! The Versatile Kisero Bag!

Awava has an insanely exciting new partnership with Ugandan artist and designer, Wasswa Donald, and his eco-conscious, artistically dramatic fashion line, Waswad.

Wasswa developed a beautiful and durable, 100% vegan, leather like material using upcycled canvas which he hand paints and designs into finished products. Wasswa is now working with Awava's tailors to produce this amazingly unique collection, also making this line FAIR TRADE! How awesome is that?!

This first featured bag below is the Kisero Bag. It is hands down the funkiest design in the collection, snapping down at the top to create a "triangular" shape, and unsnapping into a huge bag which can fit almost anything! This bag is perfect for a weekend road trip or if you're like our founding director and carry your life with you daily!

This bag is now available at www.awavamarket.com, but here you can see more looks!


"rust"



"earth"



"confetti"



"desert"



"bush"



Sunday, December 11, 2011

Thursday, December 8, 2011

Awava @ LOLA GIANT This Saturday and Sunday!

It's time for our favorite holiday sale of the year, LOLA GIANT! LOLA (Ladies of Lawrence Artwork), is an event that happens three times a year, starting in 2006, by an amazing group of artistic and driven women in Lawrence, KS. Awava's Founding Director, Kate von Achen, has been a participant and organizer for years, before Awava was even a thought. Awava has been welcome with open arms in the LOLA community since our inception, and we're so thankful for that!

For those of you in the Lawrence and Kansas City areas, you do not want to miss this uniquely exciting holiday shopping event. Find event details here, and catch a sneak preview of the amazing vendors, items being given in the raffle to benefit our gracious hosts, Van Go Mobile Arts, and learn about the amazing women crafting these items on the LOLA Blog!

See you this weekend!


Tuesday, December 6, 2011

We have a winner!

A copy of Extraordinary Women, by Ugandan artist, Daudi Karungi, has been won in November's Awava Monthly giveaway.

Here you will see the names of the people who entered the draw laid out all neat and nice on Darlyne's lovely Ekitanda Duvet set.



And they are all folded up and ready to be drawn in a lovely Ekibbo Basket.


And finally, here is the video announcing the winner!




Congratulations to Wild Fox Couture.

The prize for December is the so-popular-flying-off-the-virtual-shelf Ekitanda Duvet Set, so get Facebooking, Tweeting and Blogging to stand a chance to win one for youself.