Crafting the future together

Neema: built on empathy and good taste

Looking for cosy cushions, stylish lamp shades or casual furniture for your home? Once you spot the label “Neema”, don’t go any further.

In Iringa’s ochre-light afternoons, a low hum of looms, lathes and laughter spills from Neema Crafts – a workshop where modern Tanzanian design is crafted exclusively by workers with disabilities, and where good taste doubles as social change. The company, founded as a church project in 2003, employs more than 115 male and female craft talents  in their centre in central Tanzania, in weaving, tailoring, carpentry and paper workshops. Neema design is popular all over the country, it’s a success story built on empathy, commitment and good taste. Over the years, it  has become financially self-sustaining, its wages and overheads covered by sales.

Empathy & good taste

It all started in 2003 when a British couple, Susie Hart and her husband Andy, affiliated with the Anglican Diocese of Ruaha, recognised the need to provide training and employment for people with physical disabilities. Susie Hart herself was born with a disability and had spent much of her youth in a wheelchair. They began training three young deaf artisans, pulping maize leaves and elephant dung into beautiful handmade paper for the first Neema product. After the Harts, directors Ben and Katy Ray shepherded more than a decade of product expansion, and today Joseph and Hannah Adams are refining operations at Neema with an engineer’s eye and a designer’s heart.

The paper cards made out of elephant dung are still a bestseller but “meanwhile we use our screen printing for lots of inhouse fabrics”, explains Hannah Adams, as she takes visitors around. Neema has become more than a shop. It is a destination. The centre’s café, Iringa’s unofficial living room, serves coffee and simple lunches on a balcony; the adjacent guesthouse invites slow travel with conscience. Visitors shop, eat, stay, and, crucially, meet the makers whose names are on the tags.

Textiles by the metre

Home-design aficionados head straight to the carpentry department, established in 2012. Think sculptural lamp bases, fabric-diffusing shades, and tables that lean into clean lines with subtle Zanzibari carving. Textiles, which can be bought by the metre, are very popular and can be used for wall screens, upholstering or whatever material dream you may have for your home. Screen-printed cushions pop with contemporary patterns; woven throws deliver chunky texture. Neema  – meaning grace in Swahili – has become a full-fledged design house and community hub, living proof that inclusion can be both elegant and entrepreneurial.

You find Neema shops in Iringa, at Slipway in Dar es Salaam and online. The boutique Kumiko in Stone Town also sells Neema products (neemacrafts.com)