28/01/2018
A message from the African Sewing Club and Ryico (Rwandan Youth Information Community Organisation)
To all the lovely people at Rwanda Development Trust and their amazing supporters who sponsored Karin in the Santa Run in Greenwich in December 2017.
African Sewing Club would like to thank you from the bottom of our hearts for all of your support this winter. We have been heartened by all your generosity.
We have been very busy in the last few months trying to make the most out of your generous support. Firstly, we made the decision to scale up production and bring in seven new trainees. Thanks to the success of the first completed training programme, we knew we would be able to manage training people from the Centre Marembo, our partner organisation which supports victims of abuse and teen mothers. This turned out to be an amazing choice, as the new trainees were eager and very talented already, meaning we could accelerate the training, and these new recruits are already fully qualified after only a few short months! Many of our new recruits are young mothers, and we congratulate them most of all for having the courage to begin their careers and turn their lives around for themselves and their children. It is amazing to see them now receiving a salary which has allowed them to find their own accommodation, and they will be moving out of the centre and starting their independent lives this week. This is an amazing confirmation to us of what we always hoped would be a hugely mutually beneficial relationship between the Centre Merembo and African Sewing Club.
Last month, we also had the pleasure of taking part in the Made in Rwanda exhibition, where we ran a stall showing all of our clothes. The exhibition was created to display all the amazing things Rwanda is now producing, and we stood alongside many much larger companies who invest in Rwanda and its future. It was great to get together and see how much support there is for organisations, like us, who want to see a greater amount of jobs and productivity in the country. Members of the government turned up to show their support, and we are hopeful that their actions will create the environment we need to succeed and continue training vulnerable people to make beautiful garments. The highlight of the experience, however, was definitely the surprise of winning the award of ‘Best in Show’ for the clothing category, what an honour! This bolsters us greatly, as it is amazing have such a confirmation of the increased quality of our products and to be told how much people are appreciating what we do.
The money we received thanks to your generosity also went on training someone for a new staff position: sewing machine technician. The chosen candidate was once a resident at Umugongo house, the, now closed, Centre Marembo street boys project. Having been supported since early childhood through education by the centre, Omar had a scientific education and so we thought he was a great person to have on board. You can see him in the picture below , smiling and holding our award from the Made in Rwanda exhibition. He did amazingly at training and is now our full time technical support.
Finally, we also made the purchase of a t-shirt making machine. This brings us huge benefits in regards to the local market, where the lower costs and ease of production means we can create great t-shirts that are accessible to people all over the world. We are now producing lines of both t-sh*ts and polo shirts and these have been very popular. In addition to this, we managed to get a spot in the next issue of IWACU magazine, a fashion magazine which wanted pictures of our new lines for the next edition. Here are a couple for you to enjoy:
Thank you once again for your support and we hope you will keep in touch,
From,
The African Sewing Club
Ryico (Rwandan Youth Information Community Organisation)
