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ABOUT ECO AFRICA SOCIAL VENTURES
a US based 501(c)(3) non profit corporation.
Eco Africa Social Ventures is a non profit organization founded in 2007 by Janice Ashby together with two New York colleagues who shared with her a love of Africa, its people and its crafts.
Since 2000 conditions in Zimbabwe have steadily declined from being a poor country where most people still managed to live decent lives, where the literacy rate and education system was the best in Africa and where poor health was treated in modern well equipped hospitals. Food was plentiful in the year 2000 and people grew their own as well as purchased what they needed in well stocked shops.
The famous artists and crafters of Zimbabwe thrived in a country where many thousands of visitors arrived each year to take in the glory of the wild life and left with purchases of beautiful handcrafted art. Then when the economy collapsed the the visitors stopped coming.
In spite of this, with plenty of orders in hand, Eco Africa's crafting collectives still thrived with plentiful work and money to take home to put food on the table for their families. Their children were either in day care or in school.
When the food supply was ruined and infrastructures began to fail artists and crafters were among the many independent entrepreneurs who suffered losses from the political upheaval taking place around them. The inflation rate shot up to unprecedented levels in the world rendering the local currency valueless.
The crafters of Eco Africa began to suffer when school fees became unaffordable, trash remained uncollected for months and their drinking water became contaminated with sewage. School fees became unaffordable too, as was the seed they needed to grow their own produce. Most urgently the artisans and their families needed to be supported with packages of food and essentials to sustain them during the food emergency.
To counter the effects of the economic disaster taking place in Zimbabwe, Eco Africa Social Ventures was created in 2007 to raise money to help the Eco Africa collectives of crafting artists and artisans survive their new desperate circumstances and to help the acclaimed artistic population of Zimbabwe to find its feet again with new ways to survive and grow.