Mondo Bongo Africa – Paper Project
Behind Mondo Bongo Africa is a long and exciting story, peppered with colourful images, tales of adventure and even more ideas, which reached completion in 2012.
The result is a young, dynamic project with an international team, who conduct laborious and highly demanding recycling operations. We work with paper, seeds and fruitpits to create individual items of jewellery. The production of these innovative hand-crafted pieces is carried out in Kampala, the capital city of Uganda.
Central to our work are extremely talented craftsmen and women, who want to earn a steady income primarily through their creativity. Our mutual goal is to build a smart and bold business, which leaves us independent, and is competitive in an international market.
Important for us:
Our close cooperation with young and old has brought us to the conclusion that a transnational project with such enormous cultural differences can only have a common future when a sensible balance between give and take is guaranteed, where each employee makes a contribution. In other words:
We do not ask for donations!
We work together with people, who have to live partly in undignified conditions, who can not simply change them or sometimes do not want to change them at all! In our experience, the constant external influence, e.g., through donated money, or through goods from the western world, often achieve the opposite of ‘aid’, as the people’s own development is constantly disturbed or they wait for someone to continually help them (financially). Their own interests, the necessary responsibility, and existing possibilities are often overlooked and as a result, a completely false idea of the other ‘white’ culture is conveyed.
Mondo Bongo Africa is supposed to contribute to a better understanding of another culture, and on the way we want to create awareness for a world in which we will all eventually live.
Corinna Schmid
Mondo Bongo Africa Team