At the gift shop inside the Little America Hotel in Salt Lake City, a handful of necklaces — both long and short — are on display by the register. The long necklaces have big, bold-colored beads. The short necklaces consist of multiple strands of tiny pastel beads.
The long necklaces, priced at about $50, are selling faster, says the store's supervisor, Larissa Thompson.
"Men buy some of them as gifts, but it's a pretty bold jewelry, so ladies usually buy it for themselves," she says.
The necklaces are from Africa, and a purchaser gets a small card explaining where the necklace is from, who made it and that the purchaser is participating in fair trade.
The necklaces come from a company in Salt Lake City: A Gift to Africa. Sabina Zunguze, who was born in what is now Zimbabwe, started her fair-trade business to connect women in Uganda, Kenya, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Swaziland and Cameroon with markets for their products in Utah, Colorado, Idaho, California and beyond. In addition to jewelry, Zunguze sells clothing, art, stationery, religious artifacts and dolls.
Fair trade offers artisans and farmers in the developing world — including Africa, Asia and Latin America — a "fair price" for their goods that are exported to industrialized nations in North America, Europe and Australia. The prices are higher than the average prices offered in traditional free trade. Companies that engage in fair trade also seek to ensure that working conditions for the artisans and farmers are safe and healthy and that the methods of farming or production are environmentally sustainable.
Global organizations such as the Fair Trade Federation — with which Zunguze says she is applying for membership — aim to verify that the standards are met.
Zunguze started her company from her home in December 2005, with the aim of helping African women develop their businesses and improve their lives. In August 2006, she moved into an ArtSpace building on 500 West. Her company was accepted into the Salt Lake Gallery Association this past week and will be a stop on the monthly Gallery Stroll.
"Sabina is unique because she's the only one I know of in Salt Lake doing what she does," says Shelly Storey, vice president of communications for the Salt Lake chapter of the National Association of Women Business Owners.
Zunguze — who earned a master's degree in statistics from George Washington University in Washington, D.C. — finds herself thousands of miles away from her native country and original career goals.
"For me, it was all passion," Zunguze says. "I'm not thinking about the business."
Improved lives
Even so, Zunguze's 2-year-old business grossed $100,000 last year, before expenses.
But she says the economic impact on the lives of the artisans is an even greater success. For many of the women artisans in Africa, Zunguze has helped raise their income from less than $1 a day to $6 to $8 a day — income that provides three meals for families each day, sends children to school and purchases roofs on buildings.
Research has shown that for the most part, farmers and artisans benefit from such fair-trade agreements.
Eric Arnould, a marketing and management professor at the University of Wyoming, studied fairly traded coffee from 2004 to 2006 in Guatemala, Peru and Nicaragua. Hundreds of people interviewed farmers in the field, asking about their standard of living.
The researchers found that farmers who participated in a coffee initiative through Seattle-based licensing agency Fairtrade USA made more money than farmers who did not participate.
The farmers' children were slightly more likely to be attending school, Arnould says, and the farm families were more likely to get treatment for health problems. Farmers in Guatemala were engaged in more sustainable agricultural practices than nonparticipating farmers. The results of the study showed that fair-trade practices were improving the lives of the farmers, Arnould says.
"Studies like ours show they are in fact delivering the goods," he says.
Some fair-trade licensing groups promise lower prices than free-traded goods. But Arnould says that's not always the case.
"Oftentimes, it's more expensive," he says. "But the key thing to understand is that instead of most of the money going to middlemen, the money goes to producers in the developing country."
Kira Dominguez-Hultgren agrees. She and her husband, Andrew Hultgren, run Internet company Say it Green! from their Salt Lake City home. Customers create designs that the company prints on fairly traded organic cotton T-shirts, bags and aprons.
"From our own experience, fair trade definitely costs more than if we had gone to a regular T-shirt supplier," she says. But after hearing about sweatshop labor sometimes done by children in developing countries, Dominguez-Hultgren says, "it was a moral decision for us."
One of the oldest fair-trade businesses in the world is Ten Thousand Villages, which has a store in Sugar House and a sister store called Global Village Gifts in Logan. Ten Thousand Villages was started in 1946 by the Mennonite Central Committee — a relief, development and peace agency of the North American Mennonite and Brethren in Christ churches.
In the nonprofit's fiscal year ending March 31, 2007, it reported $23.5 million in sales at more than 160 Ten Thousand Villages stores across North America. Ten Thousand Villages uses the proceeds to expand its work with artisans in developing nations and to educate the public on fair trade, says Scott Lowe, executive director of the Sugar House store.
The organization was a founding member of the International Fair Trade Association, which now includes more than 200 members in 55 nations, including many artisans in developing countries.
An odyssey
Zunguze, who is now a U.S. citizen, was born in Harare, the capital of what was then the British colony of Rhodesia.
"We grew up very poor," she says. "My mom was a nurse's aid. My father died when I was 4."
Rhodesia was segregated in a manner similar to the infamous apartheid system in South Africa. Blacks lived in certain parts of town and attended black-only schools.
"My husband and I tell our kids we would go to school without shoes," Zunguze says. "It gets cold there. It's not Africa like people think."
The young Zunguze — who's fluent in English, Shona and Ndebelel languages — believed education was her ticket to a better life.
Throughout the 1970s, the black majority was yearning for freedom from British rule. Guerrilla fighting stirred much of the nation, and Zunguze looked to finish school outside of the Rhodesia.
She obtained a scholarship to finish high school in Nairobi, Kenya. From there, she received a scholarship from the British Commonwealth Secretariat to study statistics and business at the University of Pune in India.
After college, Zunguze returned to an independent Zimbabwe and worked for the Central Statistical Office, an agency similar to the U.S. Census Bureau. She went on to earn her master's degree at George Washington University during a government exchange in the U.S. She later crunched numbers for Zimbabwe's national brewery and national electrical company.
She married a city planner in 1986. Three years later, they decided to emigrate to the United States to provide more opportunities for their four children, now ages 12 to 20. They moved to Utah in 2002 because of her husband's job, after having lived in Ohio and Georgia.
One evening in 2004, Zunguze was chatting on the telephone with her sister-in-law, who worked with a nonprofit in Harare that teaches small-business owners to connect over the Internet.
"I'm thinking, 'How can I help you here?"' Zunguze says. "Then the idea just came."
Fostering business
At the time, Zunguze worked for Salt Lake County, and she was finishing a grant application for refugees. She also was consulting with nonprofits in Ohio and Georgia.
She started A Gift to Africa from her home in December 2005, working with her connections in Kenya to bring products to the United States. She visited artisan groups to verify that the production methods weren't exploitative and forged marketing agreements.
For many African artisans, the ways to sell their goods are through domestic tourism and international markets. In South Africa, Zunguze found groups of artisans who had distribution networks to get their products out of the country, but "the problem was, there was someone, always a middleman or someone, gouging the profits."
Zunguze had to teach the artisan groups about marketing and pricing, and the difference between retail and wholesale pricing. She got them to consider the cost of materials, their time and what a comfortable wage meant.
Most of Zunguze's business last year was from gift shows. She attended more than a dozen throughout the West. She also sells items on her Web site, agift2africa.com, in her ArtSpace store and in other people's stores, such as the Little America gift shop.
Zunguze sells silk scarves made by women in Johannesburg, South Africa. The large necklaces and earrings with deep colors are made by Kazuri — which means "small and beautiful" in Swahili — women in Kenya.
The tiny pastel beaded necklaces are Zulu, made by a collective group of artisan women also near Johannesburg, called the Gauteng Womens Group. The Gauteng Group also makes popular dolls modeled after the traditional Ndebele tribe women who live in South Africa and Zimbabwe.
Zunguze knows some artisans so intimately that she can tell which artisan designed which product.
"I can tell, this is Zenziwe, just by seeing the art," she says about a woman who created a note card.
Her company's biggest expenses are shipping, booth space at shows and traveling to Africa, where she visits at least once a year.
"Last year, I was there twice," she says. "It all depends on when I start with a new group or am having trouble with a group."
The increase of modern technology in Africa has helped reduce travel, she says.
"You might not find water, but you will always find someone with a cell phone."
E-mail: lhancock@desnews.com