Safia's Blog

People Tree celebrates Fairtrade fortnight – from a Fair Trade pioneer’s perspective

According to the Fairtrade Foundation 20% of people said they’d support Fair Trade but they just hadn’t made it their habit yet. For goodness sake the easy thing is buying it from a supermarket shelf – it can take years for a Fair Trade product and industry to benefit from being mainstreamed like this. The least you could do is buy Fair Trade.

Making Fair Trade and Ecology make a difference In Nepal

I’m in Nepal where I was working with People Tree producer groups who make hand-knit wear and handicrafts along with three People Tree designers. It seems like the only thing that Nepal has going for it economically is Fair Trade – the economy has slid backwards.

London Fashion week – My Favourite show Bora Aksu

It’s that time of year again I fly in from Nepal (coming in next blog) straight into London Fashion Week. Where People Tree presents its AW08 collection at Estethica.

Davos days

The Davos Detox

Snowball fight at Davos – Reed Paget of Belu Water UK and Garth Japhet of Soul City Institute for Health and Development Communication, South Africa.

Dressing for Davos

All I want for Christmas

.. is a future – and no more coal fired power stations – and certainly not 8 new ones to be built (the carbon capture and storage technology is years off) – Can I have something else please Gordon Brown? I’d love a demand-side public education campaign instead and a little more support for green business and green energy thrown into my stocking please?!

Fair Trade Chocolate

How it made me one of the coolest mums in the world… Second to Sophi Trunchell of course! (Sophi runs Divine chocolate, the deliciously Fair Trade chocolate company that works with Ghanaian cocoa farmers).

Bangladesh – The land and people I love

I’ve been working in Bangladesh – probably my favorite country in the world. It was shocking to see so much land, homes and fields lost to the floods this year. We all expected the giant flood that comes as a ten year phenomenon to happen next year, not this. So now people are left wondering whether the cycle was ahead of itself or whether next year’s will be even worse. But why worry about the future when there is so much to do now rebuilding homes and day to day living?