Social Impact Project for Silaiwali — Fund raising

How This Works

As part of the TRANSFORM Support Hub, you will learn how to advance your career while getting hands on experience on projects like this one.

Project Description and Impact

Silaiwali — Fund raising

Project Picture

Silaiwali works with two guiding principles: Ecology and solidarity. Founded in November 2018, we are a social enterprise based in New Delhi that upcycles waste fabric from the garment manufacturing industry to make beautiful rag dolls, home decor and fashion accessories. In manufacturing eco-friendly handicrafts, Silaiwali engages with marginalised Afghan women artisans who are temporally living in India as refugees. The sale of Silaiwali products in the wholesale and retail markets around the globe directly goes into paying the women artisans sustainable, fair wages mandated by the local government.

Silaiwali is a "Guaranteed Fair Trade Organisation" certified by the World Fair Trade Organisation (WFTO) and works with the United Nations Agency for Refugees, UNHCR.

Though Silaiwali works in a 'for-profit' model, the spirit of the business is social. We work towards a waste-free and equitable planet. It is a pity that despite being in the business for the past years and abundant visibility of our work in the media -- television, print and digital -- we have still not received any funding from any social sector endowment. Silaiwali is completely boot-strapped and struggles to survive with just sales revenue.

We address the unique challenge of dealing with a work group that is migratory in nature. All our Afghan artisan women regularly leave the work team because their ultimate destination for resettlement is not India, but instead countries like Canada, Australia or the USA. Once an Afghan family gets their immigration granted by another host country, they leave.

This uncertainty in the work team is the nature of our business. We are here to tend to the migratory refugees in need.

But this throws the challenge of having to train and skill constantly the new set of artisans who replace the older ones. We are in the business of making handicrafts. Therefore, trained artisans are the human capital on which rests the core of the business.

Training and skilling require a lot of cost and time. Besides, constant disruption in the workflow due to migration renders the business vulnerable.

This is where we want your support — to help us find agencies that fund training, skilling and capacity building.

Learning Opportunity

Silaiwali is a unique social enterprise. The experteer is requested to view our Instagram handle, by the name of SILAIWALI or our website, www.silaiwali.com, to view all the media testimonials of the exemplary work team Silaiwali has done in a short 5-year period.

The experteer's will experience how a boot-strapped social enterprise has inspired groups of marginalised women hemmed by deep patriarchy to have unshackled themselves to create the brand Silaiwali, which makes handicrafts loved and kept as souvenirs by customers all over the world.