STEP is excited to have its work featured and acknowledged in the renowned academic publication, the Journal of Fair Trade. In the article “Learning to Weave Through a Digital App: Women’s Empowerment in Artisan Villages of Nepal,” Prasuna Saakha and Dr. Roberta Discetti explore how STEP’s Artisan Villages use digital tools to support women weavers, fostering sustainable livelihoods in the carpet weaving industry.
Bridging Tradition and Innovation
In a world where technology too often separates instead of uniting, and distances us from the practical, traditional, and natural, STEP Artisan Villages takes a different approach. The initiative leverages technology to connect and preserve, blending modern innovation with the rich heritage of traditional carpet-making. This strategy empowers women artisans through decentralized production and tailored training programs, helping them refine their craft while sustaining cultural practices and fostering economic independence.
Prasuna Saakha, STEP’s Country Representative in Nepal, and Roberta Discetti, a Senior Lecturer in Business Ethics at Bournemouth University, highlight this evolving initiative in the Journal of Fair Trade article “Learning to Weave Through a Digital App: Women’s Empowerment in Artisan Villages of Nepal”. Their research examines how a specialized weaving app—designed to connect rural women with essential training resources—demonstrates the best of both worlds: modern technology and traditional craft. By strengthening livelihoods and ensuring the continuation of cultural practices, STEP Artisan Villages exemplifies how innovation can sustain and protect heritage while creating sustainable economic opportunities.
Preserving Culture While Driving Growth
The in-depth study features insights from both Saakha—who has dedicated her career to advocating for women weavers and promoting fair trade practices that enhance their rights and opportunities—and Discetti, whose research focuses on ethical supply chains, corporate social responsibility, and sustainable development in global markets. The study also incorporates firsthand insights from six women weavers and master weavers actively engaged in the program.
The Journal of Fair Trade serves as an essential platform for sharing knowledge and promoting discussions about sustainable practices within the fair trade sector—examining the latest developments, challenges, and innovations that impact its communities. Saakha and Discetti’s article contributes to that mission by addressing the pressing need for accessible training and market opportunities for female artisans. As many women weavers face significant barriers in these areas, this innovative approach seeks to provide the tools necessary for economic independence and growth. Through the app, women weavers can connect with resources and support, ultimately transforming their craft into a viable source of income. This research is essential to advancing fair trade, with so many opportunities still to explore and learn about the challenges and possibilities in the weaving industry.
Learning to Weave Through a Digital App: Women’s Empowerment in Artisan Villages of Nepal
Prasuna Saakha and Roberta Discetti
Introduction
This article aims to understand how and to what extent Fair Trade initiatives empower women workers through what we call ‘digital localization’, namely through the provision of digitally enabled training that supports localization of production and consequent improvement of workers’ livelihood. Recent scholarship on women empowerment in marginalized and disadvantaged communities has often underscored the importance of digital literacy, access to online platforms and digital training as a key tool for achieving personal and economic emancipation (Dhanamalar, Preethi & Yuvashree, 2020; Gupta, 2019; Kulkarni & Ghosh, 2021; Singh, Alok & Banerjee, 2023; Tchamyou, Diop, Asongu & Nnanna, 2023). However, research has also stressed that, in order to be effective, online training and digital tools need to be relevant to local contexts, as well as co-created between beneficiaries, local NGOs and local experts (Gupta, 2021; Tang, 2022). Despite this, digitalization processes are often considered disconnected ‘by default’ by the communities in which they take place (Discetti & Anderson, 2022). We propose instead that digitalization and localization are interconnected and complementary processes for the purpose of women’s empowerment in Fair Trade supply chains, and they mutually reinforce each other. As such, an examination of the intertwining of these processes is needed to understand fully how processes of women’s empowerment are taking place in Fair Trade initiatives both online and in local communities. Based on this, the present study addresses the following research question: how do localized digital training and tools support women’s empowerment in the context of Fair Trade initiatives?
In order to address this question, we present the case study of ‘Artisan Villages’ an ongoing project launched by the organization Label STEP Nepal in cooperation with the UK aid Skills for Employment Programme (UKaid SEP) in November 2019 (2019–2021 pilot phase and 2022–2023 scale-up phase). The project aims to provide Nepalese workers with decent and dignified local jobs as hand-knotted carpet weavers, one of the main handicrafts and key exports of the Nepalese economy, based on traditional, artisanal, complex and artistic methods of weaving. The project delivers on its objectives through the development of a system of localized training and capacity-building workshops, the establishment of local infrastructures for weaving and the digitalization of learning and monitoring progress. The present study is based on the project as a case study, supported by 12 women’s biographies and six qualitative in-depth interviews with women weavers and master weavers trained and employed through the project.
The contribution of this article lies in the acknowledgement that ‘digital’ and ‘local’ are not mutually exclusive dimensions, and that processes of digitalization and localization, far from being separate, can foster and reinforce each other, through positive loops with impactful outcomes for women workers’ livelihoods. The article is structured as follows: first, we introduce academic literature on women’s empowerment within Fair Trade supply chains, as well as outline key contributions on localization and digitalization of production as pathways for workers’ empowerment. Second, we set the context of the Nepalese carpet industry and we introduce the project ‘Artisan Villages’. Following this, we describe our methodology and present our findings to conclude with managerial and policy recommendations.
Continue reading the full article here.
