When a mother dies, her surviving children’s nutrition and health suffer. They are likely to drop out of school, reducing the means to rise out of poverty. While the problem seems insurmountable, great improvements are made with basic health care, gender equality & improved incomes. We follow … read more about Maternal Health
Who Are We?
The Global Alliance for Community Empowerment
What do you think are the keys to a healthy community in today’s global world? GACE, also known as The Alaffia Foundation, focuses on empowering African communities by advancing fair trade of indigenous resources, education, sustainable living, and gender equality. We are the nonprofit partner of Alaffia, a fair trade company with shea and coconut product sales in 30 countries.
Extreme poverty, sickness and death, and environmental degradation have many causes, both locally unique and systemic in nature, all over the world. Among these causes is the breakdown of community. Breakdown in community particularly disadvantage rural women and girls in Togo, who are under-represented in virtually all major indicators of well-being. GACE is reversing women’s marginalization through community building projects that target exclusion from education, maternal deaths, and deforestation in agriculture and wild recollection zones depended upon by women for subsistence and trade.
Women’s Cooperatives
Alaffia’s approach to economic growth and community empowerment includes developing hundreds of women’s cooperatives in Togo. Alaffia supports the cooperatives on an annual basis to build self-governance and to increase incomes through ethical trade. The cooperatives increase women’s leadership as they manage empowerment projects and ensure social and environmental compliance for fair trade. The cooperatives support financing pools and other tools that provide women with basic credit and savings opportunities.
Togolese Culture
Alaffia is dedicated to preserving the indigenous knowledge and traditions of handmade shea butter production in Togo, as well as to increase a fair trade market for this internationally sought after West African resource. Too often, the arrival of international trade or aid brings a seemingly inevitable loss of traditional culture, local ownership of development, and ransacking of natural resources. Alaffia’s approach is to build the cultural and ecological weight of its women-crafted products into its value chain.
Fair Trade
In fair trade enterprises, producers are paid on average 20% over market price because they have agreed to a set of social and environmental conditions that give added transparency and market value to their products. Also, a portion of the products’ direct cost is contributed back to a social account administrated by a producer association or charitable organization, with humanitarian or economic programs that benefit the producer communities.
Founders
Over the years, there have been moments that shaped the natural products industry. One such moment occurred when Olowo-n’djo Tchala met Prairie Rose Hyde. No one could have imagined a young woman from rural Washington and a young man born and raised in rural Togo, West Africa with a sixth grade education would go on to build one of the most successful fair trade body care organizations in the natural products industry. No one except them, that is.
Olowo-n’djo Tchala was born and raised in the village of Kaboli, Togo where he shared a single 8’x10’ room with his mother and seven siblings. After failing to afford school tuition, Olowo-n’djo dropped out of school and worked alongside his mother on her farm. In 1996, Olowo-n’djo met and fell in love with Peace Corps Volunteer, Prairie Rose Hyde, while she worked in Kaboli. After her service ended, the couple moved to the United States with a shared goal: finding a way to alleviate poverty in West Africa.
Rose entered a graduate program at the University of California, Davis studying International Agricultural Development and Ethnobotany, the scientific study of the relationships that exist between people and plants. Olowo-n’djo studied English and earned a degree in Organizational Theory. Determined to make a difference in his home country, Olowo-n’djo applied for a $50,000 business loan and, not familiar with the American banking system, did not understand why the bank could not fulfill his request when he had no personal financial assets. Eventually, Rose’s brother offered his house as collateral and the couple obtained the loan, traveled to Togo, and formed Alaffia and GACE.
Staff
GACE’s Togo staff ranges between 30-35 team members. All are Togolese nationals representing several of Togo’s many ethnic groups. About 90% of our staff are women, and women hold four out of five of our management roles. GACE has 1 staff member in the US, in Olympia, Washington.
