Alex Rose-Innes
FOUNDED by a refugee from Burundi and his partner from Italy, Kibébé Ltd in Malawi had grown to a sustainable business with an international franchise.
Innocent Magambi and Florisa started a charity in Malawi in 2007 to empower refugees and locals through training and college scholarships. Today, Kibébé is the social enterprise branch providing jobs and funding the various programmes of the original NGO, There is Hope in Malawi.
Kibébé’s founding product, the Safari book, saw the light with the birth of the intercultural couple’s child, Mwiza. Born with a rare congenital condition, Mwiza needed sensory toys but none was available in Malawi. Florisa, the loving and creative mother worked with a refugee tailor to develop a sensory book featuring Safari animals with soft chitenje material. Unfortunately, Mwiza passed away after her second birthday. However, her legacy lives on through the beautiful line of products which stemmed from that book.
Kibébé’s story is personal, yet universal. It encompasses every family’s dream to nurture healthy babies and provide a good environment for them to grow up in, including families involuntarily displaced in foreign lands. Kibébé is proof that beauty can rise from a refugee camp such as Dzaleka to become an international player in the clothing business.
Started in 2014, the brand is well-known in Lilongwe, Malawi’s capital. Thanks to the skills and passion of many volunteers, Kibébé was also registered as a non-profit organisation in the United States in 2019.
According to Phillip Richards, the MD of Kibébé Farms, the mission of the business had stayed the same, to economically empower refugee families and poor locals to support themselves and create inclusive products which would find favour among other cultures.
Marginalised artisans are trained to produce up-cycled products which are sold at a local farmers’ market and at the outlet on the farm. To date, Kibébé offers no less than 35 unique products made from recycled materials. Visitors and interested parties can undertake tours of the production centre and camp to bring customers closer to the communities responsible for manufacturing the products.
Profits are also shared with a partner organisation providing vocational training programmes to marginalised communities and from where graduates could also be integrated into the Kibébé workforce.
Working almost exclusively with the multi-coloured chitenje, fabric is sourced from Lilongwe’s bustling open air fabric market supporting 30 female sellers. The design process is ongoing and often stems from conversations with friends, customers and on social media about what kind of product Malawians would wish to buy. This brings its own challenges with haberdashery and sewing hardware in poor supply in the country.
All the production takes place in and around Dzaleka refugee camp or at home-based businesses, where artisans work on pedal sewing machines and by hand from hand-drafted patterns and ideas. Kibébé now ships their increasingly popular products quarterly to its US base in Michigan.
Kibébé, meaning big baby is a combination of Swahili and French, is proof of the human spirit’s ability to triumph over heartache and adversity.
