The Ndara Blog
Cleaning and culture; affairs of their own
If you read our blog post about how Bangui looks during the rainy season, it may not surprise you to hear that keeping our Ndara boutique squeaky clean is a challenge… for many reasons.
First, the boutique is a rectangle with only three sides. One long side is completely open to our lush garden. Second, what Bangui lacks in number of seasons - it only has two, the rainy one and the dry one - it makes up for it in intensity of the seasons.
...How to survive and thrive through different seasons.
We are in the middle of June; full-on rainy season in tropical Bangui. Rainy season near the equator means heavy rains falling from dark skies for several hours a day.
The Oubangui river, which is also the border between the Central African Republic and Congo, swells as the water rises, swallowing sand banks, rocks, and sometimes even parts of the road that has been built too close to the river. The red soil is turned into slippery red mud that gets splattered on everything and as the humidity in the air increases so does the...
What is the most beautiful thing you have ever seen?
For Nadia it was Ndara’s boutique, just a few hours before it opened. For me, Charlotte, it was watching the Ndara artisans first learn how to read and write, then watching them stand with the clients and write out invoices, selling products they made in a boutique we built ourselves entirely by hand. We had come a long way for this to happen. As we are nearing our one year anniversary (June 4th), I want to reflect on what this boutique has meant to...
What do sales and sweeping a yard have in common?
Any business coach will tell you that in order for your business to thrive, you need to know your customer. For us, this means that the artisans providing customer service in the Bangui boutique need to understand who they are selling to. This understanding can be challenging to come by, given the extreme difference in the artisan and the customers' lived experiences.
Who is our average maker – our artisan?
She is an adult central African woman who has never left the Central African Republic. She lives in...
Why do business in the most difficult place?
Ndara’s business structure was intentionally designed to fit the very particular circumstances that come with living and working in the Central African Republic. CAR is a landlocked country in the middle of Africa, with poor accessibility, high prices, and volatile security. It has one of the lowest literacy rates in the world, and is one of the most difficult places in the world to do business according to international rankings.
We are producing products for the developed world in a developing country. Production was designed to be possible without electricity, without prior skills, with minimal tools...