The majlis: Al Ghadeer Crafts have helped empower women

During Eid Al Fitr, we give gifts as part of our culture. At Al Ghadeer Crafts, what's beautiful about our gifts is that they're handmade, with love, and that about 50 per cent of the women who create the products are ­Emirati.

These days, it is rare to find a product made by Emiratis. Usually if you visit souvenir shops, products marketed as “Emirati” are made in China or India. It’s not authentic.

By buying our products, you are helping the country preserve its traditional crafts, and we are empowering women through the crafts themselves.

In the UAE, we have a lot of creative women, who carry out our traditional crafts such as talli (hand-braided metallic threads) and sadu weaving, but these are usually older Emirati women.

Because people do not participate in traditional crafts as much any more, they are beginning to disappear.

Sheikha Shamsa bint Hamdan Al Nahyan, the Emirates Red Crescent president’s assistant for women’s affairs, decided to create somewhere women of all ages could gather to foster their skills.

Al Ghadeer Crafts has trainers who teach ladies how to do the crafts. Some visitors just want to earn an income, and we teach them how to sew or paint – things related to our products.

We are open to women who maybe can’t have a full-time job because of family commitments, or maybe are not qualified for a full-time job. Through us, they gain the chance to earn a living from home.

Instead of relying on the Red Crescent for donations, they come to our centre, in Abu Dhabi’s Al Nahyan Camp, to earn their income.

We teach them design in our workshop then give them the raw materials to go home and ­create the products. We sell these in our store and on a portable trolley that goes to shops, government entities and companies.

We have been operating for 10 years but in the past we only sold in bulk to companies and the royal courts.

Now, we have made individual products available to the wider public.

I think the candles are our most popular products, especially the oud candle.

We also try to build a community for our women – and create a positive environment because some of them don’t come from good backgrounds.

In the workshops, we have hashtags written on their workspace that read “I am beautiful”, “I am productive” and “I am powerful”, just so that they keep the sense that they’re amazing.

Most of them are single mothers who take care of their own houses and children. There are so many amazing stories of the work that they do.

We try to take care of them, not just financially but also in other ways related to their rights. For example, at the moment, we are working on an initiative called Sight and Insight with Yateem Optician to check whether they need glasses, because they use their eyes a lot for this detailed work.

We have 200 women who are active and we have more who want to be, but we don’t have enough sales make this happen.

We have also created the first Emirati children’s book made using pieces of our traditional craft materials – talu, hos and sadu – so children can become familiar with the texture and feel of these materials, because they aren’t familiar with these old crafts.

It’s an exciting story about an elderly lady who takes them on a time-travelling mission. It’s similar to Narnia, in the sense that they go to a grandmother’s house and fall inside her treasure box, and then they’re transported back to the past.

We’re now translating it to have English and Arabic versions, which will be available in schools.

* As told to Jessica Hill

Mariam Al Kendi runs Al Ghadeer Crafts, a non-profit initiative which operates under the umbrella of the Emirates Red Crescent.