Lifeline: The Acholi Beads Story

Written by Adaire Hahn | 30 November 2009

Colorful beads dangle like tropical fish on a line, spinning and wriggling in a store front window display. Some necklaces have a simple color scheme, separated by tiny black spacing beads, allowing the eye to travel its path and carry its own rhythm, while others are multi-color and wild, inviting a song or celebratory dance of life. These are the Acholi Beads; their story is as individual and unique as their style.

For over 22 years, Uganda has borne the brunt of casualties in an ongoing civil war. While war has touched and taken thousands, many more have been displaced while running for safety with their families and meager belongings. As a result the Acholi Tribe was relegated to a hillside slum just outside of Uganda’s capital, lovingly named the “Acholi Quarters”. 

The only way women could earn a living, to care for their families and the war orphans they had taken on, was laboring in a rock quarry, crushing rocks for $1 per day (the international standard for Extreme Poverty). This is a dangerous place for anyone. It was particularly hard on the women who watched their children, high up on the cliffs, as they shoulder load after load of rocks back and forth.
By fate or chance, a young man named James Pearson was working with the Acholi Tribe as well as Child Soldiers. He saw the beautiful beads the women had created by using recycled strips of colorful newspaper and thought they would be an original gift. He bought some for his family back in San Diego, California as a Christmas gift and a new market was born!

Today, the Acholi Women have their own legal cooperative to manage their successful jewelry business. They earn a professional wage making Acholi Beads and work from the comfort of their homes, or together in common areas, with their children safely around them. The Acholi Beads cooperative provides training for managing personal finances for long-term success, budgeting, savings, entrepreneurship, and microfinance training. The goal is to build upon independent success, with or without Acholi Beads, for their own future and the future of their family.

Another added benefit to this new business dynamic is the new respect the Acholi women have received from their husbands and the men in the Acholi Quarters. They too have learned about financial development and as a partial result, domestic violence has decreased dramatically, while personal satisfaction has increased dramatically! It has been said for every new Acholi Partner taken on, 20 lives are enriched. This is due to the fact that a woman who earns will share and take care of her children, her parents, her grandparents, and put money back into the community. Business is the most powerful force for economic development the world has ever known. Acholi Beads is putting the power of their own destiny back into their own loving hands; one careful bead at a time.

 To purchase Acholi Beads or to book an Acholi Bead Holiday Party, pleas^e contact Adaire at (805) 709-6721. Or seek out your favorite local source. This also builds our local economy by empowering the women and men that live here.