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Mother Nature Provides Moms with Plenty of Green
FrontLines - March 2010
By Angela Rucker
COMASAGUA,
El Salvador—Women artisans
at Arte Comasagua get the
materials for their handmade
note cards, collages, and larger
works from the fertile fields
that surround coffee farms and
sugar cane plantations around
this small mountain town.
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Architect and Arte
Comasagua owner
Ana Rosa Graf started
small when she opened
the business selling
handcrafted works of
art made from natural
materials, but has since
expanded with technical
assistance from
USAID. She exports
the cards, made exclusively
by local women
artisans, to shops in
the United States.
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Wild flowers, almond leaves,
and wild grasses are all used in
works that are popular among
shoppers looking for unique, fair
trade products. And they are profitable
to the all-woman staff.
Arte Comasagua was born
out of tragedy. A 7.7 magnitude
earthquake struck El Salvador
in January 2001, causing more
than 16,000 landslides. Comasagua
and its residents were
decimated.
Architect Ana Rosa Graf,
from the capital city San Salvador,
wanted to help Comasagua
recover.
In 2002, she recruited women
to work with the natural elements
to craft paper products
and sell them in El Salvador
shops. She started with seven
women, $6,000, and a vision to
make a business making ecofriendly
products that would
allow the artisans to earn a
decent income.
USAID’s Artisan Development
Program, part of the El
Salvador office’s business
development efforts, helped
Graf reach U.S. retailers like
Whole Foods and furniture
chain Pottery Barn.
Graf enrolled in business
development programs and then
took her skills and art on the
road, attending art shows and
festivals to get her artisans’ work
before the right audiences. The
artisans improved their patterns
and branched out from the original
designs that were heavy on
religious themes. They also
added greeting cards to their line
of products.
“This was born as a group of
women,” Graf said. “We never
knew that we would be so successful
with this.”
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Maria Magdalena, 31, has worked for Arte Comasagua for seven years. She usually works from home, which allows her to take care of her two children, ages 14 and 5.
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Arte Comasagua sells its products
through its own Web site—
www.arte-comasagua.com—as
well as through Aid to Artisans
and Hope for Women.
Half of the income from the
cards and artwork goes to the
artisans and half goes to Graf.
The women almost always work
from their homes and say they
have more than doubled their
income when compared to previous
jobs as housekeepers and
coffee harvesters.
Maria Magdalena, who is 31,
has been an artisan for seven
years. She said working from
home allows her to better care for
her two children, ages 14 and 5.
After collecting the flowers
and materials and drying
them—either using a solar
dryer or by placing the materials
inside the pages of a thick
telephone book—it takes each
woman about 45 minutes to
hand-make the smallest works,
such as the greeting cards. It
can take much longer for the
larger pictures.
Graf says the development
and business planning has
given Arte Comasagua the
stability to plot its future.
She wants to expand to
other communities to provide
an alternative for women who
have few economic options.
Graf also wants to build a gallery
to exhibit some of the
artisans’ work and an eatery to
make the exhibit space more
of a tourist draw. And she’d
also like to build a greenhouse—
to make collecting the
natural materials a little less
taxing.
★
FrontLines writer Angela Rucker wrote this series of articles following a trip to El Salvador in January. All photos by Angela Rucker.
FrontLines is published
by the Bureau for Legislative and Public Affairs
U.S. Agency for International Development
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Material should be submitted
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