My Beauty Best Teacher

In 2000 Skills Development delivered a report(pdf) on the delivery of "Supplementary Technical Education to Tinsmiths" in Quelimane,Mozambique. Artisans are a demographic that are typically ignored when policies on education are being debated.The need for appropriate practical education cannot be overemphasized enough:

A group of 4 tinsmiths have been trained, and they have - as previously agreed - started to transfer their skills to their 20 colleagues. This will lead to a growth in the capacity of the total group as stated in the project proposal.The formerly very limited production, mostly consisting of buckets and containers, is now including an increased variety of goods, everyday objects, and crafts. Additionally the tinsmiths are able to produce products for ventilation systems, which is a completely new article in their sales collection...The roof construction and rehabilitation methods that the tinsmiths now master are hereto unknown techniques in Mozambique. The tinsmiths - who before the project were threatened by extinction due to the competition from plastic products – are now capable of broadening their range of production to encompass roof rehabilitation. Additionally, the artisans will in future be able to draw on their new contacts to the entrepreneurs and factories in the area.

The NYTimes on the Global Africa Project:

Bibi Seck stools courtesy of Joshua Bright

...the show presents 200 works by nearly 120 people, teams and collectives. It represents artists, designers, artisans, D.I.Y. improvisers and people engaged in various combinations of those already fuzzy job descriptions, toiling in ways that blur aesthetics, sociology and philosophy.Astoundingly ambitious for a relatively small institution, “Global Africa” aims, in the words of its news release, to explore the “impact of African visual culture on contemporary art, craft and design around the world.”

by Lowery Stokes Sims & Leslie King-Hammond

In The Atlantic excerpts from the Steve Daniels book Making Do:

Images by Steve Daniels

Leonard is one of millions of entrepreneurs who rely on informal mechanisms in Kenya, where the informal sector comprises a full three quarters of the non-agricultural economy and produces over 90 percent of new jobs annually. Under severe material constraints, they are forced to improvise solutions to everyday problems that, from time to time, result in game-changing innovations that better address local needs. Informal artisans who engage in the production of goods are known as jua kali (Swahili for "hot sun") and have established entire ecosystems of production, from scrap sourcing to repair. The most advanced jua kali like Leonard have designed and built capital goods, such as lathes, that propel indigenous production forward. The jua kali have been largely ignored by formal institutions, regarded as a second-rate economy. Yet their drive for innovation, understanding of indigenous networks, and ability to work under extreme constraints make them ideal agents of industrialization.

In the Huffington Post TED Africa Fellow Magatte Wade co-founder of Adina and Michael Strong write:

In the course of starting a business based in Africa, I was referred to a former Silicon Valley CFO who had made enough money and now devoted his life to helping the world's poor. As I began to explain my project to him, which involved setting up manufacturing plants in Senegal, he kept encouraging me to buy crafts from local artisans rather than setting up manufacturing plants. Despite the fact that he had become wealthy through a capitalist world and lived a comfortable lifestyle that depended on tens of thousands of factories around the world, his vision of helping the poor was strictly limited to microfinance and local crafts. My vision of manufacturing in Africa was frankly repulsive to him.