HUNAR Arts & Crafts – Creating Livelihoods, Empowering Artisans
We aspire to create livelihood opportunities for artisans from poorest families by engaging them in revival of traditional art and crafts leading to financial independence of women and their families.
Hunar has a focus on handmade products including but not limited to hand assembled, hand crafted and hand-altered products.
We aspire to:
- Establish a fully equipped design studio with technical preparedness to support a team of 15 artisans with various capacities
- Tie up with women artisans and collectives for training and work contracts
- Create a range of design products with a focus on handmade products by women artisans
- Create a niche for Hunar products by establishing a local and virtual store
- Cater to international markets especially in collaboration with other artisans groups
- Ensure Minimum wages, health insurance, education for children and other benefits for the workers and their children.
Why Handmade?
- Handmade describes the quality and uniqueness of a product. Handmade products have a uniqueness and inconsistency due to the individual nature of creation by the human hand. Unlike machine made products, handmade creations are not standardized designs rather each piece of work is painstakingly created by an artisan who spends hours in research, experimentation, exploring markets for raw material and finally drafting different designs to arrive at the final idea. It is this extensive work that makes a handmade work, a unique product of art and craft.
- Artisans in the handmade industry suffer due to poor work opportunities and limited reach to markets. They have also little training in strategic marketing and running a business hence the sale suffers. Handmade industry is a dying industry today and unless it is supported with enough work and skilling opportunities, it could very well fall prey to mechanization. Most skilled artisans are being pushed into informal wages sector to earn livelihood as daily wages labourers. Hunar unit will attempt to rehabilitate such artisans with sustained income and exposure to markets for their work, thereby helping them to lead a dignified life. Hunar seeks to engage grassroots artisans from poorest families.
Nested in Eka!
Eka is a non-profit trust that works in urban poor communities of old Bhopal. We engage with poorest Muslim women including those who arrive at our counseling unit. A collective of adolescent girls learn various skills at the Hunar centre.