Learning to weave through a digital app: Women’s empowerment in Artisan Villages of Nepal.

Abstract

This article aims to understand how and to what extent Fair Trade initiatives empower women workers through what we call ‘digital localization’, namely through the provision of digitally enabled trainings that support localization of production and consequent improvement of workers’ livelihoods. While digitalization processes are often considered as disconnected ‘by default’ by the communities in which they take place, here we propose instead that digitalization and localization are interconnected and complementary processes for the purpose of women’s empowerment in Fair Trade supply chains. In order to address these questions, we present the case study of ‘Artisan Villages’ an ongoing project launched by the organization Label STEP Nepal to provide Nepalese workers with decent and dignified local jobs as hand-knotted carpet weavers. The project is implementing not only digitalization of learning and monitoring but also localization and decentralization of production. We collected 12 women weavers’ biographies and interviewed six women weavers and master weavers involved in the programme. Results showed that our participants indicated three main benefits generated by the programme: i) the acquisition of new locally relevant skills; ii) the opportunity to secure local employment and generate stable incomes; iii) increased confidence and improved time management. The contribution of this paper lies in the acknowledgement that ‘digital’ and ‘local’ are not mutually exclusive dimensions, and that processes of digitalization and localization, far from being separate, can foster and reinforce each other, through positive loops with impactful outcomes for women workers’ livelihoods.