Afrikan Wear

African wear design is a social enterprise based in Arusha, Northern Tanzania registered in 2009. We make handmade souvenirs, clothes, and footwear that are associated with African cultures and Fashion i.e they mainly reflect African cultural dressing. From coastal fashion (Swahili Fashion) to mainland Tanzania cultural dressing.

The business was started by its founder Marilyn Hokororo in 2009, at the time a housewife in a quest to improve her income and also uplift other women’s income in the community. Initially, the business was dedicated to women coming from difficult family situations, but then it developed into a project for all the community members. Today we manufacture shawls, carpets, blankets, necklaces, belts, bracelets, earrings, key chains, and other goods to secure a fair income for the women and men in the community.

Since its initiation African wear design has been able to reach over 500 community members that dropped out of school for various reasons such as pregnancies and female oppression, lack of money among many other reasons. These community members have been trained on art-craft skills to make handmade souvenirs and in addition given basic entrepreneurship skills over the past 11 years. African Wear design has been working with government and non-government organizations to reach its goals over the years which have been mentioned below.

As an entrepreneurship enterprise for the community, we seek to continuously improve both qualities of production and entrepreneurship skills in order to enable the people we work with to self-sustain their needs.