DAR ES SALAAM, Oct. 30 (Xinhua) -- For Mwanamkuu Mussa, 52, a discarded glass bottle is more than waste. It represents school fees paid, medical expenses covered, and a step closer to building a home for herself and her four children.
Before joining Chako Zanzibar in 2021, the mother of four worked as a nursery school teacher. She has since built a new livelihood around transforming discarded glass into useful products. She now helps train new artisans, assists with bottle collection, and keeps the workshop organized.
The income has enabled her to open her own DVD library and contribute to her children's education and healthcare. Her next ambition is to build a house for her family.
"Working at Chako has helped me become an independent woman," Mussa said.
Her journey reflects the mission of Chako Zanzibar, a social enterprise tackling two challenges facing the Indian Ocean island: mounting waste from tourism and limited economic opportunities for parts of the local community, particularly women.
For women like Mussa, the enterprise offers more than employment. It provides practical skills, a source of income, and the opportunity to make decisions about their families' futures.
The idea began with a question that Dutch entrepreneur Anneloes Roelandschap and her partner confronted after entering Zanzibar's tourism industry.
After opening a hotel in Stone Town in 2008, they saw how tourism created jobs and business opportunities but also generated waste that the island struggled to manage. They also recognized that the benefits of the expanding industry did not reach everyone equally.
In 2012, they founded Chako to address these challenges by collecting waste from hotels and resorts, turning it into new products, creating local jobs, and selling the finished goods back to the tourism industry.
The enterprise now collects glass bottles and plastic from hospitality businesses, cleans and processes the materials, and transforms them into drinking glasses, vases, lamps, and decorative items. Tourists can also buy the products as souvenirs, taking home a reminder of Zanzibar while supporting local livelihoods.
Since its establishment, Chako has prevented more than five million bottles from ending up in Zanzibar's landfills and has trained more than 400 local people, Roelandschap said.
Yet the environmental gains tell only part of the story. At the heart of the business is an effort to help women develop skills and earning power, Roelandschap said.
"By giving women more power, an income, and skills, they can bring money home and gain more respect from their families and husbands. They can also send their children to school," she said.
The workshop offers women opportunities to take on tasks traditionally associated with men, including woodcarving and other forms of skilled production. Through training and hands-on experience, workers discover abilities they may never previously have considered developing.
Ada Juma, 36, is one such artisan. Before joining Chako in 2023, she ran a small business selling cashew nuts. Seeking a new direction, she joined the enterprise and gradually acquired skills in woodcarving, glass processing, and plastic weaving.
She now leads the plastic department, where she also teaches other artisans. Her work has expanded beyond learning a new trade to helping others gain the skills to earn an income themselves.
For Juma, the greatest satisfaction is supporting her children and paying their school fees. Like Mussa, she dreams of building a house for her family.
Her advice to other women is to stay active, work hard, and pursue independence rather than wait for opportunities.
These individual ambitions are central to Chako's approach. Its artisans are paid for each piece they produce, at rates agreed upon in advance. The arrangement gives them flexibility in how much time they devote to the enterprise while leaving room for family responsibilities or personal businesses.
The company currently works with about 25 artisans, though the number varies with production needs and orders. Some trained workers eventually move into other jobs or start their own businesses.
Helena Benedict, Chako's 26-year-old operations manager, said this combination of income generation and skills development was particularly valuable to women supporting their families and young people seeking ways to enter the workforce.
"By empowering women and young people, we give them opportunities to recycle and upcycle waste, which provides them with jobs and allows them to earn an income," Benedict said.
Chako's work also extends beyond its workshop. The enterprise welcomes students, community groups, nongovernmental organizations and government representatives to learn about waste management and environmental conservation. It also works with hotels and their staff to encourage waste separation and demonstrate how discarded materials can be reused.
The approach reflects the founders' belief that waste management on an island requires participation from businesses, residents and visitors alike.
But turning that vision into a sustainable business remains challenging. Collecting bottles, washing materials, training artisans and marketing finished products all require time and money.
Roelandschap said some consumers and businesses still needed convincing that locally made upcycled products were worth choosing over imported goods.
For now, the connection between environmental protection and economic opportunity is visible in the lives of women like Mussa and Juma. Their work gives discarded materials a new purpose while helping them provide for their children and pursue goals that once seemed more difficult to achieve.
In Zanzibar, where tourism continues to generate both opportunities and waste, Chako is showing how one can help address the other.
For the women turning bottles and plastic into marketable products, the process is also creating something less tangible but equally valuable: the means to shape their own futures. ■