When COVID-19 hit communities across the world earlier this year, there was an immediate and overwhelming demand for PPE everywhere. While everyone struggled to find PPE for health workers and citizens, developing nations were hardest hit given the high costs of importing PPE, manufactured largely in China. In response, local small-scale manufactures across the world rose to meet the challenge, transforming small scale textile factories into PPE production centers. Many of these producers are artisan businesses who were struggling to hold onto jobs with economic shutdowns. This creative response of hundreds of resilient small artisan businesses is providing needed PPE, as well as providing life-saving jobs and income to families that need it most.<\/p>\n
The Artisan Alliance is committed to supporting artisan businesses around the world. Since the beginning of the pandemic, Artisan Alliance partners have produced over 1 million PPE of different types, including cloth masks, surgical masks, and surgical gowns and employed more than 2,500 artisan producers. On Thursday, November 19th at 10:00am ET, join the Artisan Alliance to learn more about how artisan organizations are rising up to address the challenges of COVID-19 in their communities. Reema Nanavaty and Saira Baloch of the Self-Employed Women\u2019s Association (SEWA) in India, Virginia Mutheu of Shining Hope For Communities (SHOFCO) in Kenya, and Stephen Kithusi of RefuSHE in Kenya will join host Peggy Clark in conversation about the work their organizations have been doing in response to COVID-19.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":981,"template":"","class_list":["post-978","events","type-events","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aspenglobalinnovators.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/events\/978","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aspenglobalinnovators.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/events"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aspenglobalinnovators.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/events"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aspenglobalinnovators.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/981"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aspenglobalinnovators.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=978"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}