The Nubuke Foundation Centre for Textiles and Clay hosted the 4th edition of the Woori festival at Loho. The event brought together numerous weavers from various districts and municipalities in the Upper West Region, including trainee weavers, clay designers, opinion leaders, and traditional leaders.
Madam Odile Tevie, the Director of the Nubuke Foundation, spoke at the event about how she began her work and the motivation behind it.
She mentioned that she left her job in IT and Finance to work with visual artists and creative people.
“And I realized that there is a lot of opportunities for visual artists but not the echo-system that should be set up to promote them and then create market access for them and also to develop their capacity as professionals doesn’t exist; so that has been my motivation,” she stated.
She explained that her goal is to create more opportunities for weavers in the Upper West Region by providing marketing support for their products and skill training to improve the quality of their work.
She said about fifteen years ago when “we started working in the Upper West Region we realize the same thing, a lot of talents with weavers however, a lot of constraints to do with capacity, to do with continuous skill development, market access, financial literacy and then just ability to innovate was quite lacking.”
The Centre she explained was established to address the challenges faced by weavers in the Upper West Region.
Madam Tevie further explained that it took a lot of time for the dreams of establishing the Centre to come to fruition
“When we started working here we had dreams about what we could do, it took a long time to come to fruition,” because their main office is in Accra.
Madam Tevie stated that the challenges facing the Centre have to do with the recruitment of staff considering their financial capacity and also convincing people to understand that the work they are doing is important.
“We had lots of challenges with recruitment of staff, with generating internal generated funds to keep our work going and also even persuading people that the work that we are doing is important.”