Kazuri Beads

Lady Susan Wood was born in 1918 in a mud hut in the Ituri Forest, where her English missionary parents were stationed; she and her husband settled in Kenya in 1947 and eventually ran a coffee plantation on the old Karen Blixen estate outside Nairobi — the farm made famous by "Out of Africa." In 1975, alongside two disadvantaged women, she began rolling and painting ceramic beads in a garden shed on the estate, meant as a small income project rather than a business plan.

It grew because the need was larger than two jobs: Kazuri became a dedicated employer of women, especially single mothers with no other income source, and now employs hundreds who shape clay carried down from Mount Kenya into beads, painted and fired by hand. The company is a member of the World Fair Trade Federation, which audits its wages and working conditions, and visitors can walk through the workshop and watch the process from raw clay to finished strand — the same conversion Wood started, at a much smaller scale, half a century ago.