In cooperation with the Aid by Trade Foundation, OTTO Austria will support a school project in Burkina Faso starting in March 2012. The program will offer 5,000 African smallholder farmers who work with the Cotton made in Africa (CmiA) initiative basic education in the form of alphabetization courses. The aim is to kick off a sustainable process of development.
In honour of its 20th anniversary, OTTO Austria will be donating 0.50 euros for each item sold from its ECOREPUBLIC collection to the school project for a period of one and a half years. “We also want to excite our customers about this great project and promote the sale of sustainably produced textiles. We anticipate that more than 50,000 euros will go to the alphabetization program,” explained Harald Gutschi, spokesperson for OTTO Austria management. The program receives additional support from the Deutschen Investitions- und Entwicklungsgesellschaft (DEG) and Welthungerhilfe (WHH).
Illiteracy has a considerable negative impact on the country’s socio-economic development, and is a concrete place to start: by summer 2013 around 5,000 men and women will have learned to read and write in a course in the Bazega Region (central south). This program is OTTO Austria’s contribution to laying the groundwork for sustainable development for smallholder farmers and their families.
Social and ecological responsibly plays an important role for every member of the Otto Group. OTTO Austria has therefore focused on and sold sustainably produced textiles under the ECOREPUBLIC brand name for a number of years. Cotton produced by the Cotton made in Africa initiative is also used in production.
The Aid by Trade foundation created the CmiA in 2005 to improve the living conditions of African smallholder farmers. The initiative is creating an international demand alliance to purchase sustainably grown African cotton at market price. Additionally smallholder farmers profit from trainings that teach efficient cultivation methods and from public private partnership projects, such as the alphabetization project in Burkina Faso.