Bracelet for a Cause | Promoting Women Empowerment and Gender Equality

Saturday October 24, 2020

Launching Awareness Campaign to Promote Women Empowerment and Gender Equality

WoEgyptGlobal Project Partners, and Fair Trade Egypt (WGF) join hands to support women empowerment and gender equality, and to promote their safety and rights, through a unique handmade bracelet. The campaign, which includes the design, production and sale of the bracelet, aims at raising awareness and funds for various issues relating to eliminating all forms of violence against them – such as gender-based violencefemale genital mutilation and sexual harassment – while advocating and promoting female education and gender equality. This is conceived as a project of global reach under the umbrella of women empowerment and gender equality.

To this end, artisans and designers all over Egypt were called to take part in the competition, “4Women Bracelet Design Competition”, with their best designs of a unique handmade bracelet to heighten awareness and collect donations for eliminating violence against women and girls in the world. The award-winning design is meant to not only symbolize a brighter future that is devoid of violence but also highlight original, substantive, and positive contributions that help the world become an equal and fair place for women.

A team of judges selected the best design and the fashion-oriented Fair Trade Egypt team—utilizing online technology—will introduce superb, creatively-designed jewelry made by talented Egyptian artisans and designers to the global market. The bracelets shall be offered for reasonable prices, and will be offered for sale internationally through the WFG websites and retail partners and will stay on sale throughout 2021. Every purchase helps support the financial and physical security of women and girls in Egypt.

The Winner 
Salma Elbasty

The competition attracted designers from across Egypt, and the excellent designs submitted made the selectin difficult.  Nonetheless, we are pleased to announce that Salma Elbasty is the winner of the “4Women Bracelet Design Competition”. Salma will receive an award of Euros 500 from Global Projects Partner GPP. The bracelet will be produced by Fair trade Egypt.

Salma is a fresh graduate in Architecture from the German University in Cairo. While approaching her senior year of study, she decided to explore all possible different architectural fields in order to make future educated decisions and choose career paths.  

Throughout this exploration, she stumbled upon many different design fields, ranging from graphic design, all the way to the unrelated field of jewelry design.  She found out that design thinking essentially follows the same process, and so, to test the processes, competitions offered valuable opportunities to experiment. 

The competition for pencil sketches for a bracelet held by Women of Egypt, acted as an introduction to the field of jewelry design. Salma’s introduction to the initiative of Women of Egypt in itself was through Pearls of the Nile: an electronic publication of Women of Egypt which highlighted the achievements of Egyptian women in sports in 2017. 

Throughout the years, Women of Egypt has highlighted accomplishments of a large spectrum of Egyptian women, so it is appropriate that they are producing a jewelry piece to imprint their solidarity. The bracelet design produced provides a minimalistic visual reference to the symbology of the female gender, with a reference to the very aesthetically similar Egyptian symbol Ankh: the key of life. The lock mechanism of the bracelet acts as a metaphor to the completeness of Egyptian women, with the bracelet reaching its final shape only when fully locked.

Fair Trade Egypt and the designer are working together to produce the bracelet, which its production will start once the prototype is approved. 

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