Fair Trade
Marketplace: For home goods, specialty items, gifts, and more, start your shopping with the Marketplace of Together Women Rise. You support the hard work of artisans from around the world, and a portion of your purchase is returned to further the work of Together Women Rise. See the full list here. If you are a vendor and are interested in participating, review our Cause Marketing Guidelines and submit a proposal here.
Anchal Project is a nonprofit organization that addresses the exploitation of women around the world by using design thinking to create employment opportunities, services, and products that support economic empowerment. Anchal’s current priority is to provide commercial sex workers in India with careers in textile & design production. Anchal artisans create a variety of intricately hand-stitched textile goods made from vintage saris and eco-friendly fabrics. Together Women Rise will receive 10% of the purchase price of all sales and you will receive 10% off your order by using the code TWR10 with this link.
Books
Fiction
By Mubanga Kalimamukwento
When 11-year-old Chimuka and her younger brother, Ali, find themselves orphaned in the 1990s, it’s clear that their seemingly ordinary Zambian family is brimming with secrets, from HIV/AIDS, infidelity, to suicide. Faced with the difficult choice of living with their abusive extended family or slithering into the dark underbelly of Lusaka’s streets, Chimuka and Ali escape and become street kids.
Against the backdrop of a failed military coup, election riots and a declining economy, Chimuka and Ali are raised by drugs, crime and police brutality. As a teenager, Chimuka is caught between prostitution and the remnants of the fragile stability that existed before her parents’ death.
The Mourning Bird is not just Chimuka’s story, it’s a national portrait of Zambia in an era of strife. With lively and unflinching prose, Kalimamukwento paints a country’s burden, shame and silence, which, when juxtaposed with Chimuka’s triumph, forms an empowering debut novel.
By Ellen Banda-Aaku
Winner of the Penguin Prize for African Writing 2010 (fiction). Destined from birth to inhabit two very different worlds – that of her father, the wealthy Joseph Sakavungo, and that of her mother, his mistress – this emotive tale takes us to the heart of a young girl’s attempts to come to terms with her own identity and fashion a future for herself from the patchwork of the life she was born into. Beautifully constructed, warm and wise, this is a novel that will transport the reader to a world in which we can all become more of the sum of our parts.
Films
Tunainuana (Together We Rise) is the story of a young girl from rural Tanzania and the rise of a sisterhood of change leaders across Africa. Lydia Wilbard (the subject of this film) is a girls’ education and gender equality expert, and the CAMFED Association – the network of women leaders educated with CAMFED support – is a force for good across the African continent. The film was directed by Lindsay Branham at NOVO Films.
Hear directly from Christina, featured in the March 2025 Project Fact Sheet.
