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Nkwichi Eco, Fair Trade Paper

Recycled, Fair Trade, Eco Friendly Paper from Mozambique

On the shores or the clear blue Lake Niassa in Eastern Mozambique lies a very special eco-tourist destination called “Nkwichi Lodge”.

Nkwichi Lodge was developed to fund amazing community developments projects in Mozambique’s Niassa Province. The lodge is a stunning example of pure eco-tourism. Luxury chalets are built almost completely from materials collected from the bush which lies behind Nkwichi, power comes from solar panels and they use a “sun oven” and wood fires to cook with (all the wood used is 100% dead wood collected from the forest).

Yet they have created a truly luxurious place to stay from where guests can visit the projects that their guest bills are funding while keeping their travel footprint far smaller than if they were at home.

One of the projects that Nkwichi is working on is a farm which is trialling different eco and organic growing systems to allow locals to grow a wider variety of crops for better nutrition. To provide work for the farm employees when it is raining (and it rains very hard in Mozambique, it being a tropical region!) the farm has started to produce paper products using all of the waste paper from the lodge and its guests, pounding it and mixing it with banana leaves, to produce a delightful new thick paper which is ideally suited to making card products.

At Makes a Change we are using this card for our gift tags when you choose to have your eco-baby gift wrapped, and also for the cards which come with our gift vouchers. The gift voucher cards are finished with guinea fowl feathers picked up from the farm’s very free range birds, or a printed impression of a leaf, again from the farm.

During a recent visit to Mozambique and Nkwichi’s lodge’s farm, Emma from Makes a Change was fascinated by the methods used. There is no electricity at all at the farm and everything is done by hand to the rhythm of the surrounding bush. While toddlers play around their mothers’ feet or sleep in pouches on their back, baboons scream in the distance, exotic birds sing and paper and leaves are ripped, mashed and re-formed, laid to dry in the hot tropical sun and later lovingly created into a very special and unique product, the sale of which helps to pay for the continuation of this fabulous project.

For more information about Manda Wilderness and Nkwichi Eco-Lodge, please visit their website: http://www.mandawilderness.org.