YSEALI Spring 2019 - Kharolin Hilda Amazona:

Thanh The Nguyen Photo
Participant Name: Kharolin Hilda Amazona
Project Location: Yogyakarta Province, Indonesia
Program: Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative (YSEALI)
Term: Spring 2019
Project Title: Menganyam Pesisir (Coastal Weaving)
UConn GTDI Project Award: Application Accepted & Funding Awarded

Kharolin Hilda Amazona (Olin), is the Founder and CEO of Menganyam Pesisir (Coastal Weaving) social enterprise. Since March 2017,  Kharolin had begun a mini research on Menganyam Pesisir and she officially established Menganyam Pesisir in August 18, 2018. She built Menganyam Pesisir from the ground up, while she was still in college.

Kharolin has always had a passion for social entrepreneurship and the arts of crafting. So, when she found a problem in the coastal areas of her hometown in Indonesia, she decided to build Menganyam Pesisir. Specifically, to build the coastal area through entrepreneurship.

Kharolin teaches coastal women how to weave and how to make woven products, by providing skill training activities. In the future, she hopes empowered coastal women can become financially independent, and they can provide a better life for themselves and their families. She also hopes that Menganyam Pesisir, as a social enterprise can be sustainable and can provide benefits to other coastal women in Indonesia.

Organization Information: Menganyam Pesisir (Coastal Weaving)

website: https://www.facebook.com/menganyampesisir/

Activities - @menganyampesisir: https://www.instagram.com/menganyampesisir/

Products - @ngrawah.products: https://www.instagram.com/ngrawah.products/

Menganyam Pesisir (Coastal Weaving) is a social enterprise that empowering marginal indigenous women in coastal areas (in Kharolin's hometown Yogyakarta-Indonesia, especially in Gunung Kidul Regency’s coastal areas). It does this by increasing the capacity of human resources by providing "skills training, mentoring and entrepreneurship". Through the utilization of abundant natural resources in the form of sea pandanus leaves (daun pandan laut) in coastal areas to become fashion woven products based on local wisdom with high selling prices.

2 Main problems that Menganyam Pesisir wants to solve:

  1. Poverty: As the widest archipelago country in the world, Indonesia has more than 17,500 islands and Indonesia has a lot of coastal areas. But in fact, the most poverty in Indonesia mostly occurs in coastal areas.
  1. Gender Inequality: Most of coastal women get married off at a young age. They also did not receive proper education (most of coastal community educational background is elementary, some of them also have no educational background at all, so they face extreme difficulty when trying to get a job).

Menganyam Pesisir supports 3 important points:

  1. Support SDGs Global Goals: no. 1 "No Poverty, no. 5" Gender Equality ", and no. 8" Economic Growth”.
  2. Creating new jobs, especially for coastal women.
  3. Support the preservation of Indonesian traditional craft that is almost extinct (especially in coastal area) that called "anyaman" (traditional weaving techniques).