Saturday, June 28, 2008

Responsible shopping in Uzbekistan

There were small crafts and souvenirs shop all over, as you can probably see from the pictures. I would like to highlight some (but not all, most don't seem to have websites) that we found or heard of with an edge of social responsibility in their production and marketing.

Samarkand Bukhara Silk carpets in Samarkand (with a factory outside the city and a selling point in the Registan)

and

Human House in Tashkent.

I always like to honour and prefer to pay shops where I know the revenue goes back to the people (hopefully even women) who make the produce and where it contributes to a lively SME development and the perpetuation of traditional crafts and production methods, for example.

We saw examples of this almost all over (and the Lonely Planet-guide we used had a good list), but the ones above are the only ones I could find through googling).

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