Many travellers share a passion for photography and unique motifs. But being confronted with the utter poverty and plight in many countries, it is also common to feel obliged to help. It is therefore not surprising that lots of ideas apart from Photocircle have developed like this.
It was also a concern that sociologist Janneke Smeulders and entrepreneur Peter Hond from the Netherlands shared to let the motifs of pictures participate in the buying and selling process. They put their idea into practice with a different approach than Photocircle, though: FairMail is a company producing fair trade greeting cards with photos taken by underprivileged teenagers in Peru and India. The teenagers receive 50% of the profit of the sale in order to finance their housing and education. FairMail furthermore offers a photography training, health insurance and counselling for making future plans.
It all started when Peter and Janneke decided to run a vegetarian restaurant in a Peruvian fishing village after they had completed their university degrees. With the business going well they had some spare time to volunteer at the local garbage belt and at a home for former street children. They found that despite their young age many children were forced to work in order to supplement their family income while there was no time or money to attend school. “This was our personal encounter with the cold facts of child labour.”, Peter explains, “115 million children worldwide work in hazardous conditions, putting at stake their education, their health, their normal development and even their lives.”
After giving a spontaneous photography workshop for the kids who were working at the garbage belt in 2006, Janneke and Peter came up with the idea to enter the greeting card market with a system changing concept: “Our motivation was to let the country that owns the beauty earn a fair share of the profits being made and use that as an instrument to combat child labour and poverty through a sustainable business approach.”, says Peter. Their business has infact been quite sustainable so that in 2009 FairMail expanded its work to the photogenetic city of Varanasi in India.
Today, 35 teenagers work as photographers for Fairmail, supported by a group of voluntary photography trainers. Peter and Janneke considered it important to implement social change entrepreneurially instead of following the traditional “aid industry”. Meanwhile they’re back in Amsterdam, taking care of the storage and shipping of the greeting cards to 14 different countries as well as the management, accounting and legal stuff for FairMail. Congratulations, Janneke and Peter, for this remarkable success of a contemporary and creative idea!
