Meet the “Mwani Mamas,” a Group of Zanzibari Women Changing Their Lives Through Seaweed Farming (2024)

Zanzibar is an archipelago in the Indian Ocean about 15 miles from mainland Tanzania. It’s nicknamed the “Spice Island” for its proliferation of cloves, nutmeg, pepper, and cinnamon, but in recent years, seaweed has actually surpassed those spices to become its largest export. Even so, most of the area’s 23,000 seaweed farmers—nearly all of whom are women—make only $35 a month, which is significantly less than minimum wage ($150 a month). Because of this, many women seaweed farmers are reliant on their husbands, which does not offer them much security given the cultural circ*mstances. As is the case in many Muslim communities around the world, Zanzibari men are allowed up to four wives at the same time. Divorce is quite common—meaning men will often leave their wives for someone else, which in turn leaves their ex-wives struggling to make ends meet.

Clearly, this is a big problem for the women of Zanzibar. So Klaartje (Klara) Schade and Andrew Anthony, Mwani’s humanitarian co-founders (and romantic partners), decided to try to do something about it. Klara is Dutch but was born in Zimbabwe and spent a large part of her childhood in Mozambique. She originally moved to Zanzibar in 2014 to help revitalize the Mwani Seaweed Center, which at the time was a struggling non-profit project aimed at helping the farmers increase their wages. One month after her move, she met Andrew—a born-and-raised Zanzibarian—and the two hit it off. He eventually left his job as a producer to join her at the Mwani Seaweed Center, and in 2019, the couple turned Mwani the NGO into Mwani the business, with the hope of giving local women like Pandu a better chance at a secure and fulfilling life.

Their plan worked. Today, the Mwani Mamas are the first generation of women in Zanzibar to achieve financial independence. They make around $250 to $300 a month, nearly double the minimum wage—and about seven times the amount they made previously. Mwani also provides them with full benefits, including maternity and sick leave, flexible schedules, continuous training, and flexible loans for big-ticket items like homes. As a result, they’ve become respected leaders in their community. They can not only afford to buy food and clothes for their families, but many have also invested in “divorce houses,” i.e. backup houses they can move to if and when their husbands leave them. The mental peace these houses have brought them is priceless. “As a woman in Zanzibar, you have to have a backup house because you can’t guarantee marriage here,” one of the Mamas, Patima Haji Pandu, told me through a translator on my first day on the main island. “So if you can’t afford to build one, it’s really stressful because you don’t know where you’ll go. If you have a backup house, though, there’s no more stress, because your husband can say, ‘I’m done with you,’ and you can say, ‘Fine. Goodbye. See you.’ And then you just move. And it’s so freeing.”

Mwani’s positive impact on the community is a testament to the high quality and success of the product itself. After all, it’s difficult to give back if you don’t have anything to give. The brand currently employs 13 people in their HQ—nine Mamas and four other staffers—plus about 180 local suppliers throughout Zanzibar. They already have a large following in France, and recently launched a line of four products in the United States as well: a facial cleanser and mask, a face and body skin superfood, a macroalgae & lemongrass soap, and a macroalgae, cinnamon, and turmeric soap. They also make custom soaps for local luxury boutique hotels in Zanzibar, including Xanadu Luxury Villas, a design-forward tropical oasis created and run by a Zambian architect, and White Sand Luxury Villas & Spa, the first Relais & Châteaux property in Tanzania.

But their success did not happen overnight. It happened gradually, and carefully, in large part because Klara and Andrew have always measured the brand’s success by the success of its people. “From the beginning, it was always about the women for us,” Andrew told me one morning as we were sitting on his and Klara’s breezy front porch in Paje, a growing village on the southeastern coast of the island. “It was always about: How can we get them out of this? How can we give them options?”

The answer to that eventually became clear: They would transform the Mamas into local artisans. It was a radical idea. For one thing, running a business in Africa is famously challenging, with all sorts of red tape, infrastructure roadblocks, and push and pull from the government. For another, this was simply not how things typically worked at the time (it’s still not, quite frankly). Seaweed farming began in Zanzibar in the 1980s with the end goal of shipping it out to other countries, specifically China and Denmark. But Klara and Andrew wondered: Rather than exporting all of the seaweed abroad, what if we used it to create beauty products right here? Why not teach the Mamas to become artisans, thus keeping the jobs in Africa, bringing them in on the process, and empowering them along the way?

There’s a Swahili phrase, “pole pole,” which translates to “slowly, slowly.” People use it all the time in Zanzibar, and after spending a week there myself, I came to understand it as an entire lifestyle philosophy, not just a simple directive: Maybe take a beat and let things unfold. Don’t assume that faster means better. The best things in life take time. This idea is truly woven into the cultural fabric of Zanzibar, and, not surprisingly, it’s exactly the approach that Klara and Andrew have taken when teaching the Mwani Mamas to become artisans.

Making the products is a precise science that has taken the whole team years to perfect. Think: measuring and weighing ingredients, stirring oils, checking temperatures, and cutting soaps. Most of the Mamas do not know how to read or write—schooling for women in Zanzibar usually ends around age 12—so there was a steep learning curve in that department (they’re true pros now). And there were also various cultural hurdles to overcome along the way, too.

“It’s been a slow but steady evolution, because you have to build the trust first before you can make the change—and that took years,” Klara told me over dinner one night. When she first moved to Zanzibar from a banking job in London, she was very aware of the social dynamics at play. After the Zanzibar Revolution in 1964, Zanzibaris started to say “Hatutakuwa watumwa tena,” which translates to “We’ll never be slaves again.” In other words, they would never work for a foreigner again. “And so, to be very honest, when I first arrived, it was: Who is this woman coming from another country? What does she have to offer?” Klara said.

But she got started on her Swahili (she’s fluent now), she kept showing up, and she continued to believe in the mission. And it turns out, that consistent and unwavering dedication became one of the driving forces behind the success of the whole enterprise. “Ultimately, you really have to immerse yourself in the way that it’s done here,” she said. “And that idea of coming back every day and trying to do better is really big here in Zanzibar. I don’t know how to emphasize that enough; it’s the biggest way to gain trust. That continuous mindset to just keep going upwards, to just keep learning and growing, is huge.” Plus, she continued, doing so is how the whole team works together to bring out the best in each other. “We’re not here to create something that’s European or American. We’re here to create something that’s distinctly Zanzibari, something that’s really from here.”

That’s exactly what they’ve done. Nearly everything the Mamas put into Mwani’s products, from the seaweed to the mangrove honey to the spices to the oils, is homegrown. The face & body skin superfood, for example, is filled with indigenous African oils like baobab, mongongo, mokate, and marula which aren’t included in many beauty products. The same goes for the facial cleanser and mask, which is filled with local mangrove honey. One day during my visit, Klara and Andrew took me to a small island off the coast of Zanzibar to see where they source said honey. There I was, hiking through a patch of bristly mangroves to reach one of their bee hives, sweating profusely (it was a casual 94 degrees), when it hit me: These guys do not mess around. Local is actually local.

But the true shining star of the brand is its MW Macroalgae Concentrate, a patented extract made from three different types of seaweeds native to Zanzibar: turbinaria decurrens, ulva reticulata, and sargassum oligocystum. Mwani is the first and only company to register these seaweeds in a global database known as the International Nomenclature of Cosmetic Ingredients (INCI). Not surprisingly, the extract is powerful stuff, so much so that they only put about .05% of it in each product; otherwise, it will be too potent and have adverse effects. But fear not, .05% certainly does the job. My regular facialist even told me my skin looked much smoother when I returned from Zanzibar, where I used the products every day. (“What did you do differently since I saw you last?!” she wanted to know.)

To land on the winning formulation for the extract, Klara and Andrew worked with various scientists from around the world, from Japan to South Africa to the UK. And, true to their pole pole style, it took four years of dedicated experimentation to reach a conclusion. “It was a lot of trial and error, which is a very Zanzibari thing,” Klara explained one afternoon. “But that’s the mindset here, and it led to us producing something that other people haven’t produced. We wanted the Mamas to be able to come forward with the best version of themselves, and that meant producing something that’s actually really high quality.”

In the end, that’s the beauty of this entire beauty brand: They really do put their people and their community first. The products are high quality, which in turn provides a higher quality of life for everyone involved. When I mentioned this observation to Klara while we were on the boat coming home from the honey island, she started blushing…but she didn’t deny it, either. Instead, she turned quite pensive. “If you really do love a place, the question becomes: What would you do for it?” she asked me. “Other people just consume and take, but if you really do love something, you have to feed it as well. So that’s what we try to do at Mwani. We feed our people. We take care of our people. We wouldn’t do it any other way.”