Women Regenerating Tomorrow: From Ethiopian Leather to Kenyan Cricket Farms

Jun 14, 2025

This week, we turn to women—the often overlooked backbone of global sustainability efforts—whose labor powers industries from fashion to farming, yet whose voices are still too often marginalized. Our featured article, Redefining Luxury With Transparency And Purpose: Parker Clay’s Mission In Ethiopia, explores how one brand is flipping that script. By anchoring luxury leather production in women’s empowerment and radical transparency, Parker Clay shows how ethical manufacturing can drive both beauty and justice.

This week’s Essential Reads travel from rural India’s circular design labs to Kenya’s cricket farms and Việt Nam’s climate-smart fields. Whether it’s Tata Power turning plastic into livelihoods, Indha converting e-waste into artisan goods, or Krishi Sakhis leading agroecological transitions, these women-led initiatives exemplify how regeneration and inclusion go hand in hand.

In Research Corner, we look at a feminist, posthumanist study that reimagines sustainability not as a technical fix, but as an entangled process—co-created by women, cotton, machines, and microbes. It calls us to move beyond extractive models and toward relational, regenerative practices.

Let’s dig into this week’s stories of how women are not only sustaining systems but reimagining them—from the soil to the supply chain.

Featured Article:

In this Forbes article, I explore how Parker Clay is redefining luxury fashion by linking premium leather craftsmanship with radical transparency, social purpose, and women’s empowerment in Ethiopia. Once overlooked in the global fashion value chain, Ethiopia is now emerging as a model for ethical manufacturing through Parker Clay’s mission-driven approach.

Certified as a B Corp and led by co-founder Brittany Bentley, Parker Clay owns its production facility in Addis Ababa—ensuring full oversight of ethical labor practices, sustainable sourcing, and skills training. Central to its impact is the empowerment of at-risk women through partnerships with organizations like Ellilta Women at Risk (EWAR), and collaboration with women-led institutions such as Enat Bank. Hundreds of women have graduated from Parker Clay’s programs annually, with over 90% remaining economically independent.

By combining fair wages, financial literacy, and artisan training with transparent sourcing and award-winning design, Parker Clay is turning the fashion industry’s extractive legacy into a blueprint for equity and regeneration—proving that luxury can be as purposeful as it is beautiful.

Essential Reads:

Empowered by Design

In Gurgaon’s Village Daulatabad, a homegrown enterprise called Indha is redefining sustainability through women-led circular innovation. Founded by India’s first female Airbus-300 Commander, Indraani Singh, Indha trains rural and peri-urban women to become eco-entrepreneurs—upcycling waste materials like CPUs, wood, sarees, and cardboard into high-quality decor, bags, and gifts. These women manage production lines, develop new designs, and lead peer training across embroidery, paper crafts, and stitching.

Smart Circularity, Women-Led

Tata Power’s Anokha Dhaaga initiative has transformed 5,000 kg of plastic waste into recycled products—T-shirts, bags, and accessories—crafted by women entrepreneurs across six centres. Generating over ₹20 lakh in earnings, the programme fuses circular economy and community empowerment. Now supporting 30,000 women across nine states, this scalable model exemplifies how grassroots innovation drives climate action and inclusive growth.

Crafting Change from Waste

Indha, incubated by Literacy India and led by Captain Indraani Singh, has empowered over 10,000 women across four Indian states by transforming discarded materials—CPUs, wood, sarees, and bottles—into eco-conscious products. Rooted in frugal innovation and traditional artistry, the initiative enables women artisans to lead in design, mentoring, and production.

Farming With Her

Launched by India’s Ministries of Agriculture and Rural Development, the Krishi Sakhi programme empowers over 34,000 rural women as certified para-extension workers. Trained in agroecology, livestock, and digital tools, Krishi Sakhis foster women-led entrepreneurship—promoting organic produce, value-added goods, and rural e-commerce.

Fashion’s Feminist Energy Shift

Despite women making up 60% of the fashion workforce, they remain underpaid, underrepresented, and disproportionately affected by poor energy access and climate impacts. The report calls for urgent investment in renewable energy and support for women-led enterprises to transform fashion from a driver of environmental harm into a catalyst for equitable climate action.

Crickets Against Crisis

In Isiolo, Kenya, women’s group Tulla Biftu is tackling climate change and food insecurity through cricket farming. Trained under the (B)eat the Locust project, they rear crickets for food and affordable animal feed—turning pests into protein-rich assets. These women-led ventures also grow vegetables, sell camel milk, and promote sustainable agri-food systems.

Travel That Gives Back

Women- and veteran-owned Kind Traveler has launched Every Adventure Gives Back™ on California’s Catalina Island, turning snorkeling and eco-tours into ocean-saving actions. In partnership with local businesses and nonprofits like Bleu World, a portion of each adventure funds marine conservation and citizen science.

Water is Life, Women Lead

In climate-vulnerable Việt Nam, women are at the forefront of building agricultural resilience. Through projects like Water is Life, led by UN Women and Japan, rural women now access water-saving irrigation tools that ease workloads and protect crops from drought. With 63% of rural women engaged in farming, initiatives that combine leadership training, gender-responsive policies, and climate-smart tech are critical.

Research Corner:

This Organization Studies article challenges dominant, human-centered notions of sustainability by advancing the concept of becoming naturecultural—a feminist, posthumanist framework grounded in more-than-human entanglements. Drawing on multi-sited ethnography of an organic cotton t-shirt supply chain in Turkey, the authors trace how sustainability is co-produced through affective relations among cotton, machines, workers, and certification systems.

Women's roles are central: feminist scholars, lab technicians, and field researchers embody and enact alternative ways of knowing, unsettling masculinist assumptions of control and mastery. By thinking and writing with rather than about more-than-human assemblages, the article calls for a shift from capitalist sustainability narratives toward relational, regenerative possibilities.

The regenerative business practices and sustainability innovations highlighted in this week's Regenerative Insights directly tackle the critical issues of corporate responsibility explored in my recent book explored in my recent book, The Profiteers: How Business Privatizes Profit and Socializes Cost.

Quick Takeaways:

Circular design power: Women-led upcycling turns waste into decor, bags, and gifts.
Skills with mission Artistry and frugal innovation empower 10,000+ rural women.
Agro women rise: 34,000 Krishi Sakhis lead sustainable farming and rural commerce.
Fashion shift: Call for renewables and equity in a woman-majority workforce.
Protein from pests: Cricket farming tackles food insecurity and climate threats.
Travel for good: Women-led Eco-adventures fund marine conservation.

Regenerative Insights