Neema Crafts - Biographies

Susie Hart

Susie Hart, the founder of Neema Crafts, was herself born with a disability. She had many operations throughout her childhood and spent much time in a wheel chair or in plaster casts to give her the mobility she has today. Susie studied Textile Art at Winchester School of Art. She is trained in and has experience of a wide variety of arts and crafts. During and after her student years Susie spent much time in Uganda. She studied for a term of her Winchester Degree course at Makerere University in Kampala in their Arts department. She later returned to Uganda in 1997 to set up a craft workshop for the L'arche community in Kampala, training them in Candle making and hand made paper-making from the water hyacinth in Lake Victoria. Returning to the UK, Susie worked with blind and deaf blind adults at Henshaws craft centre in Knaresborough in North Yorkshire before heading out to Tanzania with her husband Andy as CMS mission partners. During her first year in Tanzania, Susie developed initial product ideas and sought out markets before starting Neema Crafts in 2003 with three young deaf men. Neema means 'Grace' in Kiswahili. The name was chosen to make clear that disabled people have received just as much of God's Grace as others and to overcome the perception held by many that disabled people are in some way cursed.

Andy Hart

Andy trained as a veterinary surgeon and a zoologist at university. During this time he organised and was involved in many charitable fund-raising initiatives and also organised and led four 3 month expeditions to South West Uganda, taking teams of students to work with the local church and teach in schools. He was involved in setting up science A-Level tuition at the main secondary school in the area of Kinkisi Diocese, bordering the D.R. Congo. He met Susie whilst they were fundraising together to purchase a Landrover Ambulance for a clinic in Rukungiri in South West Uganda. Andy worked in mixed practice based in Harrogate in the Yorkshire Dales treating everything from race horses and cattle to goldfish and guinea pigs. He then took the Master's in Tropical Veterinary Medicine and a Rural Development course at Edinburgh University before applying to the Church Mission Society (CMS). to serve as a long term mission partner with Susie.

The Diocese of Ruaha in Iringa had requested a vet to work with them and so they came to Iringa to work with the church as mission partners. Andy's role is as a development officer for rural areas of the diocese working in whichever area the local community feels there is the greatest need. As such he has been involved in various initiatives ranging from reintroducing edible insects into the diet of malnourished children to improve the protein and fat content in their diets, renovating cattle dip tanks and starting a veterinary drug shop in a rural area where access to veterinary drugs had been a major problem among other things. Now he focuses on two main projects, sharing them across a wider area. These are training vaccination teams to vaccinate their village chickens against Newcastle Disease and coordinating a project to set up households and schools with safe water using the SODIS method for household water treatment.

While he still carries out this role working with a variety of livestock and appropriate technologies he has become more and more involved with Neema Crafts as the project has grown and now spends much of his time managing the office as Co-Director and helping with fundraising.