Afribit women and girls empowerment

Our Story

Afribit Women and Girls Empowerment — known across Kibera as the Recycling Queens — is a hands-on upcycling collective led by Steph. Alongside the family's food business, Black and White Fries Palace, it is part of a bigger vision that Steph and Mitch share: building something lasting for their family, their customers, and their community. The idea is simple and powerful. We take old clothes that would otherwise be thrown away and transform them into useful, beautiful bags — handbags, tote bags, and crossbody bags. Because every piece is cut from different reclaimed fabric and sewn by hand, no two bags are ever exactly alike. But this is about far more than bags. The collective is a place where women and girls learn practical skills, work together, earn from their own labour, and save for the future. We began with volunteer effort and only two sewing machines. Today we work from a shared production space with five machines, where ten women and girls sew in a morning team and an afternoon team — an arrangement that lets members who are still in school take part. Together we make around ten bags a day, paying participants from sales, building a shared savings structure, and reinvesting in more equipment. Our earliest orders came from the Nairobi Bitcoin Conference and other community events, and interest keeps growing through Instagram, X, and Nostr. Every bag can be bought with Bitcoin over the Lightning Network — fast, low-fee payments straight from a phone. For us, that is what a Bitcoin circular economy looks like at street level: not abstract technology, but discarded fabric turned into lasting value, sats circulating within our own community, and real opportunity for marginalized women and girls — created in an environmentally conscious, sustainable way. We are taking baby steps: building awareness, trust, capacity, and a customer base, one bag at a time. This is our journey, and it is still being written — one bag, one skill, and one Lightning payment at a time.