Sara Nuru
Charitable projects and fair fashion
Casual and personable as always reported Sara Nuru talks about her experiences in the fashion industry and why she is now pursuing other passion projects.
© Jan Rickers / PR
Being a model alone was never enough for Sara Nuru. As an entrepreneur, she supports women in Ethiopia. In an interview with BRIGITTE she reports what is behind this project.
Ms. Nuru, you were discovered at the age of 15, and at the age of 20 you became “Germany’s Next Top Model” – and modeling became your career. You are also involved in charitable projects, founded companies, became a mother… a lot of energy!
SARA NURU: I probably got that from my mother. She is a real doer. Alone, at 24 and with two small daughters, she fled Ethiopia from hunger and ended up in Grünbach near Munich without a word of German. My sisters and I were raised to be self-determined women.
Sara Nuru in an interview: “You are always dependent on people finding you beautiful”
And modeling is no longer self-determined enough for you today?
It’s also a great job that gives you a lot of self-confidence. And it’s comparatively easy money that you can use to initiate good things. But you always depend on people finding you beautiful. Who knows how long this will work. And it couldn’t have been just beautiful.
33 images
With your sister Sali you produce fair coffee in Ethiopia. You can use the proceeds to help local women build their own livelihoods. How did that happen?
During visits, I experienced the poverty in the country from which my family fled. For women in particular, there are hardly any chances of a self-determined life in a male-dominated society. I’ve also been working for the “People for People” foundation for a long time and am an ambassador at the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation. We do public relations and fundraising, but it’s primarily about collecting donations. We wanted to get away from this “Please give yours “Giving money to poor Africans” – for me that is not acting on an equal footing. We wanted to create an alternative, a kind of circular system that brings money back into the country through economic performance. In this sense, our company “NuruCoffee” is the means to an end.
Why coffee of all things?
Ethiopia is the country of origin, coffee is part of our culture. It represents the beauty and diversity of the country and also has an emotional component: coffee is a product that everyone likes to drink, worldwide, that connects because people drink it together. And coffee is also the country’s largest export.
Unfortunately, most Ethiopians don’t have any of it…
Because they have to work as poorly paid day laborers for the few large landowners who grow coffee in huge monocultures and sell it to corporations around the world. This harms the environment and people remain poor.
And how exactly does your circulatory system work?
Under the brand “NuruWomen” we give microloans to women and train them in the basics of the coffee industry. Their small plantations join together to form cooperatives that produce organic coffee. We buy it at fair prices and ship it to Germany, where it is made in Hamburg is gently roasted and packaged in an environmentally friendly manner. 50 percent of the proceeds go directly back to Ethiopia and are invested in loans, training, coffee plantations and so on.
What do men say about women getting this money?
When we first presented the project in a village, we were very nervous. But then a village chief from the cooperative stood up and said that it was better this way. The men would only spend the money on irrational things.
Sara Nuru is a person with attitude. For them, fashion must be fair and sustainable. And we show how beautifully it works here: