Bamenda Handicraft Cooperative Society Ltd
A Fair-Trade Certified Organization
Welcome to Bamenda Handicraft Society Cooperative!
Thank you for visiting us. We are a fair-trade certified cooperative organization representing over 200 artisans in the Northwest region of Cameroon, West Africa. We produce locally-made handicrafts, including African masks, musical instruments, household items, decorations, baskets, and shopping bags.
Please browse our website and product catalog. Our main store is located in Bamenda, the capital of Cameroon’s Northwest region. Visit us the next time you are in town and check out our store, restaurant, and guest house in one of the most beautiful parts of the country!
Bamenda Handicraft Cooperative Society Ltd 
I’m VERY pleased that the Bamenda Handicraft Cooperative Society has a website which promotes the
Society’s featured crafts, and the Society’s purposes. I’m now age 85, but from 1963 to 1965 I was the
Peace Corps Volunteer Leader stationed with my family in Bafreng, outside Bamenda. At first I worked in adult literacy, but after seeing very impressive crafts being offered in local agricultural shows I proposed and began organizing the “Cameroon Handwork Cooperative.” We rented a two room house as our first shop, but in two
weeks the shop was SO full of crafts and potential customers we moved it to a 4-room house across the road
from the house where my family and I lived. The Society was soon so successful it was visited by the West
Cameroonian Prime Minister, and we received our first order from the United Nations Gift Shop, in New York City.
After returning to the U.S. after two years in Bamenda, one day while visiting New York City’s Philharmonic Hall gift shop in the world-famous Lincoln Center, I asked the sales clerk to show me a pair of musical shakers which looked familiar. They had my handwriting on them, and I knew the man who made them. He had been extremely
poor, but was then bringing over a dozen pairs of those musical shakers (to accompany drumming) to each
monthly meeting we held in his village. I sent him a postcard saying “Your shakers are now being sold in THIS BUILDING in New York City — and I hoped a school boy or girl would read it to him. Cooperative societies can do
GREAT THINGS, in every country. — Douglas C. Kelley, Ph.D., Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA
Posted by Douglas C. Kelley | March 30, 2014, 11:37 pm