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From Home Furnishing Business
GoodWeave Founder Wins Nobel Peace Prize
October 14,
2014 by in Community / Charitable Support, Industry 
GoodWeave founder Kailash Satyarthi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work to fight against child labor within the rug and carpet manufacturing business and fight for education of all children.
Satyarthi shares the award with Malala Yousafzai, the 17-year-old Pakistani activist for female education.
"Showing great personal courage, Kailash Satyarthi, maintaining Gandhi’s tradition, has headed various forms of protests and demonstrations, all peaceful, focusing on the grave exploitation of children for financial gain,” said Thorbjorn Jagland, chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee.
In the 1980s, once on an engineering career track, Kailash Satyarthi began rescuing children from bondage. As chairman of the South Asian Coalition on Child Servitude, he fought against child slavery one factory at a time, one child at a time. He conducted rescue raids and liberated children who were enduring extreme violence, some brutally beaten if they ever tried to escape.
Following one such raid, Satyarthi returned a trafficked boy to his home village. When he went to board a train home, Satyarthi saw dozens and dozens of children destined for the looms in the hands of middlemen. Arrested for causing a disturbance at the station, Satyarthi suddenly realized that this situation required a larger solution.
“Something else had to be done. I thought, ‘Consumers have to be educated,’” Satyarthi said in a 2013 interview. This realization was the turning point and for the child labor movement, a shift in thinking and strategy. In addition to exposing the ugly truth behind rugs, Satyarthi set out to establish a certification system that would incentivize manufacturers to stop exploiting children as well as guide consumer purchases. The RugMark label (now GoodWeave) was born. The first carpets with that certification were exported from India in 1995.
Today, GoodWeave works in the top consumer capitals of the world and in the key rug-producing areas across Asia, expanding most recently to Afghanistan. Their programs in weaving villages near Kabul, Mazar and soon Herat are reaching girls, many of whom resemble Malala. And in the two decades since Satyarthi’s jail cell a-ha moment, the organization has gone on to reduce the number of “carpet kids” in the region by two-thirds.