Twenty years ago Rebecca Lolosoli and a group of other Samburu women who had been thrown out of their homes in Kenya by their husbands and families were destitute. Some were dying of malaria. They owned nothing and couldn't afford to feed their children. "We had nobody to depend on to make our lives," Lolosoli said.

The women started brewing spirits (changá). But then they got arrested by police and sent hundreds of miles away. Some of their children, who were left behind, were eaten by hyenas.

Lolosoli tried to talk about these injustices during a Kenyatta Day rally, but was shouted down.

In 1990, she and 16 others founded the village of Umoja Uaso and began pooling their money to buy supplies for making jewelry which they sold on the street.

"We wanted to uplift our lives," Lolosoli said.

But once the men saw that a woman had sold something, "they would take the money and beat them," she said. Today the women are careful not to keep much cash around and earnings are quickly deposited in a bank account. "We never give (the men) our money because they just want it to go and get drunk," Lolosoli explained.

Now the members of Umoja Uaso Women's Group No. 48. They're still fighting for their rights — "Men don't want to see women having anything." From sales of their brightly colored beaded jewelry they've built a pre-school, provided shelter for women who have been beaten and raped and paid hospital fees for their group from a special fund. Lolosoli also talks to villagers about female genital mutilation. Last year during a drought in the area, they bought food and water to share with neighboring villages using revenues earned from the Santa Fe International Folk Art Market.

"That money really saved so many people," Lolosoli said.

Umoja Uaso is one of 10 women's cooperatives featured in a new exhibit at the Santa Fe International Folk Art Museum called "Empowering Women: Artisan Cooperatives That Transform Communities."

The exhibit in the Museum of International Folk Art's "Gallery of Conscience" is the first in a series exploring the challenges faced by 21st-century folk artists.

Museum director Marsha Bol asked Suzanne Seriff, a folklorist at the University of Texas, to curate the show. Seriff chose 10 jointly owned and democratically controlled women's cooperatives from among the 40 or so that had applied to the 2010 Santa Fe International Folk Art Market. The groups represent Swaziland, South Africa, Nepal, Lao PDR, India, Peru, Bolivia, Morocco, Kenya and Rwanda.

Seriff was already working with the market developing the process for selecting artists among the hundreds who apply.

Most cooperatives fail, Seriff said, because the members can't find consistent access to markets, or they don't share the same vision. But others across the globe have made profound differences in their communities by investing in education, health and the environment.

For the show, Seriff said she wanted to do more than exhibit a bunch of beautiful things from around the world. She wanted to focus on how women were fighting things like domestic violence, rape, suicide, hunger and war through their traditional art.

In many cases, they are struggling to keep their arts alive. "The next generation is moving to the cities and doing sex work," Seriff said. "Weaving baskets is not what they're into."

Each of the co-ops sent a sample piece for the exhibit — although not necessarily their most elaborate or difficult work.

Weavers from OckPopTok, a cooperative founded 10 years ago by a London fashion photographer and the daughter of a master weaver from the Mekong region of the Lao People's Democratic Republic, made a silk wall hanging that looks like a traditional prayer flag but incorporates contemporary weaving designs. The co-op, which grew from a one-room studio to a gallery retreat center and collaborative for more than 200 artisans, is now teaching the children of the weavers how to create designs on a computer.

Cheque Oitedie Cooperative in Bolivia submitted an example of a bag woven from the fiber of a bromeliad, garabatá fino. Inés Hinojosa Ossio, an ethnobotanist, is working with the indigenous women to sustainably raise the plant in a new location. Thirty years ago, the Ayoreo community was forcibly relocated by missionaries seeking to "civilize" them and the tribe found that the plant they used was almost nonexistent in their new home.

"The women are closely linked with this plant," Hinojosa said. And now they are now able to sell their bags in the international market at higher prices. (Each bag takes three weeks to make and the women previously were earning about $20 a bag.) At the market, she said, "Prices are better, and this is a good opportunity to maintain the culture."

From Rwanda come "peace baskets," woven from sisal, sweetgrass, papyrus, reeds, bamboo and other materials by female survivors of the 1994 genocide, which left a million people dead and hundreds of thousands of widows and orphans.

In the refugee camps, where Janet Nkubana grew up, the women took up their old culture of weaving baskets — when they weren't cooking and cleaning. The baskets were traditionally used to present food and gifts, "to give them more respect," she said.

Nkubana wondered how the women could turn weaving into a business opportunity. She helped found Gahaya Links Cooperative which has grown from 20 women to 52 co-ops and more than 4,000 weavers — both Hutus and rival Tutsis — across the country. Their baskets are sold at Macy's, and the Clinton Global Initiative bought 400 of them.

As a result of earnings from last year's market in Santa Fe, Nkubana said, four women bought cows, two put electricity in their houses and many bought goats, pigs and rabbits to raise.

Contact Anne Constable at 986-3022 or aconstable@sfnewmexican.com.