These dolls can easily be made for use as a club fund raiser, but they have the secondary advantage of raising self esteem by providing children with dolls that look like them.

This doll is from a local design used by a girls club in Njau, The Gambia. A stick is stuck in the top of a small milk can.  Scraps of cloth are wrapped around the stick to give the doll’s body some body. A ball of scrap cloth is covered and tied with brown cloth to form the head. The head and brown cloth is then tied to the stick. Arms, hands, and breasts are then sewn on. Cloths are made from scraps, and the hair is from the packs of hair extension from local bitiks. If scrap cloth is a problem, you can also collect and use kaypak, the silky substance that surrounds the seeds of the silk cotton tree.
 

Simpler dolls can be made by cutting and sewing person shaped pieces of cloth together, stuffing them with cloth or kaypak (the sliky covering of the seeds of the silk cotton tree). Clothes for the dolls can be made with scrap cloth, and the hair can be made using hair extensions.