About us

The Indigo Dogon Center is a vocational training center located in the chief town of Dourou in the Bandiagara Region of Mali. Founded in 2011, since September 2017 the center is registered with the Ministry of Economy and Finance of Mali. Mamoudou Nango is the founder and director of the center. Member of the Chamber of Crafts of Mali, he is himself from the great dyer family of the Dogon Country in Mali and has extensive experience in the field of traditional Malian textiles. He is particularly known for his actions to preserve and improve the ancestral dyeing techniques practiced in his native region.

The mandate of the Indigo Dogon Center is to preserve traditional techniques, innovate new approaches, professionalize women dyers and train a new generation of textile artisans, improve their incomes, create jobs and market artisanal textile products from the Dogon Country. The Center’s medium-term goal is to create a distinctive line of indigo cotton clothing and home décor items that targets a diverse clientele from Mali, other African countries and internationally.

The Center works closely with the cooperative CAPID (Cooperative Artisanale pour la Promotion Indigo de Dourou), founded in 2009, which has a membership of 100 mother-daughter dyers living mainly in the communes of the Bandiagara region. Many young boys and girls are now part of the cooperative as trainee members who work alongside the more experienced members. The center also works with Malian tailors, stylists and designers and provides textiles to fashion designers in Mali, France and the United States. Dogon indigo textile products are now distributed on a modest scale in Canada and Belgium.