The Official Recognition
Savage Beauty Heritage, certifiedWhen an awards process concludes, there is the announcement, and then there is the certificate. One is public and immediate: a press release, a winners page, a social post. The other is the document that sits in the archive, that gets framed, that becomes the physical record of a moment that mattered. AfroWema's AIDA certificate for Fashion Design, Sustainable Fashion, has arrived.
The certificate certifies, in the exact language of the AIDA Awards, that Tatiana Teixeira has received this award for "Savage Beauty Heritage" design in "Fashion Design, Sustainable Fashion." Rosemary Ombeshi is listed as part of the design team. It is signed by three signatories: Bibi Seck as Head of the Jury, and Astrid Hébert and Hossein Farmani as Founders of the AIDA Awards.
Official AIDA Awards Certificate · 2026
Award
Fashion Design
Sustainable Fashion
Project
Savage Beauty Heritage
Company
AfroWema
Lead Designer
Tatiana Teixeira
Design Team
Rosemary Ombeshi
Issuing Body
Africa International Design Awards, 3C Awards · Switzerland
41
Jury members, 18 nationalities
300+
Submissions evaluated
1st
Inaugural edition, 2026
The Signatories
Three names on the certificateA certificate is only as meaningful as the people who sign it. The three signatories on AfroWema's AIDA certificate represent the full structure of the awards: the jury that judged the work, and the institution that built the platform to recognise it.
Bibi Seck
Head of the Jury
Senegalese-American designer whose practice spans fashion, product design, furniture, and architecture. One of the most internationally recognised African designers working today.
Astrid Hébert
Founder, AIDA Awards
French entrepreneur and co-creator of the AIDA Awards, developed through 3C Awards under Three C Group GmbH, a Swiss-registered organisation. Astrid built AIDA to give African-rooted design a global stage it had not previously had.
Hossein Farmani
Founder, AIDA Awards
Founder of the Lucie Awards (widely considered the Oscars of photography), co-founder of the International Design Awards, and one of the most experienced figures in design recognition globally.
The pedigree behind the certificate matters. The AIDA Awards are not a new organisation improvising its first event. They are built on the infrastructure of the Farmani Group, whose portfolio includes the International Design Awards and the Lucie Awards, two programmes with decades of credibility in design and photography recognition worldwide. That institutional weight is behind every signature on AfroWema's certificate.
"Our community of designers is not only growing, it is maturing, becoming sharper, more inventive, more rooted."
Bibi Seck, Head of the AIDA Jury 2026Astrid Hébert, on launching the first edition, described what the submissions revealed: that design rooted in African experience had surpassed every expectation the founders had set. For AfroWema, a brand that has always built from within its community outward, that framing is precisely the context in which this certificate belongs.
What This Award Certifies
Fashion Design, Sustainable FashionThe Sustainable Fashion category at the AIDA Awards is specific about what it rewards. The jury assessed every entry not only on aesthetic and technical merit, but on cultural resonance, sustainability, social impact, and innovation. These four criteria had to be present together. A beautiful garment with no social dimension did not qualify. A community project with no design rigour did not qualify. Savage Beauty Heritage qualified on all four.
The collection transforms discarded denim sourced from Nairobi's dumping sites, through a research partnership with Mr. Green Africa and the Bestseller Foundation, into contemporary garments built by hand in Kibera. Every stage of that process, from material recovery through to finished construction, is designed to be replicable and scalable. That is what the certificate is confirming: not just that the collection is good, but that the way it was built is worth following.
The certificate names Tatiana Teixeira as Lead Designer and Rosemary Ombeshi as part of the design team. The artisans whose hands built the collection, Grace Swalah, Sophie Aol, Tabitha Oyugi, and Samwel Mwangi, are documented in the full AIDA submission. The certificate and the submission together represent the complete record of who made Savage Beauty Heritage and why it was recognised.
The Ceremony
Cotonou, Benin · July 2026The AIDA Awards ceremony and its associated conferences are scheduled to take place in Cotonou, Benin, at the end of July 2026. The ceremony will bring together the inaugural winners across all four disciplines: Spatial, Product, Fashion, and Communication Design. AfroWema is among the confirmed attendees.
Cotonou is a fitting setting. As the economic capital of Benin and a city with a strong creative and design culture, it places the celebration of African design within the continent itself rather than in a European capital. The Africa Design School, a founding partner of the AIDA Awards and one of the institutions whose students contributed to building the awards programme, is based in Cotonou. The ceremony comes home.
When
End of July 2026
Inaugural AIDA ceremony
Where
Cotonou, Benin
Home of Africa Design School
Who
AfroWema
Among the winners in attendance
When We Shared the News
The certificate, postedWhen the official certificate arrived, AfroWema shared it directly with the community that has followed the brand's journey from Kibera to Madrid to the pages of Afrique Magazine. The post below was the first public moment the certificate was seen outside the brand. It belongs here too.
The Full Picture
Two prizes. One collection.The Sustainable Fashion certificate is one of two awards AfroWema brought home from the inaugural AIDA. Savage Beauty Heritage also won the Avant-Garde prize in the Fashion Design category, recognised by the same jury for a different dimension of the work: its refusal to follow the established rules of what a luxury collection should look like or be made from.
The two awards are not contradictory. They are complementary. One recognises the model. The other recognises the vision. Together, they describe a collection that operates at the intersection of principle and creativity, which is precisely where AfroWema has always positioned itself.
Certified. Signed. Worn for life.
The collection behind the certificate is available now. Each piece is one of a kind, handcrafted in Kibera, and officially recognised as a leader in Sustainable Fashion by the Africa International Design Awards 2026.