Ten men and women are taking part in the program this summer. Mkasi Juma, 21, center, and Rahma Mohammed, 35, right work with instructor Tricia Morris at Purple Door in Jamestown.

The Providence Journal / John Freidah

NEWPORT — In the workroom of a master jeweler on Bellevue Avenue, three oceans away from their native Zanzibar, the women in flowing robes crank sterling silver wire through a roller that will stretch and thin it, little by little, to the thickness of a nickel.

With encouragement from Will Drake, the master jeweler at Three Golden Apples, the two women, Safia Ali Jecha and Mwanakhamis Abdalla Ali, will fashion the sterling silver into a tiny web that mimics the structure of Indian Ocean coral.

The silver setting will make a natural complement for a half-pearl, also known as “mabe pearls,” harvested in the waters off the women’s coastal villages by men who support their jewelry-making through the Zanzibar Women’s Pearl Shellcraft Cooperative.

Through a unique program spearheaded by the University of Rhode Island, they are apprenticing at the jeweler’s workbench for several days this summer. They say the opportunity has helped them see the possibilities of moving up in life.

Until a few years ago, the women’s aspirations extended no further than Ali could walk from her native Bweleo village; her world circumscribed by an income of a few hundred dollars a year.

But in 2005, a chance observation made by a pearl expert from the University of Hawaii-Hilo sparked dramatic changes in the lives of Jecha, Ali and others.

Rahma Mussa Mohamed, a mother of three, says she and her husband used to bring home about $40 a month from his fishing and her wood-cutting and charcoal-making.

Today she makes $100 to $300 a month from the shells of oysters, which she pries from the mud flats under her feet at low tide in Menai Bay.

With an ordinary metal file, she buffs the mother of pearl to a high sheen and uses a hacksaw to cut out stars, ovals and other shapes for earrings and pendants. She can polish two shells by hand between breakfast and lunch.

With her husband’s permission (customary in Zanzibar’s Muslim culture), she has traveled to a neighboring tourist island to sell the mother-of-pearl earrings and pendants, which radiate with a unique golden luminescence.

Speaking Swahili through a translator Mohamed recalled how she once thought fussing with the oyster shells was a waste of time. But her husband told her to “give it a try,” she said. She has since bought him a canoe with her earnings.

The newfound wealth was the result of a three-year-old program funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development to improve the quality of life in coastal villages of Zanzibar by encouraging a sustainable marine eco-system.

The program, dubbed SUCCESS for Sustainable Coastal Communities and Ecosystems, involves the Coastal Resources Center of the University of Rhode Island, the Western Indian Ocean Marine Science Association, the Institute of Marine Sciences in Zanzibar and the University of Hawaii-Hilo.

In 2005, Maria Haws of the University of Hawaii was visiting Zanzibar and noticed the women of coastal villages harvesting the meat of oysters to feed their families but throwing the shells away.

“She said, ‘You are not using all the richness’ of the bivalve,” recalled Narriman Saleh Jiddawi, a marine biologist with the Institute of Marine Sciences in Zanzibar.

The SUCCESS program has fostered the women’s shell-craft enterprise, as well as the culture of mabe pearls in the oysters farmed largely by the men.

Through word-of-mouth in the close-knit jewelry industry, the owner of Newport’s Three Golden Apples, Daniel MacDonald, learned of the cooperative’s first mabe pearl harvest in 2006 and bought all of it.

MacDonald, who owns an out-of-state jewelry manufacturing business in addition to the retail store in Newport, crafted jewelry out of three of the mabe pearls and returned them to Zanzibar. There, the three pieces fetched a total of $3,600 at auction.

All the proceeds from the pearl harvest were re-invested in the oyster-farming and shell-craft cooperative, said Jiddawi, the Zanzibari marine biologist.

In Zanzibar, where over-harvesting had depleted stocks of bivalves and other marine life, the enterprise has helped the participants see the economic advantage of sustainable fishing, said Elin Torell of URI, manager of several economic development programs in Tanzania, of which Zanzibar is a part.

Building on the SUCCESS program in Zanzibar, the U.S. State Department brought 10 participants — six women and four men — to the United States this summer for six weeks of entrepreneurial work-study and cross-cultural exchange.

Since their arrival in mid-July, the Zanzibaris have been fanning out from their base at the URI Coastal Resources Center in Narragansett.

While the women expand their jewelry-making repertoire at Three Golden Apples and Erica Zap Designs in Newport, as well as the Purple Door in Jamestown, the men are working at American Mussel Harvesters in North Kingstown and Matunuck Oyster Farm, learning how they might improve their own harvest of cultured half-pearls, also called button pearls or mabe (mah-bay) pearls.

In classes at the Coastal Resources Center, both men and women are learning shellfish sanitation and the business end of oyster farming, including the marketing of jewelry and systematic methods for setting price points.

“We have a perfect opportunity here,” Torell said.

“Rhode Island is a jewelry capital of the world. We have oyster farmers and a history of bivalve culture, as well as citizen involvement in environmental protection.”

“You would think that Africa and Rhode Island would be very different,” she said, “but when you get down to the local cities and towns there really is that connection.”

The cultural program has featured such events as a Pawtucket Red Sox game, a pow-wow with the Narragansett Indians and a three-day trip to New York City, where the Zanzibaris visited a jewelry trade show, met the Tanzanian attaché, and toured Harlem and the United Nations.

In New York, “We cannot look up. We cannot look down. If we look down, we get dizzy. If we look up, we get dizzy,” said Jecha and Mohamed through the translator, the marine biologist Jiddawi. And yet, they said, they were impressed with the many people in Harlem who looked like themselves and appeared to be very comfortable in that environment.

In October, the Zanzibaris will play the role of hosts as 10 of the American volunteers who donated their time and expertise during July and August pay them a return visit during the second half of the State Department’s cultural exchange program, Torell said.

A fundraiser featuring a raffle and silent auction highlighting jewelry made from Zanzibar half-pearls will be held Tuesday at 6 p.m. at the East Greenwich Yacht Club, 10 Water St., East Greenwich, by the New England Chapter of the Women’s Jewelry Association. Tickets are $35. RVSP by e-mail to kgolembeski@cox.net.

gmacris@projo.com