The jeans on sale at Oxford’s newest shop, Exclusive Roots, are not for washing the car in. Elegant and beautifully-tailored, they look as if they come from the cutting tables of a Paris fashion house.

In fact they were made in a tiny factory housed in a shipping container in the South African township of Khayelitsha, part of Cape Town.

When the six seamstresses started making the jeans they had no electricity for the lights and sewing machines, so had to run an extension cable from a nearby house, guarding it continuously to ensure no-one tapped in to the supply. They now have power on site.

Exclusive Roots opened opposite Brown’s restaurant in Woodstock Road in mid-September. It stocks an impressive range of colourful, ethically-traded clothing for men, women and children, bags, jewellery, homeware, toiletries and toys, all made by hand, mainly in South Africa’s townships and poor rural communities.

While some products employ traditional techniques, and natural materials such as ostrich eggshell and mohair, they are all contemporary in design, and many surpass William Morris’s famous advice: “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful,” by being both useful and beautiful.

Every item has been made by enterprising people who have overcome many obstacles and shown enormous ingenuity in striving to earn a decent living.

Their stories are told through posters, postcards and labels, so customers know who has made what and how they will benefit from sales.

For example, the endearing model pigs and chickens, fashioned from elaborate ruffles of plastic sheeting, are made by Mawethu Naki, who lives in Phillipi near Cape Town.

Formerly a newspaper seller, he was badly injured in a car accident. No longer able to stand up all day, he taught himself to make animal models, but sold them through a wholesaler and earned very little.

By setting up on his own account he not only improved his own income but now provides work for six other people.

The shop also stocks a selection of food and beverages, notably the African Kitchen range, which includes delicious tomato and ginger jam and chilli coconut sauce.

These preserves are made from produce grown on smallholdings and processed by women co-operative members at Tsolo College of Agriculture in the Eastern Cape, the region of South Africa with the highest rates of unemployment and child mortality. The women use the income to support their families.

Exclusive Roots is the trading arm of the charity Tabeisa, a consortium comprising Coventry University and the University of Greenwich, and four South African institutions of higher education, including the Cape Peninsula University of Technology.

After South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994, they worked together to produce accessible, culturally-appropriate textbooks for African students of science and engineering.

Today the focus of Tabeisa’s work has moved to supporting social and economic development by helping people in the country’s most disadvantaged communities to set up their own businesses.

At Tabeisa Enterprise Centres in Cape Town, Durban, and the Eastern Cape, aspiring entrepreneurs are offered training and advice which enables them to turn their ideas into reality.

One successful initiative has involved ten graduates of the London College of Fashion.

Each spent a month with a small business in South Africa, collaborating with them to develop new designs that would appeal to customers in Europe.

Zoe Hodge and Zena Al-Adhab worked with women’s co-operatives in the Eastern Cape on attractive, hard-wearing aprons and oven gloves that use traditional fabrics in an innovative way, while Rachel Bell designed wire and bead jewellery with two Zimbabwean refugee craftsmen, George and Edmore. These products are now on sale in Exclusive Roots.

Tabeisa is also developing links with businesses in other African countries, including Kazuri, which makes ceramic bead jewellery in Kenya; Global Mamas, a group of 30 women’s co-operatives in Ghana making batik clothing, and tote bags from the discarded plastic bags in which purified water is sold — and Gone Rural boMake, a Swazi company producing woven grass table mats.

They also source gourmet coffee from Rwanda and Ethiopia and tea from Tanzania.

The Oxford store is the company’s second branch — the first opened in Leamington Spa in May. There is also an online shop.

Tabeisa’s director, Professor Jane Conlon of Coventry University, said it is essential to help producers enter mainstream international trade.

One way Tabeisa has encouraged this is by running the competition Design4Life Africa, challenging British and Ghanaian fashion designers to design batik dresses for Topshop. The winning designs were made by Global Mamas.

Prof Conlon said: “Exclusive Roots is about cutting edge design and beautiful products, ethically-traded.

“We have come to Oxford because we know how socially aware people here are. They know that they are not just buying a thing, but doing something that really affects other people’s lives.

“The communities supported by their purchases will also have a better Christmas.”