Sophia Swire

Swire is the daughter of Humphrey Roger Swire, a director of Sotheby’s,[1] who was a descendant of Sir John Swire, a 19th-century global adventurer, tea trader, and shipping magnate or Taipan, and Philippa Sophia, a daughter of Colonel George Jardine Kidston-Montgomerie of Southannan.[2] Her parents divorced, and her mother married secondly George Townshend, 7th Marquess Townshend.[3] She has three brothers, including Sir Hugo Swire MP,[2] a former Minister of State at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.[4]

She grew up in a mill house near Blandford Forum, and was educated as a day girl at a nearby boarding school, at Queen's Gate School in London, and at the University of Manchester, where she graduated in 1986 with a degree in art history and Italian.[1][5]

In the late 1980s, Swire worked for Kleinwort Benson in the City of London as a stockbroker,[5] but she left that career to set up her own business, with a focus on development work.[6][7]

In 1990, she launched and managed an ethical cashmere fashion business, Sophia Swire London,[8] and launched the international fashion for pashmina shawls,[9][8] after seeing them worn by actresses at a party of Imran Khan’s in Lahore, then finding a source for the shawls in Nepal.[1]

In 1993, Swire co-founded Learning for Life, an educational charity, acting as a trustee and chairing its board from 1995 to 2000.[10] This has established over 250 schools for girls in rural Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India, an achievement for which she was awarded the 2010 Award for Empowering Women in Pakistan.[11]

In 2008, at the invitation of Rory Stewart and Charles, Prince of Wales's Turquoise Mountain Foundation, she put her fashion business and life in London on hold and returned to Afghanistan to establish a school for jewellers and gem-cutters at Turquoise Mountain.[12] During the London Fashion Week, she launched the first contemporary Afghan jewellery collection for Turquoise Mountain, with the designer Pippa Small. The first students graduated in 2010.[13]

In 2010, Swire became the senior gemstones advisor to the Afghan Ministry of Mines and Petroleum, with funding from the World Bank.[14] She has campaigned with Global Witness, as part of the Publish What You Pay campaign, to implement a global policy for better governance of the mining sector, promoting transparency and to fight kleptocracy. She was an advisor to the Afghan Chapter of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative ('EITI").

In 2012, Swire established Future Brilliance, a women-led, Afghan non-profit organisation offering workplace skills and enterprise development training. She worked to revive the jewellery industry in gemstone-rich areas of the country.[15][1] The first Future Brilliance project trained 36 Afghan gem-cutting and jewellery artisans in Jaipur, India, and assisted them in forming Afghanistan’s first jewellery co-operative and brand, Aayenda Jewelry.[16]

Swire is a published writer, and has produced current affairs and history documentaries for the BBC and Channel 4.[17][18] Swire has spoken at a number of events and conferences in various countries.[19] In 2015, she spoke at the United Nations in New York for Women’s Entrepreneurship Day.[20]

In 2014, Swire stood as a Conservative candidate for South-West England and Gibraltar in the elections for the European Parliament.[21][22]