Amina* is 40-years-old but looks like 60. Her husband died some years ago from overwork and age. Like so many Afghan women, Amina was married at 14 to a far older man. Today she lives with her ten children in a decrepit house on the outskirts of Lashkar Gah, the dusty capital of Helmand Province. Less than a year ago she had nothing to eat and was desperately ill with kidney and stomach disease. Her children wept with hunger and most of the tiny income she earned from embroidery, washing and other menial work went to pay her landlord. Amina does not know her last name because, like 90 per cent of Afghanistan’s women, she could neither read nor write.
No money, no food Today she can do both. She now earns enough to feed, clothe and provide for all of her children, can understand sums and knows the value of the education that poverty and ignorance once denied her. Her children all attend school. “My life is so much better than before,” she says. “Now I can pay the rent. Before I had no work and my children were starving.”
Fatima is 31. Beautifully turned out in a hand-embroidered hijab and elegant salwar kameez, one would never guess that a year ago she fasted for three months so that her six children could eat. “The children cried,” she says. “I had no source of income and no way to feed any of us. I could do nothing but watch them suffer.”
She too had lost her husband, but in the orgy of killing that preceded the fall of Helmand to Coalition forces. “The Taliban were almost finished,” she says. “But at that time they were killing everyone in the street and in the bazaar. They wanted to settle scores and that’s exactly what they did.” On that day her husband’s past caught up with him. A vegetable seller, he had once been a policeman. That was enough to condemn him to death and his wife and children to abject poverty.
Unlike Amina, Fatima could read a little but not enough to find work. Today she teaches embroidery and life skills at the Centre for Women’s Affairs in nearby Grishk where she comes from. She operates her cell phone with the dexterity of one who is completely at ease with numbers and technology. Her children all attend school.
Two women: supporting 16 children between them. Just over a year ago both were barely surviving. Today their lives—and that of their children—are radically different.
Small grants, big dividends Throughout the southern and eastern regions of this rugged land-locked country, USAID is supporting a small community grants scheme that is training thousands of women to embroider, tailor, raise poultry, pickle vegetables, make jam and tend vegetable and fruit gardens. It is humble work that is nonetheless yielding significant dividends—particularly when combined with the basic literacy, health and hygiene training included in the six-month curriculum.
Implemented through USAID’s Local Governance and Community Development (LGCD) programme, these programmes require only small sums but, because they target women, have a huge impact.
“When you help a woman you also help her children and her family,” says Mohammed Fahim, LGCD Helmand Provincial Stabilization Manager. “It means that she can feed her children and send them to school. The skills she learns helps many. If she learns to read then she will teach her children and encourage them to go to school. If she learns about basic health and hygiene her entire family benefits.”
Behind a glossy desk in Helmand’s Department of Women’s Affairs sits Fawzia Ullami. A dignified woman with a searching gaze, Ullami is not only the Minister of Women’s Affairs for all of Afghanistan but also the Director of the USAID-refurbished Women’s Centre where many of the project graduates now work.
It is a peaceful place, a spartanly furnished sanctuary amid the dust and disorder that lies just outside its bare walls. Inside are classrooms, offices, training rooms and a large garden where students are wooing pomegranates, cabbages, lettuce and other vegetables from soil rendered fertile by punctured hoses that snake through the beds and drip water into the dry alluvial soil.
Great benefit but even greater need Under the Taliban, Ullami operated a number of clandestine girl’s schools in Kabul until death threats forced her to retreat to Pakistan. In 2001 she returned and is working hard to reverse the tide of discrimination and violence that has engulfed Afghanistan’s women.
“The need is so great,” she says. “These USAID programmes are very effective but we need to do far, far more.”
“The women of Afghanistan are now working, they are leaving their homes and going to school but for so many conditions are very bad”.
Lashkar Gah feels like a frontier-post. A city of low walled buildings cobbled together with mud brick, it squats as if in the middle of nowhere. From a distance it looks like a pile of rubble. Yet out of the dust and dryness, its’ hard-working and self-sufficient population of mostly native Pashtuns somehow manage to coax vegetables, fruit and—to an increasing degree—opium poppies from its uncompromising earth.
But instead of a greenbelt there is only a graveyard. A vast one of newly shaped hummocks, watched over by a flapping army of tattered flags attached to bent poles of hastily cut wood. It is here where the husbands, brothers, fathers of so many of the women who attend the USAID-funded training courses now lie.
Afghanistan has one of the highest ratios of widows in the world—1.5 million for a population of 26.6 million according to Beyond 9/11 a US-based non-profit organization that supports Afghan widows and their children. Officials however, estimate that the numbers are in fact, far higher.
Divorcees also face an uphill battle. Under Islamic law a man need only repeat “I divorce thee” three times and he is divorced. In addition to the stigma of being rejected by her husband, divorcees are left with little to no legal recourse and no means to earn a living.
“Many of the women cannot travel. They cannot leave their homes. Widows are in a particularly bad state,” says Ullami. “They are living with parents, brothers and other relatives who do not want them and cannot afford to keep them or their children. They need skills and they need work.”
Since January 2009, 190 of some of Lashkar Gah’s most disadvantaged women have passed through the centre’s doors and, six months later emerged with skills that will help transform their lives. Both the vocational tailoring and kitchen garden programming have been combined, respectively with basic literacy and health and hygiene training.
Upon graduation, participants received a sewing machine and for those who did kitchen gardening, a tool kit and seeds. The project paid for all transportation costs to and from classes.
Nasleema is 28, but like many impoverished Afghan women looks far older. Married at 14, her husband abandoned her for another woman and ordered her out of the house. With no other recourse she moved with their six children into her father’s home—a tiny dwelling that includes her mother, father, their children, in-laws and grand children. Nasleema received nothing from her husband and struggles daily to earn enough to feed her children.
Today she spends her days tailoring clothes at the centre and earns enough to support her family. The youngest children attend classes in the morning and the eldest in the evening. “We are all learning to read and write,” she say. “I’m working for my children and for their future.”
By any measure, this type of vocational training has been a success. Nevertheless, there has been resistance—often among those families that still include a husband and father. “We have two types of societies in Afghanistan,” Fahim says. “In one, women can work and go out. Husbands and fathers understand that if women work they help the entire family towards a better life. In the other, we have to go to them. To their homes.”
As for the former, well, Fahim reports that he is witnessing something that he never thought he would see in his lifetime. “Right now we have some families where the husbands are staying home with the children so that their wives can learn to read, write and earn an income”, he says. “Yes, it is true.”
According to Fahim, what surprises programmers most are how well graduates do when asked to tackle government exams. “Most of them graduate into the advanced class,” he says, grinning. “It is amazing.”
* The names of students and development officers have been altered to protect their identities