Self Help Groups in Northern Afghanistan

In Faryab, Self Help Groups (SHG) established and sponsored by ACTED are giving active women in rural areas the means to start businesses, provide for their families, and ultimately improve their status in their communities. The participation of 11 Self Help Group members to the international Agfair in Kabul highlighted the curiosity and dynamism of these new businesswomen.

These women had never seen Kabul but at the international agriculture fair on October 7th and 8th, 2010, 11 Afghan women of all ages were actively promoting and selling their handicrafts at an ACTED booth to thousands of visitors. These women, members of Self Help Groups sponsored by ACTED, came all the way from rural areas of Faryab province, in the North-West of Afghanistan, to open themselves to new ideas, new tastes and new techniques in order to improve the quality of their productions and the lives of their households.

ACTED has been working with Self Help Groups since 2008

Since 2008, ACTED has been establishing and supporting women’s Self Help Groups (SHG) under a 5 year-long sustained rural development programme supported by the Royal Norwegian Embassy in the South of Faryab Province. Mobilizing these women to work in a culturally acceptable way is an effective strategy to reduce poverty and address core gender issues at the same time.

Thanks to ACTED’s interventions to date, 70 Self Help Groups have been established. A total of 1,540 women from vulnerable households are running small handicraft businesses through these groups. In order to gather these groups, ACTED began the programme with robust community mobilization and distributed grants amounting USD 3,000 (EUR 2,168) to each group, followed by the set-up of savings boxes with voluntary monthly contributions to buy raw materials and improve the quality of production. Field visits and targeted trainings (on gender, business and marketing, accounting, and new production skills) were also organized.

A long-term commitment

The success of these groups is largely a result of ACTED’s long-term commitment to these rural communities. Working with women in rural Afghanistan raises many challenges, as there is often a reluctance to change women’s roles not only on the part of community leaders and male relatives, but often from the women themselves. At first, these illiterate women did not feel confident in their capacity to use and improve skills they already had to provide for their families, or that they would benefit from working with other women of their community.

Women are now able to provide for their households thanks to their businesses

However, once the groups were established it did not take long for the women to understand the benefits of such a programme. All of the women in the groups are now generating income through selling their products (carpets, clothes, embroidery and tablecloths) both in shops rented by ACTED and directly in their neighborhoods. Women beneficiaries are able to buy food for their children, and as breadwinners, they win the respect of male relatives. Working with other women also breaks the isolation that many women feel when they are limited to household chores.

Among the SHG members, Zainab is a good example of active businesswoman. She already owned a shop before the project, it needed important repairs on the roof that she could not afford. ACTED supported these repairs and now she is selling candies, but also SHG products. In addition, she received training by ACTED on the use of solar panels and she will soon start promoting and selling these solar panels to others.

SHG members are further eager to find training opportunities or think through steps to support their own ideas. Participation to the international agriculture Fair in Kabul provided a tremendous number of such opportunities. This event is the largest and most important trade fair in Afghanistan with 106 companies and NGOs participating to expose their products. This year the fair attracted over 5,000 visitors.

During the fair, the SHG women visited women’s groups from other NGOs, and they saw an exhibition of products adapted to foreign tastes. For these women, it was a unique experience, as they had an opportunity to assess the quality of their products by comparing them with others, to gain a better understanding of what customers are looking for, and most importantly, to speak with active businesswomen from other Afghan provinces. They returned from Kabul to their fellow SHG members with the conviction that it was possible for women to run successful businesses, with the confidence that their products have a high value and with concrete plans to further increase both quantity and quality of their productions.

The Self Help Groups have improved Afghan women’s self-confidence

Self Help Groups will soon diversify their business activities, when they undergo training in soap-making and baking. ACTED regularly receives new applications to start SHGs in other villages on the initiative of women themselves. Unfortunately, the deteriorating security situation makes it increasingly difficult to find competent trainers willing to go to these remote communities, and for beneficiaries to go from their village to the district centre to attend trainings. Yet, even in areas difficult to access, SHGs are still actively running their businesses. More than the trainings themselves, the most important thing SHG members learned is that they are allowed to have goals and that they have the means to achieve them. This is something they won’t easily forget.