Hasna is 33 years old, lives in Herat and started tailoring when she was 15. During the republican government, she had a shop in the Herat women's market. Once she had saved enough money to hire other women, she started a real tailoring business. She spent part of her savings on training and attended several training courses in Iran to learn the best sewing techniques for wedding dresses.
Carrying out this activity today in Afghanistan is not easy.
The restrictions imposed by the Taliban on women had a strong impact on my business: clients decreased and I lost a lot of professional staff that I had trained myself; some have fled the country, others do not dare to work under the Taliban government. Added to all this is the obligation to be accompanied by a Mahram everywhere, which greatly complicates the activities.
The financial crisis that Afghanistan is going through is a further obstacle. People cannot afford to spend so much, the price of raw materials is soaring and some machinery cannot be found.
Despite everything, however, Hasna's business is going well. She manages to make fine clothes, training and giving work to other women. She specializes in producing good quality bikinis at an affordable price, and exhibits its products at exhibitions in Herat and Kabul where she is concluding several contracts with other shops.
It's all about hard work, she thinks, but little does she know that it's much more than that.
NOVE supports women's entrepreneurial activities in Afghanistan. With the project “Vocational Training, soft skills development and business marketing course”, financed by World Food Program and concluded in 2022, NOVE offered specialization courses in female professions that are still permitted, combined with courses for the development of transversal skills and entrepreneurship. 53% of women graduates have found a job or opened a small self-employed business.