Opportunities expand for empowered Afghan women

KABUL, Afghanistan | Hassina Syed owns six companies in her own name and is rapidly building a small business empire.

Nasrine Gross defies all expectations by walking the streets without a head scarf and teaching basic literacy to husbands and wives — together.

Razia Jan is educating Afghan girls and, in a second role, helping provide work and well-being for female weavers in some of the country’s most impoverished communities.

These three women, each in her own way, are smashing centuries of convention and forcing Afghans to think in new ways about the role of women in a country that has some of highest female illiteracy rates and poorest maternal health outcomes in the developing world.

Less than a decade after the ouster of a Taliban regime that refused to let girls go to school or women walk the streets without their husbands, these women are taking a lead in tackling some of Afghanistan’s biggest long-range problems; the future of the country may depend on their success and that of others like them.

“One of the things I often find frustrating about discourse on women in Afghanistan is that the women are much stronger and play much more a role in society than they are credited with,” says Alexander Their, director of the Future of Afghanistan Project and senior rule of law adviser at the Washington-based United States Institute of Peace.

Nowhere is that more evident than in the field of microcredit, in which individuals are given small loans — enough to buy a cow or a loom, for example — so they can start small businesses out of their homes.

The microfinance companies that issue the loans say they have their greatest success working with women, who almost invariably repay what they borrow. One government-run lending agency, the largest in Afghanistan, grants 95 percent of its loans to women, and 99 percent of those loans are repaid.

The U.S. government is also aware of the potential. It has allocated $27 million that soon will be distributed in small flexible grants “to empower Afghan women [private organizations] at the local level,” according to Melanne S. Verveer, the U.S. ambassador at large for global women’s issues.

“Women have more social obligations in terms of keeping up the honor and prestige of their families,” explains Afghan-born Barnack Pazhwak, a program officer with USIP. This makes women more responsible citizens than men, he says.

But Afghan women assert themselves, as these three do, only at their peril.

Objections — and the risk of violent attack — are so strong in some circles that the wife of President Hamid Karzai — a trained gynecologist who could serve as a role model for other women — does not practice her profession and never appears in public.

For that to change, says Ms. Verveer, “There clearly has to be will at the top and heart at the bottom.”

Hassina Syed

There is plenty of heart in Ms. Syed, the 27-year-old founding president of the integrated Syed Group of Companies through which she personally manages six separate enterprises.

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