NEW YORK — During the five years Afghanistan was ruled by the Taliban, the country was stripped economically, losing what little industry it had and becoming heavily dependent on the illegal opium trade.
After that government was toppled by U.S. forces in late 2001, international aid began trickling in, with foreign charities and governments offering donations to try to help the nation’s 28.5 million people begin the climb out of poverty. Today, the country has an annual per-capita income of $700.
To support that effort, next month a group of 18 Afghan women who have begun working in the apparel business since the Taliban fell will be coming to Seventh Avenue for some intensive training in fashion marketing and business management, in a program called the B-Peace Style Road Trip.
Their trip is being arranged by a volunteer organization called the Business Council for Peace. According to Toni Maloney, the chair of the group’s governing council, B-Peace’s goal is to help “what we call the fast runners, the women who already demonstrate survival skills and an intuitive business sense…They’re in the best position to really accelerate job creation and that’s what this is about. It’s not helping one woman, it’s the multiplier effect.”
The women in the program have already developed a cottage industry of small garment shops, employing some 450 Afghanis, many of whom have traditional embroidery skills and work out of their homes. B-Peace, which has some 130 volunteers, mostly current and former Western executives, started to reach out to Afghanistan last June when a group of volunteers traveled to Kabul to find women who needed help in developing small businesses.
“We’re not looking to Westernize what they’re doing at all; we’re looking to help them establish a stronger local market for their product,” Maloney said. “Afghans don’t even buy Afghan apparel, they don’t perceive it right now as good a quality as what can be imported. For export, they can never compete with India and China, that’s not what we want to help them do. We want to take that Afghan flair and inject a little more quality into it.”
According to Central Intelligence Agency estimates, Afghanistan’s annual exports of all products excluding opium come to just $98 million a year. The nation shipped no apparel or textiles to the U.S. last year, according to the Commerce Department.
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Throughout the developing world, apparel manufacturing — an industry that requires little capital but large pools of labor — has served as a critical first step in economic growth. In the conservative Afghan culture, the ability to do piecework at home has allowed many women to get jobs that would otherwise be difficult to find.
Rangina Hamidi, one of the Afghani women participating in the program, was born in Afghanistan but her family fled the country in 1981 while it was occupied by the Soviet Union. Hamidi, who was educated and raised in the U.S., returned to Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban, where she started an apparel business in Kandahar.
“If my family had not escaped the multiple-decades war, I would also be in the situation that most Afghan women are in today — uneducated, caged by the patriarchal culture and no access to opportunity,” Hamidi said in an e-mail interview. “It is my responsibility to now give back to the women who have suffered so much.”
Her business employs about 300 women, who produce embroidered garments for the local market. The women who work for her rarely leave their homes, so Hamidi spends much of her time shuttling raw materials to her workers and picking up their finished apparel.
On their visit to Manhattan, from May 21 through June 10, the women are expected to meet with industry experts, including instructors at the Fashion Institute of Technology and executives at Cynthia Steffe and Eileen Fisher. In addition to learning business principles like pricing and profitability, Maloney said the goal is to broaden their understanding of the importance of marketing.
“They have a very different concept of customer,” said Maloney, who is also a marketing consultant. “They’ll say, ‘I’m making all these, but I don’t have any customers.’ So we’ll try to reorient them to the customer being first and focusing on what your customer wants.”
Another goal of the program will be to help the women find financing for their firms to allow them to buy modern sewing machines and accumulate sufficient working capital.
Laurie Chock, a B-Peace volunteer who is also making a documentary film about the program, called “Threads,” noted that another goal is to encourage the women to cooperate more closely with each other on business matters.
“The women use manual sewing machines,” she said. “If they wanted electric sewing machines, couldn’t they share a generator with another woman?”
Hamidi said that as Afghan women’s chances to earn money grow, so does their influence in the country’s future.
“Because women are contributing to their household income, their value in the family life has increased,” she said. “Women can make decisions in their families because they are now earning.”