By: Zabi Balkhi
They should be sitting in classrooms. But countless girls are instead sitting behind sewing tables or weaving carpets in carpet factories. They fear twenty years of achievements have gone back to year zero since the Taliban regained power.
Across Afghanistan, there has been a noticeable rise in the number of workshops for tailoring and weaving. Local people in Balkh province say most of the girls and women working in them have been denied access to school and university.
Seventeen-year-old Saliha Ghulami from Balkhi has set up five carpet weaving workshops for females. She says 70 percent of the 500 workers were barred from education.
Saliha was a 10th grade student in Mazar-e-Sharif. She’s been watching her father weave carpets since she was 14. He helped her set up the workshops.
“After secondary and higher education was banned, the girls stayed home and struggled with mental illness,” she says. “I understand what they’re going through because I am also a student. That’s why I decided to do this, to save them from mental anguish and to give them an income to help their families.’
The girls start getting paid once they’re trained.
“We weave carpets by the meter, the price of each meter of carpet ranges from 500 to 3,000 Afghanis ($6-35 USD),” Saliha says. “And we pay these girls according to their worth and work.”
Her Oqab-e-Balkh (Balkh’s Eagle) weaving plant in Sajjadia has about 120 girls training and weaving. Benafsha Amiri, an 11th grade student, started there after her school was closed. She is now working from six in the morning to 5:00 pm.
“I come here so I don’t get mentally ill,” she tells Rukhshana Media. “And I can help my father with household expenses.”
Saliha is not the only one to create weaving and sewing workshops in Balkh for women and girls.
Tashgozar manufacturing company, one of the largest manufacturers of carpet and women’s clothing in the north of the country, has provided training space for nearly 300 females. Eight out of ten have been denied education.
The workshop’s finance officer Maryam Pedram says 150 are weaving carpets and 120 are sewing.
“There are women here who lost their husbands, or their husbands are sick, and there is no one else in the family earning money,” she says. “We pay them 4,000 Afghanis for each meter of carpet, which helps them out.”
Nazila*, 16, is a 10th grade student busy weaving from morning to night at Tashgozar. “I was really affected when I couldn’t go to school,” she says. “So I decided to get a profession and keep busy.”
Last month, Richard Bennett, the UN special rapporteur on the human rights situation in Afghanistan, and Dorothy Estrada-Tanck, head of the UN working group on discrimination against women, published a report saying that the new Taliban government had adopted arbitrary actions that violate the rights of girls and women to education, work, freedom of movement, health, physical independence, decision-making and access to justice.
The report accused the Taliban of scrapping the nation’s legal framework and ruling with extreme misogyny.
Since the Taliban takeover, tailoring workshops have become one of the only profitable trades in Mazar-i-Sharif where women can find work.
Thirty-seven-year-old Sakina has been creating a sewing workshop for girls for two years. She now has nearly 30 girls, all of whom were denied education, but she can’t afford to use any more.
“All our apprentices are school and university students,” Sakina says. “Most of the applicants are young girls and educated women who can’t find work because of Taliban restrictions.”
Taher, 18, is a 12th-grade student who wanted to become a doctor.
“When the schools were closed, I had to start sewing, and instead of studying and going to school, I came to spend my day with a sewing machine,” Tahira says.
None of the girls we spoke to expect to resume education and several have had to pay for workshop training.
Jamila Ebrahimi, 38, has been running a sewing course for 15 years. She’s now teaching 35 girls who pay from 350 to 500 Afghanis ($4-6 USD) per month.
Meanwhile, the European Union says that Afghanistan is the fourth most risk-prone country for humanitarian crises and natural disasters.
The Taliban’s restrictions on women’s education and work have only deepened the crisis.
