By Muzhda Mohammadi
A small domestic crisis provided the first spark that ignited a new career for Setara. She was home alone one night when the power went out, and she realised she had no clue how to fix the problem.
Today, Setara makes a living from her skills as an electrician, running a thriving operation making electric lamps specially adapted for Afghanistan’s often reliable electricity network — and she’s training other women to do the same.
The 40-year-old, whose real name we are concealing for her protection, used to work as a beautician before the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan and shut down the salons, depriving women of both a place to gather and a means of earning a living.
That was before a transformer burned out one night at the home she shares with her husband, an electrician. Sitting in the cold and the dark, she resolved to fix it herself and got her husband to talk her through the procedure over a call.
“He guided me on changing the fuse and connecting the input and output wires. I was terrified, but I managed to do it, and from that moment, I knew I wanted to work in this field,” she says.
It is perhaps not the most obvious choice of career for a woman living under the Taliban, arguably the most patriarchal regime in the world. They have banned women from all education above primary level and from most professional opportunities and training.
Yet her business has been so successful that Setara now trains other women in the work. “Even girls with no prior knowledge of electricity develop an interest once they start working here,” Setara says. “At home, women ignore this kind of work because they think it’s for men. But once they start, they find it fascinating and move forward confidently. They tell us how much they enjoy it.”
The lamps she produces are decorative, but they are also designed to operate reliably despite Afghanistan’s unstable power supply, working even in low-voltage conditions. Setara says they last longer than imported ones.
She set up her small lamp workshop in the western city of Herat five years ago with 5,000 Afghanis (about £60). Today, it is worth more than 600,000 Afghanis and its products are distributed in major cities across the country.
Currently, she is training at least 10 young women to assemble prefabricated components such as lenses, drivers and LED bulbs. They learn techniques like welding, soldering and using screw-fastening tools, to assemble the lights, which are then packaged in the workshop.
Some are highly educated and turned to lamp-making after the Taliban closed universities. But it’s not always a smooth path — one young woman’s family opposed her joining the workshop, saying electrics was men’s work and not for her.
“My family is Pashtun, and they didn’t agree at first,” says Liluma, a 25-year-old trainee with a degree in literature who has been attending two-hour daily training sessions at the workshop for the past two months. “But after several conversations with (Setara), they finally allowed me to attend.
“Staying at home for so long made me depressed,” she says. “This work is both engaging and educational. It’s helped me recover.”
Setara understands the work may not be the fulfilment of all her trainees’ dreams, especially those who’ve gone to university. But with most education opportunities now closed to women, she says it’s better than keeping them at home.
Her courses are free of charge and entirely practical. “I teach by doing, because electricity isn’t just theory,” she says. “In the first week, students learn to recognise the tools; in the following weeks, they manually create lamps. We provide the materials, and later they work with the machines themselves.”
Each training cycle lasts six months, after which participants can begin working in the workshop.
Setara says her team can produce at least 200 types of home and outdoor lamps, but three things are hampering their growth: a lack of capital, dependency on expensive imports from Iran and China, and rising rents since the return of refugees from neighbouring countries pushed up demand.
“We do most of our work by hand,” Setara says. “At the moment, we rely on LEDs and transformers imported from Iran and China. If I could get help, I’d buy pressing and die-casting machines so that we could produce everything from start to finish ourselves.”
Setara is proud that her initiative challenges the prevailing stereotype that labels technical and electrical work as “men’s work”.
“At first, people around me said, ‘This isn’t women’s work,’” she recalls. “But now I’ve created jobs for women and girls alongside me.”
