The Taliban have barred women entrepreneurs from selling their handicrafts and other artisanal products at a big trade fair in the eastern Afghanistan in Jalalabad city, according to visitors attending the exhibition.
They said men were staffing all the stands at the three-day event, which aims to promote locally produced goods, mostly made by women. Female visitors have also been banned.
The Taliban have barred women from most employment since 2021, but they are allowed to run small enterprises from home making handicrafts and food products. Many women depend on income from these cottage industries to support their families.
Fairs like the one in Jalalabad – capital of Nangarhar province – are one of the few places where women can market their products.
These include handicrafts like clothes, jewellery, handbags, hand-woven carpets, food items such as jams, chutneys, and honey, and agricultural produce such as saffron.
It is not clear how many women had planned to exhibit at the 80-stand fair which wraps up on Tuesday.
However, in pre-Taliban times, hundreds of women would have attended similar trade exhibitions to promote their businesses and to sell to wholesalers and individual customers.
Some visitors to the Jalalabad fair said the ban was unfair and had impacted sales of women’s handicrafts and the marketing of their products.
exhibition- Nangarhar province . Image: Rukhshana media.
Women elsewhere in Afghanistan have repeatedly called for special market places for women to help them sell their goods and develop their businesses.
A businessman at the fair, speaking to Rukhshana Media on condition of anonymity, said that women entrepreneurs were barely covering their basic living expenses and faced numerous difficulties due to the lack of markets where they can sell.
The Taliban’s local authorities in Nangarhar have not commented on the ban.
Sources in the northern city of Balkh, which hosted one of Afghanistan’s biggest trade fairs for locally made products over the weekend, said the Taliban had allowed women to exhibit at the show, but there were separate sections for women and men.
Male visitors were not permitted to enter the women’s section, and women were not allowed in the men’s section.
