Women's raisin factory provides jobs in conservative south

Clad in white, 16-year-old Zahrah carefully sorts raisins in one of Afghanistan's first food-processing factories. The factory providing employment to women in the southern city of Kandahar, the spiritual base of the nation's erstwhile Taliban rulers, who banned women's work and education. "I like working here, because I earn for my family and it makes me independent," she told IRIN. "Our life is better now, but I am sad that I was deprived of education during the Taliban's seven-year rule," she said. Earning some US $35 a month, Zahrah supplements her father's income that has to suffice for the family of nine. With mostly United States Agency for International Development and some British funding, the Central Asia Development Group (CADG), an international NGO with agricultural rehabilitation projects in southern Afghanistan, operates this raisin-processing plant providing employment to some 73 women and 15 men. The women work as processing specialists providing quality control measures such as washing, sorting and oiling raisins before packing for shipment. CADG refurbished a redundant plant exported from the US by an Afghan businessman in early 1980s. "Our effort is to address the gender imbalance in reconstruction by mostly employing women," CADG's chief executive, Steve Shaulis, told IRIN. Up until July 2003, CADG has exported some 450 mt of raisins, purchased from local farmers and processed in Kandahar, to Germany, the UK and the Czech Republic. CADG is in the midst of working to raise the exports to 1,000 mt next year. In times of prosperity, dried fruit was one of the key exports from landlocked Afghanistan, but a quarter of a century of war completely devastated the industry, as fruit trees, processing plants and transport infrastructure were wantonly destroyed. The fertile plains in the south produce fruits such as grapes, figs, apricots and pomegranates, and the redevelopment of this sector is seen as very important to economic rehabilitation. "I have learned that Afghan entrepreneurs need exposure to Western standards before they are unleashed into the Western markets, and this is an effort to create such a model," Shaulis said, adding that two decades of non-production had left no infrastructure coupled with a knowledge gap. CADG plans to eventually hand this factory over to Afghanistan's tiny fledgling private sector, and to create other such models. "We need value-added activities, and it's the only way ahead for meaningful economic reforms," he added. Kandahar's newly appointed governor, Yusuf Pashtun, is all praise for such efforts. "This is very good, but we need similar projects on a large scale," he said. The governor, a former town planner and architect, recognises the need for economic development and wants to create an industrial zone in this agrarian region. In another project, CADG is also providing employment to hundreds of displaced people in its groundnut-processing plant close to the Zahre Dasht, some 30 km west of Kandahar, which is home to some 60,000 mostly ethnic Pashtun nomads and farmers driven from their villages and communities by fighting and drought.