Rural women to benefit from 14 new centres

Thousands of Afghan women are set to benefit from 14 women's centres set up by the Ministry of Women's Affairs with help from a project set up by the International Organisation of Migration (IOM) and funded by USAID. "The use of the centres will be largely up to the Ministry of Women's Affairs, but we can rely on there being income generation, literacy and health education projects," Jarrett Blanc, the programme manager for IOM's Afghanistan Transition Initiative (ATI), told IRIN, from the Afghan capital, Kabul. The US $2.5-million project, which will provide not only employment but also training and facilities for women, will be implemented by the ministry, which will decide on the provinces in which the centres will be established. "They are making a strong effort to make sure the centres are away from the major urban centres," Blanc said. Officials of the ministry and women's NGOs in the country welcomed the new project, to be completed in 2003, and said it was well overdue. Blanc said the most important thing about the venture was the fact that it constituted an opportunity for the women's affairs ministry to expand its role. "All the ministries are trying to find ways of having a stronger and more meaningful presence in provinces outside Kabul," he said. "They want to build a real presence in the field, and this creates an opportunity for them to find the right representatives in the provinces and get them connected with the ministry," he said. While providing a new lease of life for women, who were banned from education and the workplace under the Taliban, the centres will also provide focal points for future donors to fund projects more easily than before. The project is part of the IOM's ATI, which targets Afghan women and girls. With a budget of $2.2 in 2002, 33 schools, serving over 35,000 girls in 11 provinces, were rehabilitated under the ATI. In the northern city of Mazar-e Sharif, ATI supported a medical institute to enable it to train some 700 nurses, midwives, dentists, pharmacologists and laboratory technicians.