Warm glow of empowerment

Warm glow of empowerment
September 2003

Women's feature service

Afghanistan’s women-run bakeries managed by the World Food Programme (WFP) have been one of the remarkable success stories in the country, reports AUNOHITA MOJUMDAR
Until a few years ago, the Demazang area of Kabul city was a frontline caught between Masood’s forces shell-ing from the TV hill and the resistance put up by the Hazara leader Sayyaf based in this locality.

Today, Demazang lies in the margins - a bombed out hollow shell with hardly any signs of the rebuilding happening in other parts of the city. Located here is Bakery number 5 in the backyard of a small house, one of the few signs of continuity between the past and the present.

Run by the World Food Programme (WFP), Afghanistan’s women-run bakeries have been one of the remarkable success stories that have endured the years of the Taliban, beginning in 1996. The concept of the WFP bakery is simple. WFP surveys the poorest neighbourhoods and identifies the neediest ‘zero-able bodied’ families. These are families that have no male earning member, either because they have expired or because they have been incapacitated. Most of the households identified are those headed by war widows.

To run each bakery, WFP identifies approximately 15 women, who bake the bread and sell it - their means of a livelihood - for approximately 2000 Afghani or $ 50 per month (for each woman). The support to the poorer households does not end there. The bakeries sell the bread at one-third of the market price to the poorest families in the area, also identified by WFP.

To enable the women bakers to meet the costs, WFP provides the wheat free of charge.
Currently, there are 80 such bakeries in Afghanistan at Kabul, Kandahar and Mazar-e-Sharif. With 15 women in each unit, these bakeries support approximately 1200 families headed by women. The bakeries also provide bread to over 26,000 vulnerable households, each of which may have as many as six to nine members.

The success of the programme however, has created a huge demand both for the jobs and the subsidised bread. WFP has now set itself a target of expanding the number of beneficiary households to 60,000 by March 2005.

There is much more to the story of the bakeries than mere success. Four years after the bakeries were set up, the Taliban issued an edict (one of many) on July 21, 2000. The WFP bakeries which provided bread to 42,000 families at that time were included among the NGO projects the Taliban wanted to shut down. The Taliban decreed that men run the bakeries, or they bring the shutters down.
There was no question of having men run the bakeries since the rationale for the bakeries was to support women, who were not allowed to work in the normal professions, says Alejandro Chicheri, public information officer with WFP. So, WFP threatened to pull out and it looked as if the bakeries, which were shut down, would remain permanently closed.

It was then that WFP decided to use a small loophole in the Taliban’s edicts to their advantage. As women were still allowed to work in the health sector, WFP informed the Taliban that the women bakers would be trained as health workers, and knowledge of health services would be imparted to all the women who came to buy bread at the bakery. The Taliban agreed. WFP then taught simple health and hygiene tips to the women in the bakeries and they stayed open, says Chicheri.

Even today, running women’s bakeries in conservative Afghanistan is not easy and WFP treads cautiously. To buy bread, only women are allowed inside, a precaution taken to prevent the bakeries from becoming congregation points for men who might consider the widowed women easy prey and to let the bakeries carry on as structures of support and independent financial means for the women.

Take for instance, Parveen, who is employed in Bakery number 5. Being the owner of land and vineyards in the Shomali plains did not help when her husband died in a missile attack on his way to Kabul. Even though she had done most of the work in the fields (her husband was too old to do much work) before he died, she could not keep the fields without an adult male in the house.
With five children to feed, she made her way to Kabul, working in different households until she got a job in the bakery.

It is work that has protected her. Parveen recalls with pride the day she chased away the Taliban from the bakery. “I was being followed because they knew I worked in the bakery. They wanted to see the supervisor. I refused to allow them in. They could have shot me but I chased the Taliban away.”

Her co-worker, Zargona, had a comfortable life with her husband, a shopkeeper in Kabul. Six years ago, a missile tore through their house killing her husband and her 15-year-old son, and leaving her to bring up their four surviving children. She did laundry in houses, pulled her children out of school but the money was still not enough. They ate once a day and Zargona had to go secretly to the households where she worked (in a burkha) because women were not allowed to work in strangers’ households. A year and-a-half ago, Zargona found work in the bakery and it has changed her life. “Life is still hard”, she says, “but it is manageable.”

The bakery has given Zargona more than financial independence. It has also given her and all the women there, a sense of confidence. Bakery number 5 was host to Mohammed Ali last year when he visited Afghanistan as a goodwill ambassador. Today, the women there are sure enough of their standing to rib WFP’s Chicheri about his recent marriage. “Sweets!” they demand, unabashedly. He is an old friend and they have no compunctions in treating him like one.
Bakery number 5 has certainly come a long way since Parveen stood guard outside its door, against the Taliban.