KABUL: The US and its allies have put promoting women’s rights at the core of their 12-year mission in Afghanistan and Liza Ghausi Nooristani has profited from their intervention.
She is one of a few women in conservative, male-dominated Afghanistan to set up and run a relatively big company — in the mountainous eastern war zone. She has been undaunted by the danger and death threats and her construction company has been building schools, roads and government offices, largely paid for by aid money that followed the arrival of US troops.
“In the eastern part of Afghanistan, which is dangerous for security, I was the first woman to have a construction company, and I travelled without a bodyguard or gun,” said Nooristani, Chief Executive of her Mutaharek Construction Company.
She won her first contract in 2007 to build a village school worth $10,000. Since then, her company has handled many projects, with the biggest worth $800,000. Now Nooristani faces the prospect of the withdrawal of Western troops.
For Afghan women in general, the exit of most foreign troops by the end of next year could mean a slip back in the rights they have managed to secure over the past decade. For Nooristani, a round-faced woman with sad eyes, the withdrawal of forces and aid programmes also means a sharp fall in business.
“As soon as the provincial reconstruction team left they stopped projects,” Nooristani said, referring to military-civilian teams set up to consolidate military gains with development.
She is not only going to miss projects but also the Western way of doing business. “I won’t take a project from the government because the government’s people are corrupt. The government does not think women have any worth, nobody has time for females ... they just say women are just for the home to wash their clothes.”
An official for the USAID development agency said Afghan businesswomen were still “outside the inner circle”. While they had made progress, they faced difficulties in doing business in a very bureaucratic system largely run by men. “Licences for exports and other permits are the main concerns of women.”
The agency has launched a $200m programme to help women aged 18-30 build up skills and create more than 3,500 small businesses.
Nooristani has her enemies, some of whom object to her doing what she does because she’s a woman. “First of all the Taliban, but also common people, because of the way they think,” she said.
She has received death threats and escaped a bomb attack. Despite the danger, her husband and six children support her, while her sisters — housewives — admire her. But some relatives take a dim view of her work. She spent part of her childhood in Pakistan to escape Afghanistan’s interminable conflict. She later studied at university in Kabul and New Delhi.
She is driven, she says, by her determination to help women in the countryside gain access to education.
With development projects drying up, Nooristani has set up New Lalazar Limited, which supplies and services office equipment, mainly to foreigners in Kabul.
If the new business founders, she said she would return to her home province of Nuristan in the east to help the people, perhaps teaching in the schools she built. “The people there don’t know a car, they don’t know electricity because they don’t have it, so I’m going to work for those people, I’m going to help out those people.” Reuters
