One Woman’s Battle to Improve Afghanistan

Lauryn Oates – The Epoch Times – Friday, 1 April, 2011

WOMEN'S DAY: Afghan women attend in a gathering to mark International Women's Day at Babur garden in Kabul on March 10. Image: The Epoch Times via Shah Marai/AFP/Getty

KABUL, Afghanistan—Mariam Sadat is one proud woman. She’s proud to be Afghan, proud of her country’s progress in the last decade, and proud of the famously good fruits and nuts that grow from Afghan soil.

That’s why she called her rapidly expanding company the Afghan Pride Association. While it’s a profit-making enterprise, it’s also a network of 350 women across three provinces in Afghanistan. The women are farmers and they are using state-of-the-art solar technology that Mariam acquired to process high-quality dried fruits and nuts native to Afghanistan, like pistachios, almonds, raisins, and walnuts. Mariam sells the packaged products to shops and hotels, and she regularly does the exhibition circuits in Kabul.

Traveling around the country to train women farmers for the council, she witnessed how women in agriculture toiled long hours but then earned little income in return. Women were involved in every single stage of processing, from the planting, harvesting, and sorting to the processing, and yet they had no control over their incomes and no access to the markets where the products were eventually sold. Their husbands kept the money that came from the women’s labor. . .

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