The Mercy Corps Blog

Blog Post Posted August 13, 2009, 2:20 pm by Nancy Lindborg

Today's Afghan businesswoman

Storai Sadat, a former Mercy Corps employee, is the Executive Director of Ariana Financial Services. While Mercy Corps founded Ariana, it is now a completely independent organization. Mercy Corps continues to advise Ariana, and heads their board of directors. Kabul, Afghanistan. Photo: Miguel Samper for Mercy Corps

I first met Storai in early 2001 when she worked in our Kabul office part time. After the fall of the Taliban, she started attending medical school part time, but when offered the opportunity to work on women’s programs, she jumped at the chance. Before long she was leading the charge on new and important initiatives, and when we started a new microfinance institution to provide desperately needed access to credit to women entrepreneurs, she jumped into the fray.

Since then, Storai has grown into the confident and competent leader of Ariana, a microfinance institution that provides small loans to 9,800 clients, 65 percent of whom are women. On this visit, eight years later, I was able to visit several of those businesswomen, with Storai striding confidently ahead of me on the dusty streets of Kabul.

Our first stop was to visit Nasreen, an enterprising entrepreneur who embroidered pillows and baby clothes as well as offering bridal make-up services. She ushered us into her home, through a courtyard and small hallway into a room of purple splendor. A bed in the corner was plumped with her handiwork – purple satin pillows, stitched and flounced, a case of baby clothes stored below. A mirrored make-up table displayed all the ways she could make a bride beautiful.

Nasreen is a member of a loan group with a current loan of about $540 – her fifth from Ariana. With these funds she buys materials and markets her services. And her business has thrived. With the money she has made from her business, she bought the house we visited, now a home for her six children as well as her business center.

We then visited Asfa, a baker who sits cross-legged in a small elevated room tucked inside a private courtyard, in front of her tandoori oven. She feeds flattened lumps of dough into the open pit. With the outside temperature in the mid-nineties, she seems unfazed by the heat, her head wrapped in a bright red scarf. Long finished loaves of the flat bread are stacked around her, as well as the bowls of neatly covered dough brought to her from housewives in the neighborhood for her to cook.

Asfa is now on her third loan from Ariana, with a $400 loan she now uses to buy more flour and firewood. She makes a daily profit of about $8, nearly double from before. She uses the money to support her five children and two grandchildren, including sending four of them to school. She has dreams of buying the shop she now rents and expanding her production. And, notes Storai, "She has never been late on a payment."