Sewing the seeds of empowerment

Given a sewing machine and small seed money, women had established a home business earning Rs4,000 to 5,000 a month.

When I was young, I watched with fascination as my grandmother sat at her Singer sewing machine for hours and hemmed kameezes, made dresses for babies and dolls, and put zips onto trousers. I was in awe of the black frame with its gold embossed design, the treadle she operated with her foot, and the needle that flew up and down faster than my eye could follow. I didn’t know back then that I was looking at a tool for women’s empowerment, and that when I grew up, this tool might be the key to freeing Pakistani women from the chains of poverty in which they are as trapped today as they were when my grandmother was alive.

I read a recent article about a remarkable woman, Chand Bibi, who runs a school for girls in an Afghan refugee camp in Islamabad (“Beacon of Hope, Opportunity: Chand battles dark mindset, lights up girls’ future”, The Express Tribune, November 24). She teaches the girls in the camp basic Urdu skills and also how to sew, because she believes “Kapra (clothing) is a Pakhtun woman’s tool for survival.”

In Pakistan, where negative attitudes persist against women leaving the house to pursue a career, and where so many women are denied educational opportunities, sewing is the easiest work a woman can do from the home. The small amount of rupees she earns can lead to some amount of financial independence, the foundation for empowerment. When asked about her hopes for the girls’ future, Chand Bibi said, “I wish that when each of these girls gets married, they could get a sewing machine”.

Someone who agrees with this idea is Dr Ekhlaque Ahmed, the president of GEAR, a Karachi-based social business that gives micro-loans to people of lower income levels so they can establish “employment alternatives” that build self-reliance. I listened to Dr Ahmed at the recent TieCon Karachi 2012 conference, as he spoke about GEAR’s first project: using forty thousand rupees, the organisation gave four women in Korangi sewing machines as an interest-free loan. They weren’t sure whether or not the women would be able to make a go of the venture, so they wrote the money off as “sadqa-e-jaria”.

They were astonished to find that not only had the women established small home businesses that earned about four to five thousand rupees a month, but they’d also hired other women in their neighbourhood to do the work from their own homes. And they were able to return about four thousand rupees back to GEAR the next month. Dr Ahmed outlined the simple yet powerful business model one woman created: she received a sewing machine, approached the wholesale clothes market for raw materials, and employed four women to work for her. Now men and boys have also joined the businesses, resulting in a vibrant ecosystem of earning and empowerment.

This social entrepreneurship experiment had created a ripple effect that could go further than anyone could imagine. As far as transforming the lives of low-income women in Korangi, Baldia, and Orangi Town is concern, GEAR plans to capitalise on the momentum by collaborating with the government to create a training centre and provide sewing machines to 120 girls and women so they can learn professional sewing. GEAR will share profits with the Training Centre, and the women will feel a sense of ownership in the project, an element which has been proven to increase economic activity much more effectively than did simple aid or grants that nobody is expected to repay.

Dr Ahmed also spoke about the inspiration he gained from learning about a project in India run by Hindustan Unilever called “Shakti”, where the multinational corporation worked with a local NGO for empowering rural women in order to create a microfinance facility. Hindustan Unilever trained the women to distribute Unilever products in their villages. These women were called “Shakti Amma”, or powerful mothers, and fast became breadwinners in their families. The field is wide open in Pakistan for similar projects, and with its greater mobility and connection to large-scale businesses, could be a step further than small-scale home-based sewing businesses.

I made another stop at TieCon Karachi: a panel called “Woman Power”, where two leading women entrepreneurs spoke about the opportunities for women in business in Pakistan. Many of the young women in the audience wanted to know how to achieve the perfect work-family balance; a consensus soon emerged that if companies and organisations support their women employees with flexible hours and women take advantage of the growing day care facilities, women need not abandon their careers even while raising young families.

Still, a few people in the audience insisted that “a woman’s role is more important” (meaning: being a mother is more important than having a career). But this is something of a fantasy in today’s Pakistan, where our economic situation necessitates that women contribute to national growth in larger numbers than ever before. On a recent trip to the economically-thriving Far East, I saw women working not just white-collar jobs, but as bus drivers, taxi drivers, airport porters, and taking a great deal of pride in their ability to earn a living.

Pakistani middle-class morality somewhat desperately clings to the idea that women should concern themselves primarily with home and children. But upper-class women in Pakistan have always been free to choose careers while rural women have been raising families and working in agriculture long before Pakistan was created. Instead of fighting the tide, we should embrace it; it’s vital that we create means and ways of supporting our working women — no matter what part of the social strata they belong to — if we want our society to succeed as a whole.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 4^th, 2012.