For many women in Afghanistan, the barriers to putting food on the table are daunting: inadequate water and electricity services, poorly maintained roads, and minimal government assistance—all compounded by ever-present personal safety concerns—trap many Afghan women in poverty.

This generation of Afghan women—war widows, traumatized teens, and mothers simply holding together their households—also lives under the weight of oppression. Under Taliban rule, women were fired from jobs, removed from schools, forced to cover themselves from head to toe, and in many cases virtually imprisoned, barred from engaging with the outside world. Though the Taliban were driven from power in Kabul in 2001, ultraconservative values still prevail in many areas.

That context makes the success of the Surkhrod Packing Facility, in the Pashtun province of Nangarhar, all the more unlikely. Since 2006, this female-operated facility has grown from a modest vegetable collection center into a vegetable and fruit packing facility, where products are consolidated, graded, sorted, and packed, and then exported to domestic and international buyers. Trained and certified in sanitation, quality control, and food handling, these women operate the only Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP)-certified facility in the country.

The rise of the Surkhrod facility, a product of the DAI-led Alternative Development Program/Eastern Region (ADP/E) project, funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, has coincided with a decline in opium poppy farming in the province.

“Before starting to work here in the pack house, I used to work in poppy fields to support my family,” said Nainuma, a 40-year-old woman worker, through an interpreter. “Initially, I was scared to work here as in our community, women are not supposed to work outside the house. But when I realized that working here is safe for me, I changed my mind.”

The facility processes high-value vegetables including garlic, pepper, squash, chives, carrots, cucumbers, and lettuce for embassies and high-end supermarkets in Kabul and customers in Dubai, marketed through the Eastern Region Wholesalers Association under the Pride of the Eastern Region brand name.

The Surkhrod pack house is just one of the ADP/E initiatives that generate livelihoods for women in Nangarhar and elsewhere in eastern Afghanistan. For example, the program has:

Although most DAI-assisted businesses in rural Afghanistan are agricultural, ADP/E has also promoted culturally acceptable enterprises outside of agriculture. Nearly 200 such businesses owned and operated by women have been established since 2007 with help from ADP/E’s business mentorship program, which provides training, small grants, monitoring, and technical support. More than 90 percent of these businesses were still running as of June 2009. The enterprises—selected by the women themselves to fill market niches in their communities—include food shops, beauty salons, clothing stores, and bakeries.

ADP/E has also helped women in the eastern provinces expand their markets into the nation’s capital. For a week-long trade fair in Kabul, ADP/E helped women such as Sharifa Jan of Nangarhar by putting on transportation, assisting in craft design, and sharing marketing savvy in the set-up of exhibition booths. High-end retailers visited the booths and quickly began to discuss the feasibility of opening an eastern region handicrafts gallery in Kabul stocked with products from Nangarhar, Laghman, and Kunar provinces.

“I am pleased I got to attend the Kabul exhibit where I got many contacts, received orders from Kabul stores, and learned how quality work is important in the market,” Sharifa Jan said.

Meanwhile, back in Surkhrod, producers are earning an average of $1.70 per kilogram for their products: 25 to 125 percent more than they would from local sales. The facility’s 2008–2009 revenues totaled $510,000, or about $6,500 per week. “Here in the pack house,” Nainuma said, “I was taught new skills and I successfully learned them. In fact, with the establishment of the pack house, I and my family are being supported financially with a reasonable pay of $75 per month.”

Nainuma and her colleagues are now launching an expansion that will grow the facility’s vegetable processing capacity from 1,500 to 10,000 kilograms per day, multiplying the plant’s revenue potential and holding out the promise of sustainability well into the future.