Economic Empowerment of Women in Non-developed Villages of Armenia Armenia | University of Oklahoma

Ofelya Baghdasaryan (Armenia, University of Oklahoma, UWC Dilijan College)

Margarita Parsamyan (Armenia, University of Oklahoma, UWC Dilijan College)

The goal of our project was to investigate the means of living of families in five small Armenian villages bordering Azerbaijan: Voskevan, Koti, Barekamavan, Berdavan, Dovegh. The aim of the project was to create an economic platform for those women living in bordering villages to sell their handmade products and become financially independent from their husbands. The amount of money we received for the project was enough to start our intended project in five villages of Armenia, working with about fifty women. Finding those women was easier than we expected, because during one of the nationwide festivals, where anyone can sell handmade goods, we found an NGO called “Wool to Carpet” that was teaching carpet making to Armenian women living in villages, promised us to help. We visited their office in Yerevan and explained our program in detail. Since they have been working in different villages, they had a list of villages that they still planned to start teaching ancient carpet making. Lacking sufficient resources and money, they haven’t started their lessons in many villages, and we decided to pick five bordering villages and start our own project with them. We took a trip with the organization to those five villages and met the women willing to work with us. Bringing their interest to our initiative was very easy, as majority of them were already skilled and capable of making handmade products. The product that they were interested to make, and sell was carpet, as Armenia has an ancient carpet making tradition and its always valuable and expensive. We devoted two weeks of the month to learn how to make carpet with a teacher that we hired, and the other two weeks were for their practice and improvement. At the end of the month, we cut the carpet from the loom and we took it to “Metaksughi” hotel to sell. We had already arranged everything and paid $100 to “Metaksughi” hotel for a space for the carpets. This was all done with our grant money, however, at the end of the project, our partners promised us to keep the project going by supporting financially. They decided to pay a monthly fee of $100 to “Metaksughi” hotel for a space loan specifically for selling the handmade products of our project participants, and “Wool to Carpet” promised us to stay in contact with villagers and take their final products to “Metaksughi” hotel and sell it every month. The idea of giving resources and new opportunity for women to grow and become financially independent came from our experience of volunteering in villages during summers. Women have always wanted to sell their handcrafted goods and they actually made several attempts to take their products to Yerevan (because there is no market in villages to sell their goods), however they lacked transportation means, consistent venue to sell their products and constant support. So, we took an initiative to support the women to start their “home” market. In Armenian families, men have the highest responsibility to bring money home, while women, after marriage, become housewives because there are no jobs in villages for women to do. Eventually, women become financially dependent from their husbands, and they feel financially suppressed in the family. That’s the main reason, we want to empower women living in those types of families, mostly existing in bordering villages of Armenia. Throughout our entire lifetime, we have always witnessed women being suppressed in Armenian families and hence we were very motivated to protect women’s rights in the communities we live. Armenia is a developing country and actions take short time to make a change in bigger respect, so choosing Armenia as our destination country, was giving us a faith that our project will not only empower the women of Armenia, but also become an example for other developing countries to start a change. It was relatively easy to work in our home country, because there was no language barrier for successful communication. The biggest barrier was to motivate women to start working and making money. Majority of women never worked for money and it was hard for us to train them to be effective, hard-working and cooperative workers. They used to mix their personal life issues and responsibilities with their work responsibilities, and sometimes the work was being left incomplete. The carpet weaving teacher we hired for the project helped us a lot to shape the minds of the women by teaching them how to be professional at work. At some point, when we experienced loss of efficiency by women during their work, we thought that they will no longer continue making handmade products. It was taking a lot of time from them to finish their assigned number of products before the first market sale and they were complaining about wasting time and not earning money yet. However, after the first market sale, each of them received the money of their sold products, which motivated them to get back to work and earn more. There was no major issue when communicating with women, besides the fact that it was a little hard to work with people with conservative views about family member responsibilities. When at first, we met them and discussed the project with them, they told us that they need to confirm and ask permission from their husbands to join our initiative. In several cases, some women that we met disagreed joining us regardless of their huge passion to join, just because their husbands didn’t allow them to. Peace is a concept of equality, where people living in different communities have an equal share of the available resources. Due to the empowerment of women, we created a healthy and equal lifestyle in Armenian families in long-term. Furthermore, the purpose of peace in our project has been expressed by creating a more gender equal community. The short-term impact was providing workspace to women to make their own money and stop being dependent from their husbands. The project shaped our way of thinking as we realized that there is almost nothing impossible to do in this world. You don’t need to have profession to make a living as long as you have creative mind and you are willing to try new things. There are so many ways to change the way you live if you are not satisfied with it. We are so happy that the women we worked with were very open to take advantage of the chance that was given to them: that’s how they changed their life. (Margarita Parsamyan, Ofelya Baghdasaryan)

Picture 1: “Metaksughi” hotel gift shop, where the products of the project is being sold.

Picture 2: The mayor of Berdavan Village was very grateful for our initiative in their village. They thanked us with flowers.

Picture 3: The end of the workday in Koti Village.