From the Ground up Case Studies in Community Empowerment
REBUILDING BROKEN LIVES After gaining Independence in 1991, Tajikistan endured economic collapse, civil war, and widespread hunger. To help rural people back on their feet, ADB financed a pilot microcredit-based livelihood project for women and farmers. Implemented through two international NGOs, the Aga Khan Foundation and CARE International, the experiment encountered many challenges, but produced several positive outcomes The women’s group composes a peaceful scene, without a hint of the tumultuous circumstances that spawned it. In a drab building in Vahdat district in western Tajikistan, a dozen women, mostly young, are bent over a long table, their fingers busy with embroidery. Along a wall behind them, older women are stitching a floral- patterned kurpacha, the thick, multipurpose Tajik quilt. Some of the girls are teenagers, who are only dimly aware of the horrors that followed Tajikistan’s unsought independence in 1991. But Zebo Oimatova, 52, a benevolent figure in traditional kurta (robe) and headscarf who is watching over the room like a mother hen, remembers it all—economic ruin, villages torn apart by civil war, the hardscrabble existence and, finally, a chance to rebuild shattered lives. In 2002, Ms. Oimatova, a warm-hearted woman of simple sincerity, was elected chairperson of a women’s federation, a community-based organization created under a pilot Asian Development Bank (ADB)-financed project to provide microcredit for women to start small businesses and farmers to improve crops. Despite being overawed—“I thought I could not manage the job because I am only average and not so well educated,” she confesses—Ms. Oimatova has seen her group grow from a handful to over 2,500 members and, importantly, become self-sufficient.
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