For the past three years we have been funding a training programme for widows in Kabul Afghanistan
...After learning about my rights I am going to ask rights of my children from my husband’s family. Despite of the fact that they threaten to kill me
Widows shame Canada into restoring food aid: Silenced by Taliban, women reclaim their voice
KABUL, Afghanistan
In a country where women couldn't speak out in public until recently, let alone show their faces on the street, a small group of Afghan widows has persuaded a foreign government to backtrack on a multimillion-dollar spending decision made half a world away.
Thousands of poor women, whose husbands were killed during the civil war that preceded the U.S. invasion, have helped pressure Canada into restoring $2.5 million in annual funding to a project that's supplied them with food aid since 1996.
The widows planned to stage a public rally in Kabul today - astonishing in itself - to draw attention to Ottawa's decision, made this year, to quit funding the program as of next month.
When word of the protest reached officials in Ottawa on Friday, the Canadian International Development Agency abruptly announced it would finance the program for another year.
"We are widows. We are all wondering what will happen to us without this food," said one Afghan woman, speaking through an interpreter in Kabul yesterday while collecting food rations - split peas, powdered milk and soya oil - from boxes stamped with the Canadian government logo.
Many of the widows had not yet been told by CARE International, the aid agency that administers the food project, that Canada had reversed its decision to pull funding from the program.
"We appreciate receiving this food," said the woman, who would not give her name. "We don't want it to end. We pray all the time for the government of Canada to continue our food."
CIDA's initial decision to stop supplying food - to focus instead on skills-training projects for the widows - had alarmed aid workers at CARE. More than 7,000 Kabul widows, many of them destitute and illiterate, rely on the monthly rations to feed themselves and their children.
The project had been popular in Canada. It even drew a visit to Kabul four years ago by the wife of former deputy prime minister John Manley.
Continued …
Paul Barker, a U.S. aid worker who directs CARE operations in Afghanistan, said he first heard about Ottawa's change of heart on Saturday. He said it was probably the result of weeks of pressure from several sources, including the widows' own plans for a public rally.
"I suspect a demonstration would have been an embarrassment for Canada," he said yesterday.
"When the Canadian government learned about it, I received a call from a CIDA official in Kabul, who was very concerned about this demonstration, and said to me, 'Please, try to head this off.' "
Although CARE officials had encouraged and organized the rally, the fact that a group of poor Afghan women would take part in an all-female public protest shows a startling change from the bleak years when the Taliban ruled Afghanistan.
Girls and women were barred from schools and workplaces, and forbidden from going out in public without a burka, which covered them from head to toe.
On Kabul's dusty streets today, many women still wear the burka. But there are also signs of transformation: young girls walking to school with books under their arms, women working in stores, hotels and markets, and others wearing stylish dresses and high heels, their faces uncovered.
Among the widows in CARE's food program, a painstaking process of empowerment is under way. With additional funding from Canada, CARE is running skills training and micro-credit projects, where women are being given chickens to sell eggs, or sewing machines to open their own seamstress businesses.
Groups of widows who are now making small income, have been organized into savings co-operatives, where members can apply for modest loans.
"There's freedom now for women," said Rana Haidari, one widow who belongs to a savings co-op.
"We send our children to school. We can work outside our homes. We can wear the burka, but it's our choice."
RICHARD FOOT CanWest News Service
6 March 2006
Montreal Gazette
Copyright © 2006 Montreal Gazette
From WRI Newletter 7