By Orooj Hakimi
KABUL, April 15 (Reuters) – A domestically grown e-commerce platform in Afghanistan is connecting distributors with clients around the globe, offering an necessary alternative for the war-torn economic system and galvanizing a brand new pattern of younger girls beginning up their very own small companies.
E-commerce website Click on.af began in 2016 to provide Afghans entry to a home on-line market, and final yr started delivery globally, based on its founder Masiullah Stanikzai. The thought behind the growth was to attach native designers and artisans to a bigger base of customers, he stated, primarily Afghans residing in the USA, the UK, Germany and Australia.
Twenty-five-year-old Maryam Yousufi jumped on the probability to attach with customers around the globe. She launched a trend line known as Machum on the location a number of weeks in the past and has acquired greater than a dozen orders for the garments she designs.
“I wished my firm’s merchandise to succeed in world markets … It is a huge achievement for us,” she stated.
Her garments fuse Western type with conventional Afghan design, together with her web page on the e-commerce website showcasing an array of girls’s clothes, from beaded and embroidered jewel-tone clothes to a modern balloon-sleeved mustard high. Costs differ from $12 to greater than $100.
Economists stated that regardless of poverty, corruption and poor infrastructure creating setbacks, Afghan e-commerce provides girls higher alternatives to interrupt into the world of enterprise within the conservative society.
“E-commerce is usually a highly effective device for bringing in higher positive factors to girls entrepreneurs because it addresses the outmoded limitations of geographic isolation and restricted entry to data and financing,” stated Lutfi Rahimi, a analysis fellow on the Biruni Institute, a Kabul-based financial think-tank.
Yousufi, who works on her enterprise at evening after her day job in media is finished, stated she believes on-line platforms can provide others like her an opportunity to attempt entrepreneurship.
The platforms will help girls in Afghanistan, the place the vast majority of residents stay beneath the poverty line, overcome hurdles equivalent to violence and instability, conservative attitudes in direction of girls, and the problem in getting credit score, Yousufi and specialists stated.
“I consider that younger folks shouldn’t at all times be staff of an organization or workplace,” she stated.
“They need to use their abilities and have their very own companies.”
(Reporting by Orooj Hakimi and Sayed Hassib in Kabul; Extra reporting and writing by Charlotte Greenfield; Enhancing by Tom Hogue)
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