Social Justice Day: A bus brings entrepreneurship lessons to Afghan women, house to house

The possibility of starting a business, of opening and managing small businesses, is an important step towards women's emancipation in any context, and even more so in a country like Afghanistan, where gender equality is currently a distant mirage. In conjunction with the World Day of Social Justice, which falls on February 20, an initiative is being launched that aims to provide concrete support to women living in the poorest neighborhoods of Kabul. The project has been renamed Brave Business in a Bus , and is the first mobile incubator for women's entrepreneurship in the country, conceived by Selene Biffi, founder of She Works for Peace , and created thanks to OTB Foundation , a non-profit organization of the Only The Brave group (an Italian holding company that controls the brands Diesel, Maison Margiela, Marni, Viktor&Rolf and Jil Sander, of which Renzo Rosso is president and founder).

Brave Business in a Bus is a mobile station, a minibus that will travel around the outskirts of the Afghan capital, offering women who work from home comprehensive and free training programs , including hands-on training and the ability to access essential tools for running a business, providing technical assistance and access to small machinery. It is estimated that in six months, the initiative will assist over 1,000 women-run micro-businesses by offering courses on marketing, accounting, product development, sales management and much more.

Women at work in Afghanistan

Many women have started small home-based businesses in recent years, as the possibility of finding a job has drastically decreased after the Taliban took power in 2021, imposing laws that have severely limited (to put it mildly) women's participation in many sectors of public life and the world of work. For over 15 years, Selene Biffi has been involved in projects related to creating jobs for them: "In such a difficult context," she says, " female entrepreneurship becomes a fundamental key to allowing Afghan women to take back control of their destiny and, at the same time, contribute to the reconstruction of the local economic and social fabric." The strength of She Works for Peace lies in the fact that it includes entirely local staff , "people who have a clear and determined vision of the situation and who Afghan women can trust," says Arianna Alessi, vice president of OTB Foundation.

Since its inception in 2006, OTB Foundation has invested in over 350 social development projects around the world, which have had a direct impact on the lives of approximately 350,000 people. The non-profit has long been active in Afghanistan, where it has already implemented projects such as Pink Shuttle , the first and only all-female transport service created in Kabul to resolve the obstacle to women's mobility, and Fearless Girls to provide legal, psychological support and educational activities to Afghan girls detained in juvenile prisons accused of having committed "crimes against morality" (i.e. for having escaped forced marriages or other types of violence). It has also contributed to the creation of a male orphanage in Kabul, and to the opening of the first public orphanage for girls in the province of Kapisa.