NAZO Offers Help for Self-Help

The German film-maker Elke Jonigkeit learned much about the difficult situation of women in Afghanistan while she was filming there. Now she's set up NAZO to help them and to promote the rebuilding of the country. Sigrid Dethloff reports.

In this year alone fighting in Afghanistan has cost at least 400 lives. But media attention has moved elsewhere. Other countries, above all Iraq, have moved into the foreground.

However the pictures of violence in Afghanistan have worried donors, among them aid organisations. They're holding back money they've promised for reconstruction.

Promoting self-sufficiency

A project called NAZO, founded by the German film-maker Elke Jonigkeit, is trying to work against the trend. It's designed to offer "help for self-help", to strengthen the self-confidence of Afghan women and to promote their self-reliance.

The name is that of an Afghan woman poet. Nazo Tohay lived around 1700 and led a national movement which led to the founding of the Afghan state.

Elke Jonigkeit has been making documentary flims in Afghanistan since 1985. Her last film, "The women of Kabul: stars in a burnt-out heaven," made in 2002, gave her the idea of founding NAZO together with the Afghan women with whom she had made the film. Many of them had told her the stories of their lives and their sufferings, and she'd developed a guilty conscience, since she was never able to give anything back to them.

Men control daily life

There are two NAZO organisations. NAZO Afghanistan was founded in Kabul in May 2002, while NAZO Germany was founded in Germany in January 2003. The German organisation puts on film shows, exhibitions, lectures, readings or even Afghan fashion shows.

Elke Jonigkeit collects money so that NAZO Afghanistan can work professionally. The women in Kabul, who have experienced the terrors of war and the horrors of Taliban rule, have the knowledge and the sensitivity to know what's possible in their own country.

Afghan daily life is still controlled by men. Fathers, brothers, hudbands and sons still decide what women may or may not do.

At its worst, that can mean that a woman may not leave her home even to go shopping or to visit a doctor, to go to school or to work. And certainly not to visit a tea-house.

Ninety per cent of women are still illiterate. They have an average of seven children, but 30% of them die in pregnancy or childbirth. Eighty per cent of children are malnourished and almost half of them die.

Women are the backbone of the nation

Elke Jonigkeit says that, in spite of the violence in the country, there's never been a time which has been so full of hope. And that's why the position of women must be strengthened now. She calls them the backbone of the nation.

She says that the country will only be rebuilt when women can feed themselves and their families and become independent of their menfolk. NAZO wants to make that possible by offering training and qualification for Afghan women.

In the two years since they were founded, NAZO Afghanistan and NAZO Germany have together built a training centre where women can learn to make clothes. New skills are to follow, for example, jewellery design.

In the centre, women are trained in business practice specifically tailored for Afghan needs, so that they can open their own businesses. There's also counselling in health, hygiene and legal matters. The centre has just opened its own kindergarten.

NAZO's aim is to help change the role of women in society. They should become aware of the fact that their welfare and that of their children lies in their own hands.

Sigrid Dethloff

Translation from German: Michael Lawton