Afghan women turn to businesses as Taliban restrictions deepen
Forced out of school and most jobs, Afghan women are turning home businesses into a lifeline, even as Taliban rules choke off capital, markets and mobility.
Afghan women are building businesses because the Taliban has shut off most other paths to work, study and even ordinary social life. Since the takeover in August 2021, women’s rights groups say the government has issued at least 70 decrees and directives targeting women and girls, stripping away public space as well as opportunity.
That exclusion has pushed entrepreneurship from a choice to a survival strategy. A United Nations Development Programme report released in April 2024 found that suppliers, shopkeepers and wholesalers were often reluctant to do business with women-led enterprises because of the policy environment. The same report said 80% of women-led businesses depend on business revenue as their main source of income, and many also provide jobs for other women.
The Afghanistan Women’s Chamber of Commerce and Industry says the number of registered businesses rose from 600 big companies before the Taliban takeover to 10,000 businesses afterward, most of them small home-based operations. That shift shows how women have adapted to restrictions by moving work behind closed doors, where they can still earn money while avoiding the public scrutiny that now shadows women in markets, offices and streets.
The broader picture is one of enforced withdrawal. UN Women said nearly 80% of Afghan women ages 18 to 29 are not in education, employment or training, compared with 20% of men. The agency said the Taliban’s 2024 Law on the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice further hardened those restrictions, and none of the decrees limiting women and girls has been repealed. The result is a generation of young women pushed out of formal life and into whatever economic space remains.
Some Taliban officials, including the commerce minister, have said they want to support female businesses, especially in carpet weaving, handicrafts, dried fruit and saffron production. But those limited openings sit inside a wider system that still bars most women from public life. In Afghanistan’s deepening economic and humanitarian crisis, business has become less a sign of empowerment than a workaround for exclusion.
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