Economic Empowerment of Widows Through Enterprise Development in Pakistan

The project aims to economically develop and empower the selected widowed families of District Bagh through enterprise development within a duration of 5 months by April 2018. It primarily focuses on the economic development of widows through provision of a solar powered sewing machine along with a solar lamp and mobile charger to aid in the market accessibility and continuous labour. Islamic Relief will provide training to the beneficiaries to enhance quality of the produce (i.e. one month training on cutting, stitching and basic embroidery) and make it sellable in the open market. The training cost will be charged to innovative funds. The prioritized beneficiaries are widows whose children are sponsored through IR’s Orphans Sponsorship Program (OTO) and those widows in District Bagh who fall under zakat category. They will be linked to the sale points in local market afterwards. A villager in rural Pakistan spends on average 14% of their monthly disposable income for alternate lighting . Furthermore, the lack of electricity hinders economic development, in both on grid and off grid areas, due to either regular outages, which leads to delay in production or require additional manual labour and therefore divert the efforts of poor entrepreneurs from lifting themselves out of poverty. Economic development of widowed families will consequently lead towards improved health and nutritional status and education of these widows and their families. It will not only introduce livelihood opportunities but will extend the working hours per day which resultantly increase and sustain the household income. Moreover, the solar light will benefit the children in their studies during load shedding. The selected families will be imparted training on cutting, stitching and basic embroidery or the quality of their existing skills will be enhanced. This project requires a strong collaboration both with a commercial partner and also IR’s Orphans Sponsorship Programme. The existing OTO team will extend support to project staff for execution of project activities. To make it sustainable, IR will build linkage with the commercial solar energy company to develop, install, and provide after sale service of the product to the orphan families in District Bagh, state of Azad Jammu and Kashmir.