When Afghanistan society has skilled a great many good changes over the recent past, not every afghan can advantage equally from a majority of these improvements. In rural communities, this marginalisation manifests itself through insufficient access to education, technology, equipment as well as other livelihood enhancing opportunities, with women playing a really limited role in household-level decision-making.

Offered how agriculture still represents the backbone of Afghanistan’s non-urban economic conditions, ACTED puts this industry at the center of its interventions which target decreasing poverty and enhancing the status of women.

40% of Women headed households are food insecure as against 27% male-headed households.

78% of Afghans living in Non-urban Locations are employed in agriculture.

Given the low levels of literacy and numeracy in Afghanistan which disproportionately affect women, ACTED’s agricultural interventions also have given fundamental literacy and numeracy classes for more than 1,900 women across five provinces (Kunduz, Samangan, Laghman, Kunar, and Nangarhar).

Alongside their literacy and numeracy training, ACTED brings women into Self Help Groups (SHGs), giving a strong network of peer help around a shared activity (such as running a greenhouse or handling a particular area of land). ACTED provides each group with a particular business and management training over the course of six months in which the courses are responsive to the selected activity and the knowledge gaps of group participants.

ACTED also worked with numerous members of farming cooperatives in Kunduz province to professionalize their internal administration depending on a prior assessment of their learning requirements. Courses on economical administration and business planning ran alongside mandatory courses on gender equality.

Absolutely nothing educates as fast as demonstrable results. That is the reason ACTED applied the ‘Farmer Field School’ approach in its agricultural training. Over 2,000 agricultural workers (of whom 374 were female) participated in trainings which used demonstration plots to show the application of proper cultivation techniques and the big difference they create to enhancing yields and crop resilience.

Once they had finished their training, combined members got new farming products to the worth of $3000 per cooperative which they are able to currently utilize to put the recently learned methods to work.