| Nicole Caldwell |
Infiltrating a conservative culture like Afghanistan in order to help women is no small feat. To do so, one must maintain, above all else, a fundamental
respect for the people and their traditions.
So says Toni Maloney, co-founder of the New York City-based group, Business Council for Peace, or BPeace. She and several other business-savvy
American women make it their mission to promote peace in war-ravaged countries like Afghanistan by focusing on women there.
“We first of all respect the culture,” says Maloney, a rosy-cheeked woman in her mid-50s. “We make sure that we are dressing appropriately as
women. We wear headscarves while we’re there, the only skin that shows is our face, our hands and our ankles, we wear loose-fitting clothing. We
have cars and drivers and translators, so we’re always moving about in a car or van, we don’t walk on the street. Depending on which mission and
which time of year, we don’t go out after dark.”
Members of Bpeace volunteer their time to help women in regions of conflict and post-conflict start businesses. “It stemmed from taking a look at the
world,” Maloney, who helped found the group in 2002, says. “And [in] realizing that in these regions of conflict and post-conflict that women were often
marginalized. We believe that business can be a route to peace. When people have jobs, when they have hope for their families, they’re going to be
less interested in waging war and more interested in waging peace. More jobs mean less violence.”
The timing could not have been more perfect. Under the Taliban, women conducting business of any kind were subject to beatings and death
sentences. BPeace’s founding in 2002 depended on the removal of the Taliban. Still, Maloney believes that the push to bring more women into the
workforce would likely have begun anyway.
“I think that when we tell the story of more jobs, less violence, people get that right away. So BPeace might not have been born, but eventually
someone would have come to this ‘a-ha’ as well. If you look at New York City during the dot-com era, crime was at its lowest.”
Adhering to a politically neutral stand, Maloney says the idea for the group came soon after 9/11. “Afghanistan, post-9/11, was on everybody’s radar
screen,” Maloney says. “We felt women had the least to lose and the most to gain. If we could work with women, Afghans would be more interested in
pursuing a path of economic independence.”
But how, then, to find the right women?
The group uses the power of referrals from other women the group has helped, or organizations that work closely with BPeace, like the Afghanistan
Ministry of Commerce, the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), and the Afghan Women’s Business Council. Everyone – referred
or not – must pass stringent criteria. BPeace is specifically interested in what it calls “fast runners: high potential women, literate, already in business,
and who demonstrate an intuitive business sense.”
First, a woman must already be in business in some capacity. Second, she must already be literate in her own language. (This point isn’t as easy as it
sounds: the literacy rate for women in Afghanistan is 14 percent, according to a 2004 study by UNICEF.) Third, she must really want to help her fellow
Afghans. “They must want to not just make a living for themselves and their family, but to help those around them,” says Maloney.
When Maloney and her fellow volunteers travel to Afghanistan, money is always an issue. “We pay our own way,” she points out, “so people are
basically sacrificing their vacation money to make the trip. In this way, donors know that any moneys they give us are going directly into the program.”
But because these are businesswomen we’re talking about, Maloney says that operating “leanly and efficiently” is not a problem. “We don’t have a
physical office space, for example. We work virtually [online], and our meeting spaces are always donated. For our conference calls, we use a service
where every individual caller gets billed.”
The money BPeace gleans from donations and grants goes directly toward the women Maloney and others try to help. It costs about $15,000 over 3
years to have an Afghan woman in the program. “That money goes to cost share, English and computer lessons, which she needs in today’s
environment,” she says. “We pay 2/3 of that cost, the associate [businesswoman] pays 1/3.” Leftover cash goes toward staff costs in Kabul and New
York, where people work as translators and liaisons to the cause.
There are obvious challenges to BPeace’s efforts, particularly the challenge of long-distance mentoring between the U.S. and Afghanistan. “It’s very
difficult,” Maloney says, “and we’ve put together a mosaic of resources to make this better. The barriers are language, technology and culture.”
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