However, as soon as these women heard the news about the Taliban's takeover, they were shocked and started reliving their experiences of the Taliban’s earlier rule - from 1996 to 200.

An Afghan women selliing jam made by women in Kabul

These 10,000 Afghan women trained by the SEWA who comprised the country’s biggest women’s alliance were once poor, widows and single-house earners from the capital Kabul, Kandahar, and other provinces.

They were left impoverished firstly due to a long war between the Soviet military and the Mujahideen and later infighting among the local warlords. The war left many widows, and orphans and pushed families into poverty.

The Taliban’s first rule made women cover their faces, vanish from public spaces and workplaces, and face punishments like stoning to death, and the world watched the women suffer.

After the Taliban was overthrown and an elected government led by Hamid Karzai took charge o the country, life started changing for women. India and Afghanistan signed a memorandum of understanding in 2004 for mutual socio-economic cooperation.

At this stage, the Indian government approached Elaben Bhatt, whose NGO had made women workers' cooperatives a force to reckon with in India for helping Afghan women.

Kabul women Women getting trained in making Bakery items in Ahmedabad

SEWA’s senior coordinator Manisha Pandya says when they met these women in Kabul in 2007 for the first time, they looked terrified and were not optimistic about life and the future.

It took the SEWA team comprising Manisha Pandya, Pratibha Pandya, and Megha Desai one year to boost their morale and emerge from the shadows of their past.

Manisha Pandya, Pratibha Pandya, and Magha Desai, who were associated with SEWA’s Afghan initiative say they first did a survey in Afghanistan and zeroed in on three areas: embroidery, food preservation and processing, and flower cultivation.They said that initially 35 women were selected and invited to Ahmedabad for a Train the Trainer program. These women went back to Kabul to start the work of mobilizing and training women.

In the first four years, a SEWA team stayed in Kabul for three months to be replaced by another with an overlapping phase of a few days to maintain continuity.

Motivating the women was the hardest part for SEWA as these women had barely come out of the shadows of an oppressive regime.

“They faced a lot of problems; their families were hostile to their working outside the homes; the markets didn’t value their work and menfolk were forbidding them from moving out for training and association,” Manisha said.SEWA officials started inviting their menfolk to the meetings and gradually conditions improved.

They also spoke with retail businesses and markets to make sure they bought their products.

Soon the women started doing well, they set up a business center in Kabul, and their stuff was in demand in the markets. They participated in exhibitions in India.