While the grip of gender discrimination continues to tighten under the Taliban regime, denying basic rights to the female population, Afghanistan is witnessing a phenomenon that openly defies the paradox imposed by the regime: the exponential growth of women’s entrepreneurship. Far from being relegated to the mere role of victims, Afghan women are demonstrating extraordinary determination and resilience. As illustrated by Elena Noacco alongside Arianna Briganti, women’s ideas have translated into concrete realities ranging from catering and manufacturing to fashion, crafts, and agrifood processing, including small local pasta enterprises and the production of super-nutritious fruit juices. Noacco and Briganti are international aid workers and among the founders of NOVE Caring Humans, a non-profit organization founded in Rome in 2012 alongside Susanna Fioretti. Through their work with the association and in synergy with international networks and Italian partners, they have spent years supporting the silent resistance of Afghan women, promoting micro-entrepreneurship, training, and inclusion projects to overcome the bans and restrictions imposed by the Taliban regime. Since last year, the NOVE association has launched the Women Business Prize, a project dedicated to supporting female entrepreneurs and women-led business ideas, enriched by peer learning pathways to foster the mutual exchange of skills. In its first edition, the project engaged around 140 female entrepreneurs from 11 provinces, including the country’s most remote areas—an important milestone that testifies to the resilience and vitality of women’s entrepreneurship even in the most challenging contexts.
This economic momentum thrives precisely through a dense network of international cooperation, particularly thanks to the partnership between Italy and Afghanistan. Faced with severe restrictions—such as the prohibition against leaving home without a male chaperone or managing money independently—women entrepreneurs have reinvented themselves, leveraging cutting-edge digital tools and e-commerce to bypass these barriers. Many of them received their training in the two decades preceding the Taliban’s return and are now mentoring new generations. Unfortunately, with younger women locked out of higher education and universities for the past five years, peer learning circles and mutual support networks have become a vital educational and professional lifeline. The strength of this economic model also lies in its capacity for domestic and social adaptation. Many women produce goods directly from home, entrusting male family members with the task of taking them to market for sale. In this way, women’s enterprises often sustain entire households, making up for the dramatic lack of work affecting men in an Afghanistan choked by economic crisis and unemployment. The scale of these ventures ranges from small businesses with 6 to 15 employees up to medium-sized operations with as many as 50. Alongside the vast, traditional carpet-weaving supply chain, women are emerging as logistics managers and even heading construction companies. A group of young women, for instance, successfully runs an application for purchasing public transport tickets, proving how decisive female expertise is, even when forced to operate “behind the scenes.” Qasid, as the startup is named, is a digital logistics and ticketing platform launched in Kabul, designed to simplify travel and spare women from having to visit transport terminals in person, thereby cutting costs and circumventing the logistical hurdles imposed by travel restrictions. Operating with a mixed team, the platform’s female section handles services dedicated to women, while male colleagues look after male clients, working in separate environments in compliance with local regulations. This entrepreneurial fabric represents far more than a mere form of subsistence; it is a strategic pillar for the survival of the national economy. This fundamental recognition also echoes on the international political and diplomatic stage.
On August 26, 2026, the Embassy and Mission of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan in Rome hosted a gala dinner in honor of 23 Afghan women leaders gathered in the Italian capital for the “Afghanistan Dialogue and Visioning Process” (DVP), an initiative co-organized with the University of Notre Dame -Rome to foster team-building and reinforce shared goals. Launched in 2023 at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame, USA, the DVP is a participatory, decentralized, and non-partisan platform aimed at building a shared vision for a peaceful future. Through in-person and virtual meetings conducted under Chatham House Rule to ensure participant safety, the program has engaged roughly 210 professionals over the past three years, including politicians, diplomats, legal experts, activists, and media workers. The Rome event highlights the centrality of dialogue and acknowledges the crucial role women and minorities play in negotiating the country’s political future. By bridging everyday economic resistance within Afghanistan’s borders and international rights diplomacy abroad, the women of Afghanistan continue to chart the course toward a future of pluralism, the rule of law, and sustainable peace, proving themselves to be the true engine of change.
