"The only remaining hope for women in Afghanistan is business." That is how one representative of female business owners in Herat described it to The New York Times in June 2026, in a report on Afghan women who continue to pursue entrepreneurship despite restrictions on employment and on girls' education beyond the sixth grade. The number of women running businesses is now estimated to be around ten times higher than in previous years: figures from the Afghanistan Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ACCI) put the number of formal business licences held by women at more than 10,000, against the 600 to 1,000 registered in the years before 2021.

This is the complex reality UNDP engages with every day, implementing one of its largest private-sector recovery programmes in one of the most challenging operating environments anywhere. We spoke with Doel Mukerjee, UNDP Afghanistan's Deputy Resident Representative, about the factors behind these developments and what they reveal about women's economic participation in the country.

The Times calls it a paradox: more women in business, fewer rights. How do you read it?

Both halves are true, and you can’t understand one without the other. More than 10,000 Afghan women now hold business licenses, about ten times the number five years ago, and the Afghanistan Chamber of Commerce thinks another 120,000 or so are trading without one. The World Bank finds small businesses are now the single largest employer of Afghan women.

But our own data shows fewer than 7 percent of Afghan women were in work as of 2024. So the rise in women-led businesses isn’t a sign that things are opening up. It’s what’s left after the other doors closed. Women who wanted to be engineers or lawyers are weaving carpets and making soap because that’s the path still permitted to them amidst restriction on women from traveling long distances or interacting with male clients, suppliers, or banking officials without a mahram; total sector bans -for example, the forced closure of commercial beauty salons alone which stripped an estimated 60,000 women of their livelihoods and access to finance constraints with less than 7% of Afghan women having access to a bank account, forcing the vast majority to rely entirely on informal cash networks, family savings, or international aid grants . We try to make that path wider and more profitable, while being honest that it shouldn’t be the only one.

What does UNDP’s response actually look like at scale?

It’s one of the largest private-sector recovery efforts we’ve mounted in any fragile setting. Since 2021 the programme has reached more than 90,000 micro, small, and medium enterprises with grants, equipment, and business services, run jointly with the UN Capital Development Fund, our Istanbul International Center for Private Sector in Development, and UNCTAD. Where we can measure it, enterprise revenues rose about 25 percent and the incomes of women workers about 15 percent.

The Times told the story of one of these businesses without naming us as more than a footnote. Nasira Azizi was 14 when the schools closed to her. She’s 19 now and runs two rug workshops in Mazar-i-Sharif with around 450 workers. Her business started with a UNDP grant, part of which was meant to create jobs for Afghan women pushed back across the border from Iran and Pakistan. The license is in her name. That’s the model working as intended.

You mentioned the Istanbul Center. What does that partner bring?

IICPSD is UNDP’s specialist hub for private-sector work, and Afghanistan is where its tools get tested under real pressure. Most Afghan entrepreneurs, and nearly all women, can’t use conventional interest-based loans, so the Center built finance products that comply with Islamic law instead, where the bank shares in the trade rather than charging interest. It has certified more than 80 Afghan finance professionals against the global Islamic-finance standard and run Afghanistan Islamic Finance Weeks in 2024 to spread that knowledge.

On trade, its mapping identified around USD 350m untapped agriculture export potential USD with 1.09 billion in untapped export potential across manufacturing, and minerals, which now informs the Doha Process through UNAMA. And UNDP/ICPSD training reached 792 businesses across trade facilitation and value addition tracks, including  240 women in the trade facilitation cohort, publishing exporter and value-addition guides in English, Dari, and Pashto so the material reaches people in the language they actually work in.

How do you get credit to businesses when the banking system is barely functioning?

Through guarantees, mostly. A US$1 million credit guarantee from UNCDF and UNDP, re-guaranteed through the Afghanistan Credit Guarantee Fund, has been leveraged several times over into MSME lending. By end of 2025 the facility was operating across 15 provinces, with a standing requirement that a meaningful share of that lending, at least a quarter, goes to women-owned or women-managed businesses. Thousands of enterprises have borrowed against it, sustaining on the order of 37,125 jobs with 13,254 women jobs.

In a country where women’s access to credit was thin even before 2021, getting women to a quarter or more of borrowers is hard-won. It’s also why I watch that ratio more closely than almost any other number we report.

Women’s economic empowerment runs through all of this. What do you point to?

The work, and the listening behind it. In collaboration with UNCDF, UNDP support has digitized Village Savings and Loan Associations (VSLAs), which are critical community-based financial mechanisms, particularly for women. Across four provinces, 1,667 digital group wallets were established, enabling AF 88 million in seed funding to be securely transferred digitally. With women representing 68% of participants, the initiative strengthened financial accountability while expanding women’s access to formal digital financial services. This has expanded access to digital and fintech solutions that allow businesses to receive payments and trade remotely without needing to travel to physical markets. UNDP has also,designed implementation toolkits for Sharia-compliant products built for women-led businesses, including Salam and Istisnah structures, which let a producer get paid up front for goods delivered later.

The evidence base for all of it is a study we published with IICPSD in April 2024, “Listening to Women Entrepreneurs in Afghanistan: Their Struggle and Resilience,” built on more than 3,100 interviews and carried out with the research group REACH and Türkiye’s TEPAV. It was launched with UNDP’s Crisis Bureau, the European Union, and Japan, and much of this work runs on EU and Japanese support. The findings are sobering: most of the women surveyed couldn’t even reach a local market without a male relative, and only a tiny fraction had ever received a formal loan. We designed the products around what they told us.

There’s a digital and technology thread here too.

There is, and for women who can’t move freely it matters more than it sounds. A joint UNDP–UNCDF fintech pilot, launched in March 2022, reached over 15,000 people, almost 3,000 of them women, and cut the time to receive a payment from seven days to under two, at roughly 30 percent lower cost. A woman barred from dealing with male clients or travelling alone can still be paid on her phone.

We’re also investing in skills that outlast the current moment. Forty Afghans, taught almost entirely online, graduated from a Frontier Tech Leaders machine-learning programme, and several have quietly started teaching others. We ran feasibility work for a green industrial park in Kabul to give manufacturers reliable power. None of it is loud. In this context, quiet and persistent is the point.

Where does the programming go next?

We want the finance to stand on its own. That means moving from donor-backed guarantees toward market-based Sharia-compliant lending that Afghan banks and investors can sustain without us carrying the risk indefinitely. We want to widen the digital rails, because every woman who can receive a payment remotely is a woman who can keep trading. And we want to keep listening, turning the next round of research into the next round of products.

At the same time, we are investing in the foundations of inclusive markets. This includes strengthening the capacity of microfinance institutions and financial service providers to design products that work in Afghanistan’s context with products that do not depend on collateral or credit history, but instead reflect the realities of informal and women-led businesses.

The women in the Times story built what they built largely on their own. UNDP’s part is narrower and more practical: make the capital reachable, make the payment systems work, and keep the door we can influence open a little wider. With our partners, and with the women leading it, that’s work worth continuing.