Making masks for rural communities in Tajikistan
Aga Khan Foundation
Tajikistan · 16 November 2020 · 3 min
AKDN / Christopher Wilton-Steer
This page is also available inRoziyamo Kabirova lives in a remote village in the scenic Wakhan Valley, in Ishkoshim District of Tajikistan that borders Afghanistan and Pakistan. She enjoys the unspoiled natural beauty of the valley. For most people, Vrang village is very isolated and disconnected from the rest of the world. They don’t have the Internet and phone lines are often spotty.
But Roziyamo wouldn’t trade her life for city comforts. She begins her day at the break of dawn, makes breakfast for her family of six, tends to her little garden and then takes her cattle to open pastures to let them graze freely.
By 8:00 in the morning, she’s at her workplace, where she leads a women’s group that usually sews school uniforms and other items of clothing for a living. But these days, Roziyamo and her group of nine seamstresses are sewing cloth face masks instead. While there have been no cases of COVID-19 in Vrang village to date, Roziyamo believes that she and her community need to be prepared for it.
Thrive Tajikistan helped Roziyamo get a licence from the Government of Tajikistan, enabling her team to sell its masks to the general public.
AKDN / Christopher Wilton-Steer
Stopping the spread
“I first heard about COVID-19 on TV in early March and then again through neighbours. But back then, we didn’t think it would come to Tajikistan. Sadly, by April, the Government declared cases in our country, too,” said Roziyamo.
When the Government sent out a call for organisations to produce masks for the country’s use, Roziyamo and her team wanted to pitch in. “We didn’t know how to make face masks or have the right fabric. But we knew masks [would] help with stopping the spread of the virus so we wanted to learn how to make them,” shared Roziyamo.
Through Thrive Tajikistan: Partnership for Socio-Economic Development, a programme of the Aga Khan Foundation in partnership with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Roziyamo’s team received a grant, the training to produce face masks according to international quality standards and materials like fabric, threads and elastic bands. Thrive Tajikistan also helped Roziyamo get a licence from the Government of Tajikistan to sell the masks they produce to the general public.
In May 2020, Roziyamo and her sewing team put aside their usual activity of sewing clothes and began producing 150 face masks a day.
AKDN / Christopher Wilton-Steer
Meeting the demand for affordable face masks
Thrive Tajikistan partners with communities across 16 districts in Khatlon and Gorno-Badakhshan regions along Tajikistan’s border with Afghanistan. The programme helps people improve their quality of life by catalysing small and growing businesses, improving access to financial services and strengthening local governance.
By the beginning of May, Roziyamo and her team were all set and had started making 150 face masks a day. By the beginning of June, they had already made 5,500 masks. “The demand for masks is greater than the supply. It’s also not easy to find masks that are for sale. And when they are available, a mask usually costs anywhere between 5–7 Tajik Somoni (US$ 0.44 - US$ 0.62) while we are selling them for only 3 Tajik Somoni (US$ 0.27) each,” adds a proud Roziyamo.
Roziyamo is thankful she can play a role in keeping her community safe from the COVID-19 pandemic. “My greatest wish is for this to be over soon and for people to be able to go back to their normal lives. Until then, we will continue to make masks for our community.”
This text was adapted from an article posted on the AKF USA website, and was originally authored by Hazel Correa, Senior Regional Development Outreach and Communications Coordinator at USAID/Central Asia, and published on the USAID Central Asia’s Exposure blog.