Nargis Habib (32 year old), wife of Habib Said is a resident of village Gabral (Tehsil Matta, Swat), living in a joint family with his two sons and one daughter. Nargis is a tailor by profession and stitches clothes for females and children.
“Women in our area are not allowed to give their clothes to male tailors; I have been stitching clothes since my childhood for my relatives and family members on festivals and weddings. I decided to take it as a business after my marriage to support my husband as my husband’s income was not enough to abide our expenditures,” she says.
Devoted and hardworking Nargis in no time became famous due to her fine stitching and hence started to earn well.
Swat Valley witnessed variety of disasters in the recent past including militancy culminating into a major military operation resulting in migration of hundreds of thousands of families into other parts of Pakistan. The cumulative impacts of these resulted into an extremely dismal situation, the local economy was ruined, critical infrastructure was destroyed, and local tourism which used to be a significant contributor to the local economy declined.
“My business suffered badly due to the closure of small businesses, less farming due to continuous curfews and migration of villagers to adjoining cities in the search of jobs,”she described.
The floods of 2010 further added misery to the residents of Tehsil Matta and Bahrian who had barely recovered from militancy. These floods destroyed roads, farming land, irrigation channels and most importantly Gabral Micro hydel power station, the only source of electricity for the entire village.
“I still remember the time when I saw the destroyed micro hydel station washed away by the flood, I thought that we will never ever have electricity in our village again,” Nargis added.
With a grant of $ 233,016 through USAID’s Small Grants Program, Swat Participatory Council (SPC) a local NGO of the region aimed at bringing comfort to the life of local residents installed 5 micro hydel power units in 4 Union Councils of Tehsil Bahrain and Matta District Swat. With the help of the grant and active involvement of the local communities, these micro hydels are now ready, fully functional and producing electricity.
The villagers after the restoration of electricity started returning to their homes, many restarted their businesses, farmers started cultivating, children resumed schools and life was finally restored. Nargis is extremely happy now, the uplift in the economic conditions resulted in an increased demand for stitching as villagers could now spend easily.
“I am thankful to USAID and SPC for bringing back electricity!!!!! Like many others I have restarted my business, now I can even stitch extra orders at night due to the availability of electricity,”says Nargis with a big smile.
In total 830 households (5,815 individuals including 2,035 men, 2,326 women and 1,454 children) have directly benefitted from this project.
