The challenges faced by women-owned companies in Afghanistan under COVID-19 and Taliban

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic and the shift of power to the Taliban have negatively affected women-owned companies. This study aimed to explore the external and internal challenges of women-owned businesses from March 2020 to January 2022 in Afghanistan. In-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted from December 2021 to January 2022 with 29 women-owned company owners and chief executive officers (CEOs) based in five provinces of Afghanistan. Data were analyzed using thematic analysis. The themes are COVID-19 external challenges: movement restriction, inability to access the market, and financial issues. COVID-19 internal challenges: financial and production problems. Taliban governance external challenges: regulation on women’s activities, economic crisis, and market downturn, and Taliban governance internal challenges: financial issues, production issues, and staff mental wellbeing. The study concluded that challenges due to the COVID-19 and Taliban governance presented strong shocks to women-owned companies that may precipitate the closure of these companies or the immigration of businesswomen.

Rights

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.

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DOI

https://doi.org/10.1080/23311886.2023.2195231

Repository URI

https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/en/publications/the-challenges-faced-by-women-owned-companies-in-afghanistan-unde