Boosting business in Lashkar Gah 26.04.12
3The city of Lashkar Gah in southern Afghanistan no longer depends for its security on international forces like the British.
But boosting economic self-reliance is equally important to stability, according to the Provincial Reconstruction Team.
Now, despite high levels of poverty, illiteracy and unemployment, people in Helmand are opening new businesses.
Most are doing it by joining Islamic credit unions.
At the Lashkar Gah Islamic Investment and Finance Cooperative, the village elders and local officials who sit on its board consider requests for money.
Like six similar Helmand cooperatives it belongs to the World Council of Credit Unions. It was started with British and US government aid but now operates independently.
Whatever their enterprise, borrowers have to become credit union members and tribal and religious leaders decide who joins. Islamic law strictly forbids interest payments, but there is an administration charge.
And the credit unions are not only helping men create wealth. Lailoma runs a tailoring business and is one of more than five hundred Helmand women to secure loans. Because she has repaid on time, she says she can now borrow larger sums.
Since the end of 2007, Helmand cooperatives have distributed four and a half million dollars to nearly fourteen thousand people. Across Afghanistan as a whole micro-financing of this kind is said to have created 46 000 jobs
And if peace is the key to prosperity, the reverse can also be true. As international combat forces prepare to leave, ordinary people generating their own wealth is considered crucial to Afghanistan's long-term stability.