An Afghan economics student turned to knitting after losing access to university. Her story reveals how women are building livelihoods amid restrictions on education and work.
She was studying economics at a university in Afghanistan, preparing for a future that presumably involved a profession, an income, and the independence that higher education can bring.
Then the university doors closed.
The young woman, from Afghanistan’s eastern province of Parwan, was among the women whose education was disrupted after the country’s de facto authorities suspended university education for women. For her protection, the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women) has not published her name.
What came next was not another degree, an office job or a conventional career.
She turned to knitting.
A hobby became a means of earning money. She began making bags, purses and jewellery, developing her own designs and spending the next four years trying to find customers. But the business remained small. Her monthly income was around 4,000 to 5,000 Afghanis — roughly US$60, according to UN Women.
The figure is striking not because knitting is an unusual livelihood, but because of what it represents.
A woman studying economics at university had been pushed into an economy where the space available to her was largely inside her home.
Her story raises a much bigger question about Afghanistan’s women: when education is closed and access to formal employment is restricted, what kinds of work remain possible — and can those forms of work provide anything close to economic independence?
From economics to handicrafts
UN Women says the woman had developed knitting as a hobby before turning it into a business.
She was inspired by another woman who ran a similar enterprise, learned from her and gradually developed her own style.
Over four years, she produced handmade bags, purses and jewellery.
But making a product and being able to sell it are two very different things.
The woman told UN Women that she did not have a suitable local market where she could display and sell her products. She also said there was little space for women to work outside their homes.
The problem, therefore, was not simply whether she had a skill.
She had one.
The problem was whether the surrounding economy allowed that skill to become a sustainable livelihood.
That distinction matters in Afghanistan, where women have increasingly turned towards home-based work while facing restrictions on mobility, employment and access to markets.
UN Women’s Afghanistan reporting says home-based self-employment has become a predominant form of women’s participation in the labour market. Women who lost jobs after 2021, as well as women who had previously identified themselves as homemakers, have increasingly moved towards self-employment.
For some women, this can provide an income.
But it can also mean that economic participation happens without the workplace, protections, networks and opportunities for advancement associated with formal employment.
The university door closed in 2022
The woman’s personal story cannot be separated from what happened to higher education in Afghanistan.
In December 2022, the de facto authorities suspended university education for women across the country. The United Nations condemned the decision and called for it to be reversed.
UNESCO says the ban has affected more than 100,000 young women who were previously attending public and private higher education institutions.
The restriction followed the earlier suspension of secondary education for girls.
By August 2026, UNESCO estimated that 2.4 million girls remained excluded from secondary education. It also reported that women continued to face severe restrictions on employment and participation in public life.
This means the story of the woman in Parwan is not simply about one university student changing careers.
It is about a generation whose educational and professional pathways have been interrupted.
For a student of economics, that interruption carries a particularly uncomfortable irony.
She was studying how economies work at a time when her own access to the formal economy was becoming increasingly constrained.
What happens to an educated woman when there is nowhere to use the education?
Education is often described as an investment in a woman’s future.
But education only translates into economic independence when women can actually use the knowledge, qualifications and networks they acquire.
Afghanistan offers a stark illustration of what happens when that link is broken.
According to UN Women’s Afghanistan Gender Index, 77.6 per cent of Afghan women aged 18–29 were not in education, employment or training in 2024, compared with 20.2 per cent of men.
UN Women also reported that 24.2 per cent of Afghan women participated in the labour force in 2024, with women facing restrictions on sectors that previously employed significant numbers of them.
Participation in the labour force does not necessarily mean having a secure job.
In fact, UN Women says much of women’s work takes place in informal, insecure and unprotected settings.
That makes the Parwan woman’s knitting business part of a much larger pattern.
She is working.
But she is working from within a narrowed economic space.
Home becomes the workplace
For women who cannot freely access conventional workplaces or markets, the home can become the only practical place from which to earn.
That has created a growing ecosystem of home-based enterprises involving handicrafts, tailoring, food processing, agriculture and other small-scale activities.
UN Women says Afghan women have increasingly moved into home-based activities such as garment production and food processing, while women’s participation in the labour force has risen amid the country’s wider economic and humanitarian crisis.
There is an important contradiction here.
On one hand, home-based work can offer women a way to continue earning despite restrictions.
On the other, the same restrictions that push women towards home-based work can prevent those businesses from growing.
A woman can make a product at home.
But can she travel to a larger market?
Can she meet customers?
Can she open a bank account easily?
Can she obtain credit?
Can she hire workers?
Can she register a business?
Can she move freely enough to build a customer network?
Can she access digital technology?
These questions determine whether home-based work is an economic opportunity or merely a survival mechanism.
The market problem
The Parwan woman identified one of those barriers herself: there was no local market where she could display and sell her products.
This is an easily overlooked part of women’s economic exclusion.
A business does not survive on skills alone.
It needs customers, capital, transportation, technology, market access and predictable rules.
UN Women’s reporting shows that Afghan women-owned businesses face significant obstacles in accessing finance and markets. In a 2024 survey cited by UN Women, 70 per cent of women-led businesses operated without a licence and therefore remained in the informal sector, while only 5 per cent of women-led small or medium-sized businesses reported receiving loans from formal banks.
The same UN Women reporting says women-owned businesses were 3.5 times more likely to shut down because of vulnerability shocks than businesses owned by men.
For someone selling handmade products, these structural barriers can become very tangible.
A finished bag sitting at home is not income.
A customer who cannot reach the seller is not income.
A product that cannot enter a market is not income.
And a skill without a route to buyers remains a skill rather than a livelihood.
Then came the internet
The turning point in the Parwan woman’s story came through something that did not require her to leave home: digital access.
According to UN Women, she was connected to the organisation through a survey and subsequently received business and digital skills training through a local civil society organisation, with support from UN Women and the Government of Japan.
The training helped her establish an online shop.
That changed the reach of her business.
Instead of depending entirely on a local market in Parwan, she could connect with customers beyond her immediate surroundings.
UN Women says her products eventually became known not only in Parwan but also in neighbouring provinces. She told the organisation that she was earning money, addressing her financial difficulties and becoming more self-sufficient.
It is a small example of a much bigger possibility.
When physical mobility is restricted, digital mobility can become economically significant.
But even that solution has limits.
Digital businesses still require phones, internet access, digital literacy, payment systems, customers and the ability to produce and deliver goods.
For women who lack one or more of these, an online shop may not be an easy escape from economic exclusion.
The economics of survival
The Parwan woman’s initial income — 4,000 to 5,000 Afghanis a month — also tells an important part of the story.
US$60 may represent vital income for a household facing financial hardship.
But it is not the same thing as having a stable professional career.
This distinction is important because discussions about women’s economic empowerment can sometimes celebrate entrepreneurship without asking how much money a business actually generates, how secure the income is, or whether the woman has control over the money she earns.
A woman selling handicrafts from home may technically be an entrepreneur.
But if her business cannot grow because she cannot access markets, credit or transportation, entrepreneurship may remain a form of survival rather than a route to economic mobility.
The Parwan woman herself describes the difference.
After receiving support and establishing her online shop, she told UN Women she was earning money and becoming self-sufficient.
That matters.
But it also raises another question: what could her economic future have looked like if her university education had continued?
No one can know the answer for this individual woman.
But the national consequences are easier to measure.
A country cannot easily replace a generation of educated women
UNESCO has warned that the suspension of women’s higher education has consequences far beyond individual students.
A 2024 UNESCO study estimated that if the suspension of women’s access to higher education remains in place, Afghanistan’s economy could lose US$9.6 billion by 2066, equivalent to around two-thirds of the country’s current GDP at the time of the study. It also estimated that more than 100,000 women were unable to resume university studies.
The effects also reach professions that require years of education.
UNESCO estimated that by 2030 Afghanistan could face a shortage of more than 11,000 female teachers because women currently entering the profession will eventually retire without enough replacements coming through the education system.
That is the deeper issue behind one woman’s knitting business.
The question is not whether knitting is valuable work.
It is.
The question is whether a society can afford to replace pathways into economics, teaching, medicine, law, administration, research and other professions with an increasingly narrow set of home-based livelihoods.
More than 5,100 women have received business support
The Parwan woman’s story is also part of a broader UN Women programme.
According to UN Women, more than 5,100 women entrepreneurs have been supported to launch or expand businesses through initiatives backed by the Government of Japan, while 3,700 women have accessed services through safe spaces. Support has included business development, financial assistance, market access and literacy and vocational training.
Women are working in different areas, including greenhouse cultivation, poultry farming, tailoring and handicrafts.
The objective is not simply to teach women a skill.
It is to help turn that skill into income.
For women who have been excluded from conventional employment, that distinction can determine whether a training programme has a lasting impact.
What the story does — and does not — prove
It would be easy to turn the Parwan woman’s story into a simple narrative of triumph: university closed, woman learned knitting, online shop succeeded.
But that would miss the most important part.
Her success does not mean the barriers have disappeared.
She is succeeding within those barriers.
She has found a way to work when conventional employment opportunities are heavily restricted. She has used a skill she already possessed, received additional business and digital training, and found customers through an online platform.
That is significant.
But it should not be confused with evidence that the underlying restrictions no longer matter.
UNESCO’s August 2026 assessment says women and girls in Afghanistan remain barred from secondary and higher education and continue to face restrictions on employment and participation in public life.
The fact that a woman can build a small online business from home does not replace the opportunities lost when she cannot attend university or freely participate in the broader labour market.
A future reduced to what can be done from home?
The most revealing line in the UN Women’s account may be the woman’s observation that there is little space for women to work outside their homes.
It describes more than a workplace problem.
It describes a shrinking geography of opportunity.
For an educated woman, the world of possibilities can become smaller not because her ambitions have changed, but because the spaces in which she can pursue them have.
A university becomes inaccessible.
A formal workplace becomes difficult or impossible.
A local market may be unavailable.
Mobility can be restricted.
Finance can be difficult to access.
What remains?
For some women, it is a sewing machine.
For another, a greenhouse.
For another, a poultry business.
For this woman in Parwan, it was knitting.
And then, crucially, the internet.
Her name remains unknown
There is something unusual about writing about a woman whose name cannot be published.
We know that she studied economics.
We know she lives in Parwan province.
We know she turned a hobby into a business.
We know that for four years she struggled to make it financially viable.
We know her income was initially around 4,000–5,000 Afghanis a month.
We know that digital training and an online shop helped expand her customer base.
And we know that she now describes herself as financially more self-sufficient.
But we do not know her name.
That anonymity is deliberate.
And in Afghanistan’s current environment, protecting the identity of women whose stories are being documented can itself be part of responsible journalism.
Her anonymity also makes the story less about an individual celebrity and more about the thousands of women whose names may never appear in international headlines.
The question beyond the knitting
The story of this unnamed woman from Parwan is ultimately not about whether Afghan women can knit.
They clearly can.
It is about whether women should have to turn every available skill into a livelihood because the conventional routes to education and employment have been closed.
Her online shop gave her something important: income, customers and a greater degree of financial independence.
But it cannot answer the larger question of what happens to the ambitions of a generation.
A woman who wanted to study economics may become a successful craft entrepreneur.
Another woman may become a tailor.
Another may run a poultry business.
Another may sell food from home.
These are legitimate forms of work, and none should be dismissed simply because they are home-based.
But women’s economic empowerment also requires choice.
The ability to decide not only whether to work, but what to study, where to work, how to build a career and how far to take one’s ambitions.
For the unnamed woman in Parwan, knitting provided a way forward when another door closed.
Her story is therefore both a story of adaptation and a reminder of what was lost.
The bag she makes can be sold online.
The degree she could no longer complete cannot.
And that may be the most important part of her story.
Inputs and Photo: UN
