Eight men are sitting cross-legged on mats with plates of vegetables in front of them. They almost fill the tiny restaurant, which opens on one side onto a dusty street. There are no tables, chairs or menus. There's only one choice: the dish of the day. A small television in the corner of the room is showing an Indian drama series. The place is called Khwaja Ghareeb Nawaz, which translates as 'the one that is friendly to the poor’. There are lots of restaurants like this, but in a country where men dominate every aspect of life, it’s unusual to find one run by a woman.

 

Parveen, a plump 45-year-old, goes back and forth between the pans on her counter and her customers. "Mama, can I have some chapattis?" one of them asks. He's not her son but, in conservative Pakistan, relations between unrelated men and women are frowned on. The solution is to behave as if you were relatives. Women are usually addressed by the respectable word for sister 'baji', but Parveen gets more than the usual respect. "Everyone calls me Mama," she says with pride.

 

She explains that she was very poor until five years ago. Most of the 3,000 Pakistani rupees (around 28 euros) that her husband earned went on rent for the room in which they lived with their nine children. A further 700 rupees paid for food, while 300 bought him cigarettes. The couple regularly had fierce rows till she heard about microfinance. She got a loan of 6,000 Pakistani rupees (56 euros) from the Kasf Foundation and started a business selling hairclips. She now has a restaurant and rents out a rickshaw, and her husband runs a launderette. Family tensions are a thing of the past.

 

Parveen pays the Kasf Foundation 1.5 percent insurance costs and 20 percent service costs. Syed Nasir Zaidi of the Council for Islamic Ideology explains that traditional theologians are fiercely opposed to the extra costs. More modern clerics, however, have nothing against them, as long as they don’t amount to exploitation. The Kasf Foundation's Roshaneh Zafar says microfinance fits in with the Islamic principle of economic justice.

 
Discrimination

In Pakistan last year, 22 percent of all women had a job compared to 82 percent of all men, according to the Social Policy and Development Centre in Karachi. Discrimination and the idea that women belong in the home make it hard for them to enter the labour market. To Parveen the attitude is all too familiar. “Some people made nasty remarks. They said I shouldn’t be doing this work. But many women feel encouraged by me.”

 

Pakistani women have the willpower and perseverance to be entrepreneurs, says Roshaneh Zafar of the Kasf Foundation. “They have skills and knowledge. It’s just their way of thinking that needs to change. If that happens, everything will change.”

 

Her award-winning organisation has around 300,000 clients with small businesses, ranging from shoemakers to poultry farmers. In total, an estimated one million small businesses in Pakistan have received microcredit. The Pakistan Microcredit Network estimates that ten times this number of loans are needed.

 

A third of the Pakistani population lives below the poverty line, according to the 2009 United Nations Human Development Report. There are more than 50 aid organisations and seven microfinance banks, including the Kasf Foundation, providing microcredit in the country.

 

Family decision
Around half of the microcredit borrowers are women. The Kasf Foundation initially had only female borrowers, but has now switched to a system whereby borrowing is a family decision. “The man and woman are equal co-signatories, they both take the decision,” says the foundation’s founder.
 
Parveen has the support of her 55-year-old husband. “Men and women have to work together,” he says. He no longer has to worry about having the money to buy his cigarettes, and he lives in a house that is at least four times larger than their previous home, with air conditioning, a fridge, tables, beds and four televisions. And more importantly, their five unmarried children can continue their studies.
  
Dreams
But emancipation has its limits. This becomes apparent when Parveen says she doesn’t allow her daughters to go with her to the market. “People are quick to accuse girls of having a bad character.” She’d prefer to support a daughter who wants to become a doctor, one of the few professions open to Pakistani women. With tears in her eyes, she says "I’ll do anything I can to realise my daughters’ dreams."