For Love of Afghanistan

April 2007

By: Kate Carter 

The traditional lemonade stand wasn’t ambitious enough for Mariam Nawabi and her sisters. They were making money for college—nickels, dimes, and quarters wouldn’t suffice. So they put on a show in order to charge more money and to provide much-needed entertainment for their small South Carolina town.

Nawabi and her sisters, Alina, Samira, and Zohra Atash, were born social entrepreneurs. Native Afghan women, they have created a powerful business in order to create ties between Afghanistan and international markets. Their company, Afghanistan Market Development, Inc. (AMDi), has offices in the Washington DC area and Kabul, Afghanistan, and focuses on generating investment in Afghanistan through business management and consulting, investment facilitation, product development, sales and distribution, and more.

Nawabi is a mother of two young boys—Amir is seven and a half years old, and Omar is six years old—and has spent her life giving a voice to her home country as an attorney, entrepreneur, and activist.

“I think one of the key things for Afghanistan is there is hope,” said Nawabi. “If we can battle using words, not guns, then the future is bright.”

But over the years, the outlook wasn’t always so bright. When the war broke out between Afghanistan and the former Soviet Union in the late 1970s, Nawabi’s father, Dr. Mohammed Nadir Atash, who was a PhD student at Florida State University, brought his nuclear family to the United States. Meanwhile, five of Nawabi’s uncles were imprisoned in Afghanistan, and her grandfather, a general in the Afghan army, was imprisoned and later killed for refusing to support the Communist regime. Nawabi’s family became refugees and applied for political asylum, not able to return to Afghanistan until after 9/11.

Nawabi’s family moved from Florida to Irmo, South Carolina in 1985, where her father took a job with the South Carolina Department of Education.
“The racial lines were obviously very divided,” said Nawabi. “We weren’t classified as white or black. We ended up making friends there, but it took a while for us to assimilate.”

As soon as the family felt more at home in the small, southern town, Nawabi’s father worried they were losing their Afghan roots. The family moved to the Washington DC area, which was hopping with new immigrants. Nawabi focused on her studies, and in 1993, when she was a student on a scholarship at George Mason University, she helped start the first Afghan Student Association in the Washington region.

“That was a turning point, I think, in the Afghan Community, because we started art exhibits, cultural concerts, and performances,” she said. “It wasn’t just the students. We started bringing the older people back in.”

Nawabi and the student group raised money to help support an orphanage in Afghanistan, among other causes, but by the time they were able to organize a visit to the orphanage, the Taliban had taken over the country and their plans were foiled.

Nawabi’s next focus for her relationship with her home country was on legal reform. After graduating from Georgetown Law School, she went to work at Dechert LLP, a large Washington firm. In 2001, two years after she joined the law firm, the United Nations asked her to join its Legal Affairs Working Group for Afghanistan, which was providing advice to the country’s interim administration after the fall of the Taliban.

Nawabi’s topic? Women’s rights.

“I was really excited, but I knew there was enormous responsibility,” she said.

Nawabi went to work. She researched the Afghan legal system, and did a comparative analysis of Constitutional Law of Muslim countries and some key non-Muslim countries that had experienced conflict. She scoured Afghanistan’s Constitution of 1964 and the changes that were made with each political regime that took power.  Knowing that Afghanistan was now even more conservative than when she lived there as a child, she realized that she could not make meaningful recommendations without providing an Islamic law context. She thus conferred with Islamic law scholars and learned about useful terminology like “Adalah,” the Arabic word for “equity.” 

The result of her work was a memorandum providing options to address women’s rights in Afghanistan’s new Constitution. In 2003, she traveled to Afghanistan to present her recommendations to the country’s Constitutional Review Commission and met with women leaders. Many women expressed their gratitude for the recommendations, which were used by the Gender and Law Working Group that worked to advocate the new clause in the constitution that provides for equality for men and women. Nawabi recognizes, however, that it will take many years of development and education to implement the rights that women have “on the books.”

Nawabi’s resume reads like an incredibly accomplished older woman at the end of a six-decade career. Among many other accomplishments, she has served as Commercial and Trade Counsel at the Embassy of Afghanistan, where she established the first commercial service for Afghanistan in the United States; the first US business and trade mission to Afghanistan; and the first investment promotion trip to the US by the government of Afghanistan.

She served as Senior Advisor to the Afghan-American Chamber of Commerce, instituting new programs, helping to organize one of the largest events in the US promoting investment in Afghanistan, and engaging in outreach to media, government, and companies regarding the need for continued engagement by the US in Afghanistan. As Strategic and Business Development Director of AMDi, Nawabi is working on projects in financial services, transport, distribution, and other sectors. She still serves as the Senior Advisor to the Afghanistan International Chamber of Commerce as a volunteer.

She also is working hard to promote Artizan Sarai, an online boutique—currently under the wings of AMDi, but likely its own company in the future—that creates work for artisans in economically disadvantaged parts of the world. Artizan Sarai, which was founded by her sisters Alina and Samira Atash, aims to pique American consumers’ interests in socially conscious and, of course, artistic and fashionable wares from around the world. In late March, Artizan Sarai drew a crowd of 200 people to the International Finance Corporation’s Pangea Artisan Market & Café and unveiled the first collection ever featured there from Afghanistan.

Nawabi’s goal is to eventually have Artizan Sarai’s wares—like woodwork from Nooristan and high-quality embroidery from Kandahar—featured at upscale stores such as Nordstrom.

“We’re trying to generate demand and sell the producers’ stories because we can’t compete with China,” she said. “It’s truly art that symbolizes a person’s story. The people are really struggling, so they have to get more for one piece.”

Nawabi has faith that American women will do what they can to help support women of Afghanistan. “Because of the harsh circumstances they lived under, I think it resonated with American women who think they can help these women by buying products,” she said.

As Nawabi mentions, the two countries have a considerable amount of shared history. And while she said “some of the good will” has been lost since the Coalition bombings, she believes the commonalities are as strong as ever.