Women-run businesses squeezed by Iran’s coronavirus crisis

SANANDAJ, Iran – A small shop in downtown Sanandaj, a city in Iran’s western Kurdistan province, sells Kalana, a traditional filled bread which forms a staple of every Kurdish dinner table. Like the bazaar, it today stands empty.  

Its owner, 57-year-old Rabia Ahmedi, packs away her ingredients. Her grey hair and lined face make her look older than her years. Pain in her leg forces her to sit on the ground while she works. No customers means no Kalana. 

Ahmedi is one of Iran’s many female breadwinners. Most of them are street vendors who get no government welfare or subsidies.

She has been baking bread here for 20 years to earn money to feed her family. The coronavirus pandemic has caused business to grind to a halt.

“My husband died 20 years ago. The rearing of my three children has fallen solely on me since then. I have been making ends meet by making Kalana,” Ahmedi told Rudaw English.

“I have not made Kalana for a month and I only bake bread for my relatives. I pay a million tomans ($80) each month in rent but this month I did not even earn $40. Therefore, I have decided to close my shop as no one is supporting me,” she added.

The first cases of coronavirus were confirmed in Iran in late February. It has since exploded, killing more than a thousand people and infected at least 14,000, according to official figures.

Iran has been particularly hard hit by the virus, with fears it could kill “millions” if citizens do not heed advice to stay indoors.  

Opposition groups claim the official numbers fall way short of the reality and accuse the government of deliberately delaying reports of the first case to help boost the turnout in Iran’s recent parliamentary election.

Nahida Tajaddin is a member of the Iranian parliament’s Social Commission. She estimates 3.5 million female breadwinners in Iran are vulnerable to the pandemic’s ravaging effects on the local economy.

Because these women play such a central role in Iran’s informal economy, Tajaddin says they must get financial help from the government in addition to postponed debt repayments and utility bills. 

How will Ahmedi make an income without her business and while ordered to stay indoors?

“I have to [work]. What else shall I do? The landlord wants the rent and I do not want to lose money,” she said.

“Why should I come out of my house at this age if I do not have to? They [officials] always call on people through television broadcasts not to come out. [But] if we stay at home, what shall we eat? The government does not support us. Those people who are currently out of their homes are all obliged to do so just like me,” she added.

Bayan Azizi is a researcher working on women issues. She told Rudaw English there are many women in Iran who are their family’s main breadwinner. Among them are divorcees, widows, and women whose husbands are unable to work, through disability or drug addiction. 

Other working-age men have left the Kurdish areas in search of work elsewhere in Iran, or even in the neighboring Kurdistan Region of Iraq.

And socially conservative Iran doesn’t make it easy for women to work or rent independently. 

Azizi says 18 percent of Iranian families are financially dependent on working women, according to the government’s most recent population figures.

The same statistics indicate the number of female breadwinners increased by 1.4 million between 2007 and 2017, while around 800,000 women live alone across the country.

Zuhre Ashtiyani, head of the family committee in the Iranian parliament, says 16 percent of these women are under the age of 20, leaving them especially vulnerable, according to the Iranian Red Crescent Society's Shahravand newspaper. 

Although a law was passed in 2018 to help support families without a breadwinner, it was never implemented. 

Mohsen Shujaei, the deputy head of Kurdistan Province Welfare Organisation, a government agency assisting deprived households, told Rudaw English: “Even though our organisation financially assist some of the women that are their family’s breadwinner, and gives them a small allowance per month, this is a small percentage of the women who are the head of their families.”

“This is clearly not enough.”