Author: Leslie Vryenhoek
Zhazgul Duishenova is a home-based seamstress working in Kyrgyzstan. She also takes in orders from middlemen. “With them, everything depends on the orders,” she says. The middlemen provide samples and the materials, but also take at least 50 KG Som for each item.
Zhazgul l is the breadwinner for her family. Her husband has a bad back and cannot work. Zhazgul’s work supports herself, her husband and their three young children. Sometimes the older girl (16 years old) helps her with cutting or packing.
She creates pants and jackets for both men and women, as well as women’s dresses and blouses. Zhazgul says that she prefers to work on her own sewing, instead of working with a middleman, because “there’s more profit.”
Zhazgul uses the income she makes from her independent work to buy more materials to make more clothing to sell, and to support her family. Most of her income goes to buy food, as well as medicine for her husband and education costs (such as textbooks) for her children. However, she was able to save enough money to make a fence of cement blocks around her house, and to buy the “red book” deed giving her title of ownership to the land the house stands on.
What Zhazgul wants most right now is a separate space outside of her house to work. Her house consists of just three rooms, and she uses the entry space for her sewing work.
Zhazgul was the first woman in Group “Bereke» to become an independent home-based worker. She started by buying small quantities of material, and analysing the local market before deciding to make warm pants for the cold season. She took her patterns from samples, made 58 pants and sold them in Naryn, where she was born., then reimbursed herself for the initial capital. From the 600 KG Som wholesale price for one pair of pants, Zhazgul was able to retain 300 KG Som as profit. This compares to 60 KG Som she would have earned making the same pants for a middleman.
She now continues to work for the middlemen, but does an increasing amount of her own work. She’s learned how to make patterns now, which is a relatively rare skill in her region. Zhazgul also makes local school uniforms, writing out the total cost and net return in advance to be sure she will make a profit – a skill she learned in a workshop offered by head of the Bereke Mutual Aid Group. Zhazgul buys a patent for the production of sewing products and thus legalizes her status.
“I’m not afraid anymore,” Zhazgul says. From the wholesale of her 58 pairs of pants, she made a profit of 17,400 KG Som (about $200 USD). With those funds, she took her husband to a private medical clinic to have his back seen and bought the property title to her house.
