LAHORE – Being divorced at the age of 21 and left with three children to take care of, Gulzar Fatima did not want to continue living in her parents’ home, depending on others to earn for her. For the first time she made a decision of moving out of her parents’ home to live an independent life and earn livelihood for the family. As expected, initially she faced the disapproval of her family at the idea of earning money all by herself, but her firm determination paid off and she managed to convince her family after she joined a local school as a teacher. But the school teachers did not get enough money and Gulzar Fatima needed more to bring up her three children, so she began contemplating beginning her own business.
Selling cloth was what she had thought of but she was once again strongly stopped by her family. They refused to finance her and she had no choice but to continue with the profession of teaching. After the death of her father though, there was much more family pressure on her to meet the daily necessities of life. “This was a very stressful period of time and I was under immense pressure from all sides,” says Fatima. “But even then I forced myself not to lose hope and continued saving whatever little amount of money I earned from my teaching.” Once Fatima managed to save a sufficient amount of money, she decided to purchase clothes from Jhelum city and sell them off to female members of her village. It resulted in a minor profit for her.
As Fatima did not possess the relevant capital to establish a proper shop, her business did not flourish for a long time. It was minor profits and small time sales for her. Being a woman of courage and substance, she did not give up on her dreams and continued searching for a reasonable source of financing. Once again, she began to search for help, but this time, it was for a bank that could help her finance a start of her career. Fatima learnt about the Khushhali Bank, a microfinance organization set up under the umbrella of the State Bank of Pakistan.
“I was nervous the first day as to whether I would get accepted or rejected for the finances I needed,” she explains, remembering the time she spent trying to realize that she had finally reached a point where she would be making this decision herself. But once they explained the banks’ parameters she decided that she would step forward, and she took her first loan from the microfinance bank. Khushhali Bank had offered Fatima a timely financial assistance to roll forward her business plans. After the microfinance loan was given to her, she decided to buy cloth from Nowshera and Gujranwala where the chances of a larger profit margin were better.
She began fortnightly visits to these two cities and in the mean time continued with the loan facility. With every passing loan, her income level kept increasing.
“I was at a point when my income reached Rs 30,000 a month,” smiles Fatima happily. “And only two years ago I used to earn just Rs 500.” Earning more, however, did not mean that Fatima became a spendthrift. She further invested her savings, while also buying important day-to-day household appliances and utilities. She also bought things that could be sold for less and off the counter such as kites, sweets and candies for children, kitchen appliances, threads and beads for stitching, and others which resulted in an extra earning.
Meanwhile, Fatima’s sister who already ran a tailoring shop started buying cloth from her, had them stitched and sold them in the nearby village market. This gave Fatima wonderful profits. Today with that money and the savings, Gulzar Fatima has managed to easily open her own cloth selling shop. Fatima now not only helps her family meet most of the household expenditures but also is satisfied and confident in terms of running her business independently. She is content and hopeful of providing a good future to her children, while feeling that her self-esteem had never done better than this.
“I wish that all women, who have nothing to do and sit at home or who feel helpless just because a man is not around, know that what I am doing is something they can do too,” she says. “This is a wonderful option for a woman who wants to work from home and have her own business. Two years ago, my family used to object to me strongly and treat me like a fool when I spoke about earning my own money. Today they have no choice but to respect me because I am economically independent and also because I did it all on my own, thanks to this microfinance program.”
Besides everything, Fatima is too modest to accept openly that she is a source of inspiration to the people who live around her, especially as she provides employment opportunities to others through her business. She sometimes takes a few serious women along her trip to purchase cloth so they learn the bargaining tactics of the business too, she reveals. Seeing Fatima’s progress this way some other women of the village were also encouraged enough to avail the loan facility of Khushhali Bank and improve their businesses which were mostly comprised of small grocery stores, or stitching and animal rearing work on a small scale.
Not only did Gulzar Fatima prove to be a role model for her family, she also managed to hook in her entire community. “Today I can do things that I had never dreamt of,” she says. “I wanted to do Hajj, for instance, along with several other things that were impossible because I had no money of my own. But today, I am doing these things and I feel so proud of myself. No one can guess how positively this business has affected me today.”
