The project aims to provide support to women entrepreneurs working from home, with the specific goal of helping them improve their entrepreneurial and managerial skills.

Through free business development services delivered via telephone, the project aims to bridge the technical gap left by the trainings generally provided to Afghan women by NGOs and the UN.

Offering direct assistance to 5,000 home-based micro-enterprises and aiming to help them increase their sales by 30%, the project will reach a total of 20,000 direct and indirect beneficiaries by building economic opportunities and employment at the local level.

 METHODOLOGY

Afghanistan is no stranger to projects related to entrepreneurship, SMEs support or private sector development. 

As a matter of fact, all the programs seem to have a similar structure including 2-3 months of basic technical training and the entire project lasting anywhere from 6 months to 1 year. 

These types of projects are often dictated by the demands of individual donors rather than the needs of the people, and pose quite a few problems during their implementation: the time devoted to technical trainings are insufficient in a context with literacy around 35%, and the grants distributed are never enough to put the businesses on the path to financial success.

In addition to these issues, there is also the lack of sustainability of the interventions and the need to fill the technical gap that remains both at the end of the project and in the country more broadly, as highlighted various reports also.

Considering the needs present in the current scenario and ongoing projects, the Bale Khanom project aims to provide free business development services and technical support on an ongoing basis. 

With the services delivered via telephone by a team of female consultants, the project is accessible by any women  entrepreneurs with a cell phone and can thus become the reference point for those who need assistance in areas such as business management, accounting and budgeting, marketing, product development, quality control, taxes and the like. 

THE ACTIVITIES

The project consists of three activities as follows: 

1. SELECTION AND TRAINING OF PROJECT STAFF;

2. ESTABLISHMENT OF THE CALL CENTER;

3. DELIVERY OF BUSINESS SERVICES VIA TELEPHONE.

1. SELECTION AND TRAINING OF PROJECT STAFF

In the first phase of the project, the organization will reach out to NGOs, Chambers of Commerce and other professional contacts to gather profiles of Afghan women with experience in entrepreneurship and business to select the project staff that will go on to provide the business services via telephone. 

Following a selection process based on a written test and an interview, the organization will select a team of 6 women to be offered 2-month technical training. The technical training will include daily classes of 4 hours each maximum, for 5 days a week, on two areas of interest: entrepreneurship and management, and technology management.

As for the "entrepreneurship and management" area, the course content includes topics of interest to entrepreneurs such as business management, accounting and budgeting, legal aspects, marketing, product development, quality control, taxes and the like. 

Training related to "technology management," on the other hand, covers the practical aspects and proper use of the technology used to receive, sort and manage incoming calls, as well as their monitoring. In this case, technical training will be provided by Viamo - a social enterprise with a focus on technology and communications for Developing Countries - during a 2-week course, complemented by dedicated technical assistance for the entire duration of the project.

2. CALL CENTER ESTABLISHMENT

The technology used by the project for receiving, sorting and evaluating incoming phone calls is a user-friendly technology developed by the social enterprise Viamo for the rapid establishment of call centers in developing countries. It is based on the use of simple cell phones and a laptop computer for each operator (6 in all). 

The call center uses the existing telecommunications infrastructure in Afghanistan and provides automated features for answering frequently asked questions, triaging calls to operators, handling calls outside of working hours or handling peaks in call volume. The call center is also equipped with a dashboard for live data collection and call quality monitoring, and operates H24.

3. BUSINESS SERVICES DELIVERY VIA TELEPHONE

The delivery of business services via telephone will start in the third month from the start of the project, once the technical training and the establishment of call center are completed.

The service will make itself known through outreach activities through NGOs and other stakeholders operating in Afghanistan, as well as through short announcements disseminated free of charge on Hotline 2-3-4, a national toll-free line created by the main telecommunications (Roshan) to distribute pre-recorded educational content on various topics (health, agriculture, Covid19 etc.). 

In terms of the actual delivery of the service, on the other hand, the operators will be active and provide telephone support for 6 hours a day, 5 days a week.

MONITORING

 Monitoring of project activities takes place at different levels as follows:

1. GENERIC PROJECT MONITORING: The first level of monitoring is internal, covering mainly activities 1 and 3 described above.

Since it deals with the selection, training and employment of the call center, the organization will collect and analyze material related to the results of written tests and interviews, as well as the results of the technical trainings provided.

It will also organize weekly meetings with the operators to share experiences, identify gaps in technical skills and analyze the progress of activities, with a view to have an accurate understanding of the performance. The details collected will be compiled into monthly reports.

2. CALL CENTER MONITORING: The second level of monitoring relies on the technology in use for the phone-based assistance, and relates to activities 2 and 3 above.

The call center presents a dashboard that automatically collects information and details related to the helpline, collecting quantitative and qualitative data related to incoming phone calls and users such as their geographic area, age, literacy level, the type of business and area of support required, duration and frequency of the calls. 

In addition to this data, there are additional data collected live by operators during calls that will enrich user profiles with details about their specific needs, the type of business service offered and the results obtained from the same, especially in the case of frequent users.

Thanks to the technology in use and the procedures for collecting information during calls, the project is able to offer customized reports on a monthly level.

3. SPECIFIC MONITORING THROUGH A THIRD-PARTY SERVICE PROVIDER: The project also includes an additional level of monitoring by a third-party service provider covering all the 3 project activities. In this case, the proposed analysis will be longitudinal and will consider a set of qualitative and quantitative indicators co-constructed together with the organization, highlighting variations in the indicators themselves as well as the transformative capacity of the project in general. The final report will aim to highlight the positive impacts of the project on its direct and indirect beneficiaries.