Creating Employment for Displaced Artsakh Women

Our community raised $50,070 during and after the Second Artsakh War to support the work of Sose’s Women NGO, a women’s empowerment organization based in Goris, Armenia, that has been supporting families displaced by the war since fighting started. This blog post is our first update on how donations are being used there to support the most vulnerable families affected by the war.

About Sose’s Women

Back in 2003, there was no space for women in the southern city of Goris to meet, talk, and seek support for the issues they faced, according to founder and president of Sose’s Women NGO Liana Sahakyan.

Originally from the village of Tatev, Liana knew that if she and other local women didn’t change the situation, no one would. That’s why they established Sose’s Women, to address local gender issues and show wider society in Goris that a woman’s place is not limited to the domestic realm.

The organization gets its name from Armenian female freedom fighter Sose Mayrig, who at the turn of the 20th century fought alongside her husband, Serop Aghpyur, for Armenian national liberation. “Us women can help our husbands and do that which our husbands do, we can be helpful. Our place is not only in the kitchen. That was our message about gender equality to society back when we started,” says Liana.

Liana Sahakyan, founder and president of Sose’s Women NGO.

For six years she and a small team of local women worked on a volunteer basis, organizing various educational workshops and trainings for the community with support from friends living abroad. Overtime, the organization and its scope of work grew. Three years ago, they moved into an office that’s now too small for their team of 8, which includes a psychologist and 3 social workers. While their projects have focused on empowering women in the Syunik Province, they’ve expanded to Vayots Dzor and Gegharkunik, where they’ve created leadership clubs to engage women who want to be involved in local decision making processes.

Sose’s response to the 2nd Artsakh War

When Azerbaijan launched last year’s war on September 27, women, children and the elderly population of Artsakh were almost immediately evacuated from the republic for safety. The town of Goris became a sort of ground zero for the estimated 100–120,000 refugees seeking shelter in Armenia, and Sose immediately shifted gears to assist however they could.

Thanks to support from private donors abroad, Sose provided refugees staying in Goris’s shelters and hotels with basic necessities such as food, medicine, clothing and shoes, and hygiene products. Many Artsakhtsis came to Armenia believing that the fighting would not last long and that they would return to their homes after a couple days — the last major war lasted four days in 2016. But last year’s war lasted 44 days, and resulted in the permanent displacement of an estimated 30,000 Artsakhtsis. Sose’s psychologist and social workers were busy throughout the war working directly with refugees, and continue to assess and serve the needs of some 5,000 Artsakhtsis living in and around Goris today.

Shinuhayr village as seen from the main highway. This village and many others surrounding Goris are now home to an estimated 5,000 permanently displaced Artsakhtsis.

During and after the war, the 1A Community raised $50,070 for Sose to support the most vulnerable displaced families living in and around Goris. Thanks to you, Sose has already provided nearly 100 families, a total of 388 Artsakhtsis who lost their homes, warm bedding urgently needed for the cold winter and spring months, as well as hygiene supplies for the month of February.

Families will continue to receive hygiene packs till June 2021, and women from these families will soon be employed producing high-quality home textiles to be sold in the local market. Keep reading to learn about our first site visit to Goris with Sose.

How your donations are being used

Our first stop in Goris this month to report on how Sose is using your donations was to the workshop where displaced women from Artsakh will, after undergoing training, produce towels, bathrobes and other household linens to be sold in the local market.

The linens will be created under the Harmony Home brand, a social enterprise established by Sose in the village of Tegh in 2020 to provide the rural women of Syunik employment. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the enterprise halted its operations last year. But with the support of the 1A Community, Harmony Home is continuing its work by employing displaced women from Artsakh. The new Harmony Home workshop is located in the center of Goris, and the day we visited was their very first day getting set up.

Brand new sewing machines lined the walls of the workshop, where several women were already gathered to begin training. Sose has hired two women with professional sewing experience, one from Goris and one from Artsakh now living near Goris, to train the other women that will participate in the program.

Compared to towels and other linens imported from abroad, which significantly drives up prices, Harmony Home offers products of equal or higher quality for a significantly lower price. The hand towels they’ll produce will be sold for 1,500 AMD each (about 3 USD), whereas similar towels from Zara Home for example, imported from Italy, cost around 5,000 AMD (about 10 USD).

“Our intention is not only to support the women financially, but to provide then with skills and in order to break the cycle of dependency,” says Liana. Harmony Home has sold its products to hotels, restaurants, and various other service providers throughout Armenia in the past. They already have interested buyers in resort towns like Tsaghkatsor for the next production run by the women of Artsakh.

Nina Abgaryan lost the home she and her husband built in the town of Berdzor, Artsakh. She now lives in her old family home in the village of Shinuhayr, near Goris. With professional sewing experience, she’s been hired to teach other displaced women to sew as part of Sose’s project that’s being funded by you. Here she stands in front of many beehives her family was able to salvage from their home in Berdzor and bring to Armenia.

In addition to the workshop which will be up and running soon and offer sewing training for 6 months, Sose will continue to distribute hygiene packs to the 100 families being covered by the program till June 2021, all thanks to your donations. The families have already received warm bedding for the cold winter and spring seasons. Any extra supplies that remain from the program budget will go to other vulnerable Artsakhtsi families in the area. Families that are able to return to Artsakh or move elsewhere will not continue to receive assistance through the program — the goal is to provide assistance to those who urgently need it and set up families for success after the program’s end, and not have them depend on humanitarian aid to survive, which isn’t sustainable.

We’ll dive deeper into the human stories of this program in our next update, and visit Goris again soon to see the progress of Harmony Home — stay tuned!