The new AfghanMarkSM trademark empowers
conscientious consumers, wholesalers, importers and retailers to
make a choice, get involved, and decide to ask for and select high-quality
AfghanMarkSM certified carpets and
rugs at competitive prices, while knowing that the women who made
them received fair wages and higher rates of pay under inspected
working conditions with no illegal child labor and access to health
care and education, including literacy classes.
Only “better”
carpets -- “heirloom quality” carpets -- will
be allowed to carry the new AfghanMarkSM
certification trademark. Each carpet will be numbered and
will have with it a brief story of the woman who wove the carpet
on the loom.
The Afghan
Women’s Business Federation created the AfghanMarkSM
to create brand name recognition for carpets made by Afghan
women in order to certify increased income for women working on
the looms, to create a monitoring system to certify working conditions
and to increase educational opportunities and social responsibility
to benefit the Afghan women weavers. The AfghanMarkSM
is expected to become a meaningful brand-symbol of a better
life for Afghan women weavers who are asking for no charity, but
just the opportunity to benefit fairly from their hard work and
high quality artisanship on the looms.
“AfghanMarkSM” was
created by and is wholly-owned by the post-Taliban era Afghan Women’s
Business Federation, which is headquartered in Kabul with women-owned
and women-managed business members throughout Afghanistan.
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