Made in Afghanistan Agricultural Equipment aims to meet Market Demand

JALALABAD CITY, Nangarhar Province – Farming just became a whole lot easier for Enayatullah, 35, a farmer from Surkh Road district, located 13 km outside Jalalabad City.

Enayatullah owns 15 acres of farming land and has recently purchased five new domestically produced threshing machines. “These new machines have really made our work much easier,” he says. “The machines are homemade in Afghanistan, so if they break, we no longer have to wait for a foreign mechanic to come and fix it. Now Afghans can service the equipment ourselves
in country.”

The local production of agricultural equipment is the result of a move by the Ministry of Commerce and Industries to help enterprises increase skills, technology, and capacity to enable them to compete on domestic and export markets through the Afghanistan New Market Development Project (ANMDP), operated by the funding support from the World Bank. 

The ANMDP, launched in May 2011, is a cost-sharing program to support Afghan Small & Medium Enterprises (SMEs) and Business Associations with access to Business Development Services (BDS) to enhance their productive capacity and encourage innovation through product and/or market diversification. The Facility for New Market Development (FNMD) as the core window through which firms access assistance, operates in four key cities of the country including Kabul, Mazar-e-Sharif, Jalalabad and Herat. The FNMD helps SMEs and Business Associations to gain market knowledge, improve product quality and processing technologies, and increase their presence in both domestic and export markets. Other FNMD supporting activities include a marketing and communications program, core skills building workshops and supplementary support for developing business plans.

One such beneficiary enterprise is the Jawed Afghan Factory, which has been a major manufacturer of agricultural equipment for years, but only recently made unprecedented progress. The factory, headquartered in Jalalabad, the capital city of Nangarhar Province, has benefited from the ANMDP.

“In the past, people travelled to Pakistan to buy threshers there, and we imported parts from Pakistan to manufacture trolleys
here,” says Toor Malang, 47, the company’s Director. “With support from the ANMDP, we were able to offer local training courses to our staff, and can now produce the parts ourselves.”

“We manufacture threshing machines, which help farmers winnow their wheat, rice and corn crops,” explains Malang. “We also manufacture vehicle-pulled trolleys, which farmers pull behind tractors to transport crops from their fields to facilities.”

SME support project increases sales, jobs, and income 

One of ANMDP’s objectives is to create job opportunities in the short term, with room for more growth in the long term. Jawed Afghan Company saw this job creation over the first six months of joining the pilot program.

“After the project trained our staff, we hired more people and trained them to manufacture thresher parts using materials locally available in Afghanistan,” Malang says. “We now have about 100 employees receiving salaries ranging from $100 to $400 per month.”

The company has also expanded employment in its branches in the provinces of Herat, Kandahar, Helmand, Ghazni, Logar, Kabul, Balkh, Kunduz, and Baghlan. Malang estimates the company has increased the number of employees by 30 percent in the year since joining the project.

Hedayadullah Shinwari, 45, a welder with more than 15 years of experience, is pleased with the training he received. “We learned very useful skills in this program,” he says. “Through these training courses, we realized that it is possible to produce our products with resources available within Afghanistan. The company has made great progress and our income has also increased since we went through the training.”

Employees at the company are working hard to meet the company goal to manufacture 400 threshers by mid-2015. Each of these machines will sell for about $6,000. Orders for four of the machines have already been placed from Tajikistan, in response to a television advertisement that was also made possible as a result of ANMDP support.