Weaving dreams for women

Eight years ago, Buddhimaya Ghale opened a handicraft shop in Chitwan with Rs300,000. The venture is now worth Rs30 million.

Ghale had less than a modest start, her family could not afford schooling and she had to drop out after Grade 7. But then she joined a group in her village organised by Maiti Nepal to spread awareness about women trafficking.

Before long, Ghale was even travelling to India to rescue young Nepali women sold to brothels there. She became deeply involved in not just rescue, but also to bring justice to victims of trafficking, domestic violence and abuse.

Read also: Trafficked Nepali woman’s testimony

“I would spend all my time hounding the police and going to the courts,” recalls Ghale, now 37. “Seeing and listening to the women every day, both older and younger than me, used to cause me great pain. I even wished I was in a different line of work.”

Back in 2000, the National Trust for Nature Conservation was training people to use spinning wheels for woollen thread. Ghale enrolled and learnt handicraft.

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Starting in 2005, she began selling her products but soon realised that access to the market was limited and that local women needed training in refining their products and in sales. So in 2016, Ghale set up a centre to train women in handicrafts. 

She registered the centre at Kalika Municipality as a cottage industry and named it BM Hastakala Prashichyan Udhyog (BM Handicraft Training Industry).

After training over 600 women (and five men), most have found work as Dhaka fabric weavers or in the carpet industry. Others are involved in the eco-friendly business of turning waste material like chicken feathers and plastic bottles into gifts and handicrafts.

“We started from 10 people, now we have 600, many of them from underprivileged families,” says Ghale. 

Previously, the women used to gather firewood from the forest and sell it in the nearby market. If they were lucky, they could sell it in the market to buy food for the day. Now the women make as much as Rs30,000 a month after being trained at the centre.

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Initially, women faced resistance from their families for leaving to work outside the home, and the women themselves were skeptical. Now, Ghale has women as old as 70 at the centre, supplementing their families’ income.

“Even women from well-off households are treated as subordinates and are entirely dependent on their husbands or in-laws,” adds Ghale. “They are beaten if they assert themselves. When women have no money of their own, they get no respect. Income makes all the difference, and gives women power.”

BM Hastakala provides women with raw materials and machines to make woollen goods, Dhaka clothing, shopping bags and more. The products are then exported to more than 10 countries including Japan, India and China.

Having left school at such a young age, Ghale had thought she would not get to complete her education. But following financial and social success, she has enrolled in school again.

After a ten-year hiatus, Ghale joined eighth grade and just passed high school. “I was never more satisfied than when I completed school,” she says.

Ghale was honoured with the Women Entrepreneur Award from Bagmati Provincial Government in 2019, and in 2021 the best cottage industry entrepreneur in the Bagmati Province by the Ministry of Industry, Commerce and Supplies.

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Headquartered in Chitwan, BM Hastakala has a branch in Kathmandu. And now, this self-made entrepreneur wants to train more women so that they have economic independence to become their own person. She says: “The target is to increase the number of skilled women to 2,000 every year so the income empowers them.”