By Mushtaq Ali
PESHAWAR, Pakistan (Reuters) - In a small workshop in the bustling northwestern&nbsp;Pakistani&nbsp;city of Peshawar, a dozen&nbsp;Afghan&nbsp;women&nbsp;sit watching a teacher show them how to make clothes on a sewing machine.
The skills centre was set up last year by Peshawar resident Mahra Basheer, 37, after seeing the steady influx of people from neighbouring&nbsp;Afghanistan where they face an economic crisis and growing restrictions on&nbsp;women&nbsp;since the Taliban took over in 2021.
Trying to create options for&nbsp;women&nbsp;to become financially independent, she opened the workshop to teach tailoring as well as digital skills and beauty treatments. Basheer quickly found hundreds of&nbsp;women&nbsp;enrolling and has a long wait list.
"If we get assistance, I think we will be able to train between 250 and 500 students at one time, empowering&nbsp;women&nbsp;who can play an important role in the community," Basheer said.
Officials say hundreds of thousands of&nbsp;Afghans have travelled to Pakistan since foreign forces left and the Taliban took over in 2021. Even before then, Pakistan hosted some 1.5 million registered&nbsp;refugees, one of the largest such populations in the world, according to the United Nations refugee agency.
More than a million others are estimated to live there unregistered.&nbsp;Grappling with an economic crisis of its own, Pakistan's government is increasingly anxious about the number of&nbsp;Afghans arriving, officials say. Lawyers and officials have said scores of&nbsp;Afghans have been arrested in recent months on allegations they don't have the correct legal documents to live in Pakistan.
Basheer said that her main focus was expanding operations for&nbsp;Afghan&nbsp;women&nbsp;and she has also included some&nbsp;Pakistani&nbsp;women&nbsp;in the program to boost their opportunities in the conservative area. Once graduating from the three-month course, the&nbsp;women&nbsp;are focused on earning a modest but meaningful income, often starting their own&nbsp;businesses.
Nineteen-year-old&nbsp;Afghan&nbsp;citizen Fatima who had undertaken training at the centre, said she now wanted to open a beauty parlour in Peshawar &ndash; currently banned in her home country just a few hours away.
"Right now my plan is to start a salon at home. Then to work very professionally so that I can eventually open a very big salon for myself," she said.
&nbsp;
(Reporting by Mushtaq Ali; Writing by Charlotte Greenfield, Editing by Alexandra Hudson)

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