Five lives, five provinces

Karine Hakobyan, 52, has sewn clothes by hand in Ashotsk, a windswept village in Shirak province near Gyumri, for over thirty years, ever since the 1988 earthquake and the economic collapse that followed forced her family, like so many others in the region, to make do with what skills they had. For most of those thirty years, her work was informal and undervalued: neighbours paid in kind when they paid at all, and she had no access to bulk fabric prices, no way to reach customers beyond a two-kilometre radius, and no functional understanding of how to price a garment to cover both materials and her own labour.

In 2021, Karine enrolled in Innovative and Equal's digital-literacy and microenterprise programme, initially, she admits, out of scepticism. "My daughter registered me. I thought it was for young people with telephones," she said. Over fourteen weeks she learned to use a smartphone to photograph and list her work, to manage a simple order book on a messaging app, and — through the microenterprise grant component — received $420 in seed capital to buy a second-hand industrial sewing machine and three months of fabric stock at wholesale prices negotiated collectively through the newly formed Ashotsk Women's Sewing Cooperative, which she helped found alongside ten other village women.

The transition was not smooth. Her first attempt at online sales, in the winter of 2021, produced almost no orders for two months, and Karine considered quitting the programme. "I felt foolish, posting photographs of my aprons into the void," she recalled. A programme facilitator worked with her one-on-one to reshoot her product photographs against better light and to write descriptions in both Armenian and Russian, targeting diaspora buyers and Yerevan-based boutiques. Orders began arriving by March 2022, first from a boutique in Gyumri, then, through word of mouth, from customers in Yerevan and eventually a standing order from a small textile retailer in Glendale, California, supplied via a diaspora relative.

Today Karine's monthly income has risen from an estimated $40 to approximately $310, and the cooperative she co-founded now supports eleven women, splitting bulk-purchasing costs and sharing a single delivery arrangement to Yerevan twice a month. "I am not rich," she says, "but for the first time in my life, I know what I will earn next month, and that changes how you plan everything — school shoes, medicine, whether you fix the roof this year or next." Her outcome is measured not only in income but in her election, in 2023, as the cooperative's elected treasurer, a role that has required her to learn basic bookkeeping — a skill she now teaches to newer members.

Siranush Baghdasaryan, 17, lives in Aygepar, a border village in Tavush province that has experienced periodic shelling and military tension in recent years, most severely during escalations in 2021 and 2022. Her father works seasonal construction jobs, often away from home for months, and her mother manages a small household plot; the family's cash income is irregular and, in bad years, has fallen below what is needed to cover school supplies, transport to the district town for extracurricular exams, and warm clothing for the long walk to school in winter.

Siranush was identified for our girls'-education scholarship fund in 2021 by a village-school teacher who flagged her as an exceptionally capable student at risk of being pulled from school to help with household income during a difficult stretch. The scholarship provides $65 per month directly to her family, contingent on continued enrolment and a minimum attendance threshold, along with a laptop and mobile-data stipend that let her access remote lessons and university-preparation resources unavailable through her small village school, which has only nine teachers for all grades.

The scholarship arrived at a precarious moment: in the autumn of 2021, following renewed border tension, her school closed intermittently for eleven days, and Siranush recalls studying by candlelight during a multi-day power disruption, using a printed set of practice exams a facilitator had brought from our Ijevan office. "I remember thinking, if the shelling doesn't stop my studying, nothing will," she said. Her academic performance improved substantially over the scholarship period — her grade-point average rose from 6.1 to 8.7 out of 10 — and she has since represented her school in a regional debate competition and a national olympiad in social studies, placing seventh nationally in 2023.

Siranush now intends to study law at Yerevan State University, with a specific interest, she says, in the rights of border-community residents — "the kind of law that would have helped my grandmother when the government surveyors came about our land, and she didn't understand the papers she signed." Her case illustrates both the fragility and the leverage point of scholarship support in border communities: a relatively small, steady monthly sum, paired with connectivity and material support, kept a highly capable student in school through a period when the pressure to withdraw her was acute, and set her toward outcomes that ripple well beyond one household's finances.

Nona Sahakyan, 29, lives in Armavir town and has used a wheelchair since a car accident at age 21 left her with a spinal injury. For six years afterward, she was effectively excluded from the local labour market: most available jobs in Armavir required physical mobility the town's largely inaccessible buildings could not accommodate, public transport was unreliable for wheelchair users, and, as she puts it bluntly, "employers would look at the chair before they looked at my résumé, if I even got as far as an interview, which was rare."

In March 2023, Nona enrolled in our newly launched disability-inclusion pilot programme, delivered jointly in Gyumri and Vanadzor but with a remote-participation track that let Armavir-based participants like her join via video link, addressing precisely the transport barrier that had excluded her from earlier in-person vocational courses. Over 220 training hours she completed modules in assistive-technology use, professional written communication, and customer-relations software commonly used by international remote-support employers, alongside a peer-support component connecting her with three other participants navigating similar mobility barriers.

The early months were difficult: Nona's first two job applications, to remote-support roles advertised through a partner staffing agency, were rejected, and she recalls a specific low point after the second rejection. "I called my trainer and said maybe this isn't for people like me after all. She reminded me that of the sixty people we lost track of over decades of nobody trying, I was still trying, and that mattered." A revised application, with a portfolio built during the programme's project-based coursework, resulted in a paid three-month trial with a Yerevan-based outsourced customer-support firm serving European retail clients, conducted fully remotely.

That trial converted to permanent part-time employment in September 2023, and Nona now earns a stable income for the first time since her accident, working from an accessible home workstation funded partly through the programme's assistive-equipment grant, which covered an adjustable desk and specialised seating support. She has since become an informal mentor to two newer disability-inclusion cohort members and has spoken, at her own initiative, to the Armavir municipal council about accessibility gaps in public buildings — an advocacy role she says she "backed into" but now considers as important as the job itself. Of the pilot's 58 initial participants across Gyumri and Vanadzor, 39 have secured paid or self-employed work within six months of graduation, a 67% employment-outcome rate the programme aims to sustain and expand to further provinces including Armavir in 2024.