Choosing Location for Economic Activities

  Written by: Yama Rahi

One of the most popular businesses is buying and selling goods or retail business.

In retail business, besides having a high-quality goods, good behavior with the customers could also affect the impraovement of work and sales.

AEPO’s writer/producer has talked to Muhammad Ulfat Momand who has a supermarket in Kabul city.

Momand says: "I and my brother have opened a superstore in Kabul city sometimes before. We sell different kinds of goods in our store. At the beginning, we had a bakery in this area and we opened a supermarket 7 months ago. We leased a land and then we started to build the supermarket.  As we have a bakery in the same area, we believed that we would get a positive result from our work. Apart from being in the residential area, our supermarket is near to Kabul- Jalalabad highway, so that many travelers also buy their goods from our supermarket. There is no other supermarket in this area, and many residents of the area are our customers.

before starting the supermarket, we accepted that we might face some problems but fortunately, we are successful in our work.

Storybooks for kids and juveniles:

AEPO’s writer/producer has talked to Shaber Ahmad Hamed, a resident of Kabul city who has established a publishing company with the assistance of his wife, Marhaba Hamed.

Shaber Ahmad says: “we prepare, design and publish storybooks for children and juveniles in three different languages. At the beginning, we surveyed some schools and found out that what kind of stories do students like and if they would buy the books that we publish or not. When we got a positive response, then we started our work.

At the beginning, we get the permission of the story writers and then we publish those stories in the books. If we have some new subjects or ideas, we have contracts with some writers who write for children and they write the stories according to the given subjects.

My spouse is an engineer, and she designs the cover of the books and we have hired designers too and they design the pages of the books.

The designing of storybooks differs from ordinary books because these books need different varieties of illustrations.

At the beginning of our work, we faced some problems because we were not familiar with printing presses but later we contacted more printing presses and now our problems are solved.

We sell the books in our main office and also through our books selling agencies in Kabul, Nangarhar, Balkh, and Kandahar provinces. The price of each storybook is 20 Afghanis and we get 7-8 Afghani benefit from each book.