CONNIE DUCKWORTH (right) pays her Afghani weavers a premium in exchange for their promise to take literacy classes and send their children to school.

"This is such a different environment from the finance world that I’m used to," says Duckworth, 51, who is sometimes given to understatement. "I’d never been in a helicopter before, and I’m sitting in an open sling with a guy next to me in full body armor holding a machine gun. It’s so fascinating, you kind of forget about fear. You get caught up in the moment."

The world of Manhattan design showrooms was also unfamiliar to her until she launched a business that imports rugs handwoven by Afghani women. But today, Duckworth discusses the minutia of vegetable dyes and tribal elk-and-horseman patterns with architects and interior designers. She is well known in philanthropic circles as the former Goldman Sachs partner now spearheading a social entrepreneurship venture that she calls Arzu, the Dari word for "hope." If the idea succeeds, it will be thanks to her ability to create excitement in fashionable circles around a rug business that, as she is always quick to point out, can make it possible for the weavers and their children to earn a living and go to school.

Duckworth started at the bottom of the cliquey, mercurial interior furnishings trade. She solicits friends and friends of friends to form a coterie of what she calls "brand ambassadors"—design industry insiders who talk up Arzu rugs to other designers. She also hosts events, including one at the Baldwin Gallery in Aspen last July, where she sold $40,000 worth of rugs. She plans gatherings this fall in Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Las Vegas, Miami and London.

Peripatetic Prospector
Duckworth’s upbringing was nomadic enough to teach her to go where prospects beckoned. Her father was a hospital administrator in the Army Medical Corps who moved the family around before settling in Texas. She graduated from the University of Texas, then earned an MBA at Wharton, but had her eye on California. "I thought it was a land of opportunity, for women in particular," she says. There she met her husband, Tom, and began working in fixed-income sales for Goldman Sachs, first in Los Angeles, and later in Chicago. By 1997, when the firm transferred her to New York to co-head the municipal bond department, the Duckworths had four children. Rather than move the family, she spent the next four years leaving Chicago on Monday mornings and flying back on Friday nights.

She retired from finance in late 2001, during a period of post-9/11 reckonings. But Duckworth had been appalled by the Taliban’s atrocities against women before they were front-page news. She had long been a proponent of female-friendly working conditions at Goldman Sachs and was active in the Committee of 200, a group of women business leaders. "After 9/11, there was a groundswell of interest among women in Committee of 200 to help the women of Afghanistan," she says.

When President Bush and President Hamid Karzai established the U.S.-Afghan Women’s Council with a combination of public and private funds, Duckworth joined. She embarked on her first visit in 2003. None of her work on behalf of corporate women in the U.S. prepared her for the suffering she saw. She learned the average Afghan woman will have eight pregnancies and has a life expectancy of 40 years. She came away determined to create opportunities for women to work and attend school.

There was no shortage of women with the skills to weave rugs with traditional tribal and Persian motifs, but they needed yarns, dyes and looms, as well as distribution channels. "These people are living at a below-subsistence level," Duckworth says. "A small thing can literally change their life." She underwrote Arzu’s start-up costs herself; she had the promise of a grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development, but it took a year to arrive. The grant has since been renewed twice, providing a total of $2 million, and Duckworth has raised capital from private individuals and private foundations, including Beyond the 11th, a foundation started by two 9/11 widows with a mission to assist widows in Afghanistan.

Arzu now employs 250 weavers, and, to date, the company has sold 330 rugs. Duckworth has calculated that Arzu must sell 1,200 rugs annually, at costs ranging from $400 to $16,200, to turn a profit. She predicts it will be profitable by the middle of next year, while reminding customers and donors that the venture is an experiment in social entrepreneurship rather than charity. "We have a high-quality, beautiful, artisan craft that comes with a story of the woman who made it," she says.

Duckworth pays her weavers 50 percent more than the going rate. Arzu’s wages vary widely based on the type of rug, but, for example, a weaver in Shash Pul will earn $60 per square meter, while the market standard is $40. In return for the extra money, she requires weavers to take literacy classes and send their children to school.

Fortunately for Duckworth, most of the rural villages that maintain historic weaving cultures are outside areas where the Taliban is dominant, in the relatively safe provinces of Kabul, Andkoi and Bamyan. Nevertheless, when she or her Afghanistan staff travel to visit the weavers, they worry about highway bandits and land mines, as well as the safety of weavers who might incur local wrath because they work with a foreign organization. "We try to stay under the radar," Duckworth says. "There are still areas where schools are under attack." In some communities, she must work with local organizations and village elders to assess the possibility of her weavers being able to send their children to school at all.

"I’d never been in a helicopter before, and I’m sitting in an open sling with a guy next to me in full body armor holding a machine gun. It’s so fascinating, you kind of forget about fear. You get caught up in the moment."

Other Afghanistan-based philanthropic entrepreneurs say that Duckworth has chosen her areas of operation wisely. In the Kandahar region, where Sarah Chayes recently founded Aghand, a company selling skin-care products using locally raised almonds, pomegranates and roses, obstacles to educating and employing females are significantly worse.

"In the south, after a high-water mark during the six months to a year after the fall of the Taliban, the ability of women and girls to gain education is being curtailed every day," says Chayes, a former NPR correspondent who has been living in Afghanistan since 2001. "It does not take much in the way of a threat to dissuade people from any behavior that might stand out. Threat letters induce whole neighborhoods to take their girls out of school."

Cultural Currency
The first rugs Duckworth commissioned did not meet her standards. She uses them as doormats in her home in Chicago, which features four Arzu rugs and a lapis box that was a gift from Karzai. Hiring is difficult; she had to fire her first employee in Kabul because of fiscal irregularities. The weavers do not have bank accounts, so Duckworth must pay them via the centuries-old hawala system, which channels funds through village middlemen known as hawaladars, in whom their neighbors place their financial fortunes. Duckworth’s staff gives wages to a hawaladar, "and our people get the money from one of his guys," she says. "We keep three pairs of eyes on every dollar and have developed very careful monitoring from the beginning."

Her Afghani employees register each weaver, and conduct follow-up interviews every six months, asking what the women have done with the money and how their life is different. Some of the weavers and their families have been able to pay off debts and buy food, clothing and fuel. In areas where electricity is available, they have purchased radios and televisions that give them a glimpse—the first glimpse for many—of the world beyond their villages.

Duckworth is making her fourth journey to Afghanistan this fall, and will participate in formal meetings with government ministers. She will most likely sleep on the grounds of the U.S. Embassy in a hooch, a shipping container that has been converted into a trailer home. "A number of people along the way have said, ‘I don’t think you can do this.’ I think of it this way: Doing something is better than doing nothing," she says.

Jackie Cooperman is a writer based in New York.