By Kayhan Life Staff
Home-based businesses in Iran engaged in activities such as handicrafts and ecotourism have been devastated by the Internet blackout in force since the Feb. 28 outbreak of the war with the U.S. and Israel. Women are the primary victims of the blackout: they make up approximately 80 percent of this sector’s workforce.
Such businesses rely heavily for their marketing and sales on the internet, social media, and messaging platforms such as Instagram and Telegram. They have suffered a dramatic decline in sales and are facing deep financial losses due to the internet shutdown.
Many of the women concerned are heads of households and the sole providers for their families, making the consequences of these restrictions especially devastating.
Meanwhile, statements by officials of the Islamic Republic of Iran indicate that the government intends to continue implementing its repressive policy of restricting internet access, despite the escalating economic damage and the severe impact on vulnerable groups whose livelihoods depend on online commerce and communications platforms.
Malek Hosseini, Deputy Labor Minister for Entrepreneurship Development and Employment, acknowledged the extensive damage suffered by workers in the home-based business sector due to the internet shutdown, and said the suspension of online sales had been the most significant challenge facing home-based businesses in recent months.
Speaking on May 12 at the National Home-Based Businesses Day conference, Hosseini said internet restrictions and the suspension of seasonal exhibitions had deprived many people in this sector of the ability to sell their products.
Referring to the fact that around 80 percent of home-based businesses were run by women, he added that the majority of these women came from low-income households.
As Hosseini noted, according to statistics released in July 2025 by the Ministry of Cooperatives, Labor, and Social Welfare (MCLS), women account for 80 percent of those active in Iran’s home-based business sector, while men account for only 20 percent. Additionally, 11 percent of women employed in home-based businesses live in rural areas.
The Tehran-based newspaper Payam-e Ma also reported that in many villages across the provinces of Gilan (north), Kurdistan (west), East Azerbaijan (northwest), and Kerman (southeast), internet restrictions — particularly the blocking of Instagram and Telegram — forced many rural women’s home businesses to shut down.
The report added that in Iran’s tourist villages and handicraft-producing regions, from the picturesque village of Abyaneh in the central province of Isfahan to the 1,000-year-old village of Masuleh in Gilan and the historic Uraman Takht (Hawrami) in Kurdistan, female heads of households had in recent years succeeded in creating independent sources of income by using the internet to sell handmade products, book eco-lodges, and receive customer orders.
That foundation has now been undermined from three directions: the internet shutdown since Feb. 28, the decline in tourism beginning in the second half of 2025, and rising inflation and living costs accompanying both developments.
Zahra Jafari, a rural development expert working with several NGOs in Isfahan Province, said: “Female heads of rural households have always been among the most economically vulnerable groups, but in recent years, some of them managed to build an independent income base through online handicrafts or eco-tourism. The internet shutdown destroyed that base overnight.”
“They no longer have online sales, tourists are not coming, and the price of everything — from flour and cooking oil to medicine — has increased. Taken together, these factors amount to a disaster.”
“These women had succeeded, despite years of hardship, in creating a small but independent economic structure. Now that the structure is collapsing, and no one is tracking how many women are affected, how much they have lost, or what kind of support they need,” Jafari added. “The problem is not just the internet. The problem is that when a crisis emerges, these are the first people to be forgotten.”
The manager of an eco-tourism complex in northwestern Iran told Payam-e Ma: “Our province has 60 rural eco-lodges, 23 of which are run by women who are the heads of their households. Between October 2025 and April 2026, the average occupancy rate at these 23 lodges fell below 15 percent, compared with more than 40 percent during the same period the previous year.”
The manager added that some of these women had taken out loans to furnish and equip their lodges and are now unable to repay them.
“They took loans, launched eco-lodges, and had customers. Now they have neither customers nor internet access to advertise their businesses, nor the income needed to pay their installments,” the manager said.
Meanwhile, Kayhan Life recently reported that employed women have also become victims of the wave of layoffs triggered by the country’s stagflation, caused by the war and internet shutdowns.
Thousands of Businesses Shut Down In Iran Because of Internet Blackout
According to the report, traditional attitudes toward women’s employment and the perception of men as the “family breadwinner” have led many employers to place women at the top of layoff lists.
Simin Kazemi, a sociologist, told the Iranian Labor News Agency (ILNA) that women are being dismissed and pushed into unemployment in large numbers.
“During workforce reductions, the most marginalized segments of labor are often the first victims — a process in which gender stereotypes and sexist assumptions play a major role,” Kazemi noted. “These stereotypes portray women’s employment as less essential than men’s, meaning that when layoffs occur, women are the first to be sacrificed.”
“Unemployment pushes women to the bottom of the class and gender hierarchy and strips them of power within the family and society. Among lower-income groups, women’s unemployment deepens poverty and worsens the quality of life for them and their families, to the point that they struggle to meet basic needs such as food, healthcare, and housing,” Kazemi explained.
“The unemployment of lower-class women exposes them to the harshest realities of poverty and places them, their families, and their children at risk of homelessness, malnutrition, illness, interrupted education, and broader social harms.”
“Unemployment deprives these women of economic independence and makes them dependent on men, thereby increasing men’s control over their lives. Under such circumstances, women are less able to confront or escape domestic violence,” she warned. “At the same time, unemployment calls their competence and capabilities into question and forces them into isolation and confinement within the home.”
Kazemi also described unemployment among women as “a devastating calamity,” because “in Iran’s labor market, women already face enormous difficulties in obtaining employment, and if they are dismissed, returning to work is far more difficult for them than for men.”
“Women face barriers to employment because women’s work is neither genuinely nor officially supported, while cultural and social obstacles to women’s employment continue to persist.”
