Vocational Training

Throughout the Islamic World, women are denigrated by polygamy, easy divorce, discrimination, and abuse.  When a fourth wife is abandoned so that the husband may take another (Islamic Law allows only four wives), she may find herself without food and shelter, without education and friends.  Every door may close to her -- except the door of the Church.  This Fund enables indigenous ministries to open a door of protection, education, and evangelism to women when they are most vulnerable. 

Women's Vocational Centers in areas such as Central Asia and West Africa reach out to prostitutes, drug addicts, widows, and persecuted Christians. 

Give now to assist Vocational Training.

More information --

In the heart of West Africa lies a region scarred by tribal violence, threatened by poverty and disease, dotted by new mosques. Here Smyrna Ministries International has been partnering for years with a trusted National Church leader. Previous gifts have helped him construct a leadership training center, operate a widespread Bible correspondence course, send out village church planters, and rescue children from poverty. We have visited and witnessed the fruits of his thriving ministry.

His current need: to support the outreach of a Women’s Vocational Center.

To be a Christian woman in this region is to be persecuted, threatened by Muslim relatives, surrounded by a hostile community. Religious discrimination heightens her pre-existing economic pressures. When she follows Christ, she risks losing all. Spiritual and physical needs are great. To be a Muslim woman in this region is to be vulnerable. Allah is distant, the culture oppressive. Her soul is blinded by ignorance, veiled by confusion. Islamic Law allows her husband four wives—and when he notices a fifth woman, he abandons his first wife to the streets. Without education or means of support, she considers prostitution or experiments with drugs.

To women such as these, the Vocational Center opens its doors, providing comfort, safety, education, and hope. Women live at the Center for three years, taking courses such as the following:

  • home economics
  • sewing
  • cooking
  • making cotton into fabric
  • making soap
  • making peanut oil
  • computer skills
  • bookkeeping
  • hygiene
  • health and nutrition
  • sanitation


In meeting physical needs, the Christian staff at the Center build bridges over which women may walk to Christ. The most important course offered is Bible education, through which Muslim women are introduced to the Gospel and Christian women strengthened in their faith. Upon graduation, many are confident, healed, equipped to support themselves and their children in a volatile Islamic world. And they know and love their Savior, Jesus Christ.

The Vocational Center expands a proven sewing school ministry, with a history of seeing 40% of its Muslim students come to saving faith in Jesus Christ. But where the old sewing school ministry could teach only seven women at a time, the vocational center accommodates up to three hundred. One hundred students are accepted annually into the three-year course.

Hundreds of lives are transformed: from the streets to safety, from hunger to satisfaction, from ignorance to knowledge, from abandonment to acceptance.

Feel free to contact us for further information. We would be delighted to talk with you and share some of the pictures and testimonies that come into our office.