And now for some good news.
Fereshteh Forough reminds you about all the wonderful things technology can make happen. This is a story about a coding bootcamp doing things, enabling human beings, in a way that would have been impossible just a few years ago.
Women in Afghanistan have bleak prospects for all the reasons you might imagine, though the odds they face are probably worse than you imagine. About seven out of eight have no formal education and are illiterate. Only about one out of eight participate in the labor force. The very notion of teaching girls, let alone helping them get a job, is controversial. It’s hard to travel safely to work. It’s nearly impossible to take a job in a city away from family — women don’t move in with roommates. It’s even hard to accept payment without access to traditional bank accounts.
The Internet solves many of these problems neatly. In fact, you might imagine it was invented for this very situation. It was just waiting for Fereshteh Forough to make the connection. After all, women there are much more likely to have Internet access, or even a mobile phone, than access to a bank account. (See CodetoInspire.org for sourcing on these data points).
About a year ago, Forough opened Code to Inspire, a women-only school in Herat, Afghanistan that teaches computer programming to students 15 to 25 years old The women can work safely and anonymously at home — hiding their gender, if they have to. They can work for international firms, getting higher than local pay rates. And they can get paid online, potentially via a virtual currency like Bitcoin.
I met Forough at a Bitcoin event last year, which led to me attending Code to Inspire’s first graduation celebration this weekend and it was a treat. An inspiring treat.
Forough is from Herat, the third-largest city in Afghanistan. It’s in the west, near the Iran border, and while it is relatively safe, there are still plenty of security concerns. A fatal attack on Western tourists this summer was a reminder that overland trips to Herat are still perilous.
Herat is far less dangerous now than when Forough was a little girl, and her family fled to a refugee camp in Iran. When she returned to Herat after the fall of the Taliban, she faced suspicion over the Iranian accent she had developed. Still, she blazed a trail by earning a computer science degree from Herat University and later, a Master’s degree in Germany.
She returned home again to teach and found a mountain of issues facing young Afghan women who wished to break into the tech world. Even those who made their way into her classes were extremely reluctant to talk.
“Women in Afghanistan are facing a lot of challenges. Safety and security is one of them,” Forough told me. “So a majority of families prefer their daughter become a teacher…because you only deal with women.”
Forough decided she wanted to intervene even earlier in women’s lives, so she created the non-profit Code to Inspire. The school teaches girls as young as 15 simple skills like setting up a social media, using WordPress or designing web pages — helping them gain confidence. More experienced students learn everything from JavaScript to mobile video game design.
The small classroom in Herat is filled with laptops thanks, in part, to an online funding campaign.
It opened last year and has so far trained 40 young women aged 15 to 25. The school is free, but it has a competitive application process.
“What we try to do is we provide a very safe and secure educational environment…the girls, they come feel secure, and they get an education,” she said. “The main purpose is we try to find jobs for them online. So they get paid online and they work online without the fear of any security and family concerns.”
Challenges abound. Not everyone is happy Forough is teaching young women to support themselves. The power goes out occasionally, and the school must run on generator power. It’s still premature to pay students in Bitcoin, as merchants in Herat don’t accept it, and it’s nearly impossible to the women to receive packages ordered online.
“For the start, we are going to receive their payments in our bank account in NYC and then transfer to our…account to Afghanistan and pay them in person,” Forough said. “There are many challenges for Bitcoin…there is no exchange in Afghanistan and also they can’t purchase tangible materials as shipping addresses are not working in Afghanistan properly.”
Still, Forough and crew are working on educating class No. 2, which they hope will exceed 100 students. Proceeds from Friday’s celebration, which cost $50 to attend, will pay for three full months of school operations, Code to Inspire Secretary Benjamin Dubow told the crowd on Friday. (Dubow works at Google.)
The effort is small, but growing and recognized by the Afghan government. Afghan ambassador to the U.S. Hamdullah Mohib attended the event.
I asked Forough what she wanted Americans to know about her students. You can listen to her in her own voice, or read below.
“I would like not only Americans but the whole world to know that the spirit of women in Afghanistan is they are facing a lot of challenges but…every morning when they wake up they are stronger to chase their dreams,” Forough said. “They face discrimination in access to education. There are a lot of girls being prevented from going to school. There are a lot of security reasons, bombings, in Afghanistan that are happening. But you know all these girls when they wake up in the morning they really want to go after their dream. They really want to give back to the community. So I want to say that there are a lot of good stories about Afghanistan that have never been heard.”
You just heard one of them. Take a few moments to click through the videos of Forough speaking to me at the event, or the short video of students working at the school in Herat. You’ll be glad you did.
To learn more about Code to Inspire, visit the non-profit organization’s website. If you’re interested in hiring one of the students for a freelance project, send an email to info@codetoinspire.org.
If you’d like to see more pictures of the event, click on my photo gallery here.
To read more of my women in tech stories, click here.
