Ethereum is changing the lives of women in Afghanistan

A company in Afghanistan is breaking paradigms and trying to empower women in the country, not only through education, but also by providing some economic independence using cryptocurrencies.

Source

Code To Inspire (CTI), a non-profit organization that aims to teach Afghan women to code, has recently announced that it will begin paying at Ethereum those students who detect software failures and correct vulnerabilities of companies or projects Web. For this, it has partnered with The Bounties Network, a platform specialized in transactions with ETH.

Fereshteh Forough, director of CTI, told CoinDesk : "Personally I think it's good to have digital literacy or financial education, knowledge, especially for women in Afghanistan who are limited to access a lot of financial resources, like banks" .

Afghan women are not only limited by cultural or religious issues; they must also confront terrorism. The Taliban are an extremist Islamic group that follows an orthodox doctrine of how an authentic Muslim is supposed to be, which does not accept interpretations or "debauchery". Their commitment to "convert" the rest of the population according to their beliefs, has led them to take violent actions, claiming the lives of hundreds of people.

This terrorist group ensures that women should not study, as this is an activity of the man. That is why they have made several attacks on girls' schools or directly on the girls who frequent them.

Even if we put terrorism aside, the STI initiative must face several obstacles. The main one, the lack of cryptocurrency exchange houses in Afghanistan. So, even if the students at ETH are paid, they would find it difficult to convert their digital money into legal tender.

On this point, Forough clarified that "even now, when they are keeping cryptocurrencies in any form, there are still the same challenges of how we can exchange them with the local currency or dollars".

In addition, Afghans often do not trust financial institutions in charge of converting currencies. Instead, they prefer to use sarafis, people who take care of this change personally.

In spite of the diverse challenges that both women and cryptocurrencies have to face in Afghanistan, that CTI is still committed to making projects such as payments in Ethereum or simply helping in education, it is worthy of admiration.

CTI is helping digital currencies to be incorporated into the Arab country; and although the process may seem slow, the possibility that cryptocurrency sarafis may become popular in the future, and the adoption of digital assets become easier, can not be ruled out.

Finally, it is important to keep in mind the words of the director Forough about the future of the country:

"There are girls in Afghanistan who know how to code. And they will change the future of Afghanistan, their country, by simply acceding to this knowledge of the 21st century. "