Roya Mahboob isn’t a typical Bitcoin entrepreneur.
But, as a child, she wasn’t the typical Afghan girl either.
When she was 16, she heard about a box that enabled you to connect to the world and talk with people there without meeting them.
At a student club in Herat, Afghanistan, she got on a computer and connected to the internet for the first time.
“In 2003, the Taliban had just left, and there were limited books in the library, and they were very old books, mostly from Iran, and we didn’t have any updated information. I was fascinated that in this small box, you could find any information,” she says in the latest episode of my podcast, Unchained (Google Play, iTunes, iHeartRadio, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio). We were talking on Necker Island, Sir Richard Branson’s private island, for the 2017 Blockchain Summit, which brought together 50 leaders in the arts, government, business, non-governmental organizations, conservation and other industries to discuss ways in which blockchain technology can improve the world.
The CEO and cofounder of Digital Citizen Fund, who had been shy as a child, found herself talking to people all over the world, eventually learning English by chatting with people over apps like Yahoo Messenger.
Working at the information technology department for the Ministry of Education, she eventually launched the IT services firm, Afghan Citadel Software Company (ACSC), at the age of 23.
At first, her company, which consisted mostly of female engineers, had contracts with the U.S. government. But, she says, “When I was working for the U.S. government … or NATO, conservative people who didn’t like that gave our names to the local Taliban and informed them, Oh, these women are working for the military. They sent threats to us. Death threats or telling you you should’t work for them or you are not good Muslims.”
In 2013, after she was named by Time Magazine one of the 100 most influential people in the world, they placed a spy in her company so her competitors could know about potential deals her firm was making.
When she pivoted to working with the Afghan government, those agencies would delay payments to ACSC. After the company’s window was broken and death threats were arriving at her house, she moved to Kabul to be safer and realized she could be a digital citizen and find clients outside Afghanistan’s borders.
By doing so, she met an American investor and business partner with whom she launched a new company, Women’s Annex, which enabled women to write blogs and made money via advertising.
That startup ran into problems paying the contributors, the majority of whom were female, since 99% of them did not have bank accounts. While legally women could have bank accounts, culturally, many families did not trust banks. The system they trusted, hawalah, was actually an ancient non-technological system that resembles blockchain technology, in which money is transferred from one person to the next, each of whom trusts the next link in the chain. It’s basically an eighth-century version of Bitcoin.
Once she turned to Bitcoin to solve the company’s payment problems, she was able to explain to the users how it worked by comparing it to hawalah. During a panel discussion on Necker Island, she described how one woman whose husband beat her and confiscated her money was able to save her money once she began earning bitcoins, because her husband could no longer take the money. She eventually saved enough to file for divorce.
Though Mahboob has since closed Women’s Annex, her company Digital Citizen Fund is teaching girls about blockchain technology, Bitcoin and Ethereum, how to code and financial literacy so they can manage their own money. They’re also training them to launch businesses.
Tune in to the episode (Google Play, iTunes, iHeartRadio, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio) to hear the inspiring story of two girls in her program who overcame the skepticism of their fathers — one to launch her own successful business, which now employs all her family members, including her father, and the other to transform her father’s struggling agricultural business into a flourishing one.
Mahboob, whose Digital Citizen Fund sponsored the Afghan girls’ robotics team that was a social media sensation, gives the inside scoop on how the team was formed, the obstacles it faced in getting approved to compete in Washington, D.C., and how everyone reacted when they finally came to the U.S.
Finally, she talks about her latest ventures EdyEdy and her coffee and tea business, Digital Citizen Brew, how her next venture will incorporate either Bitcoin or its own token, and what she does personally with her bitcoins.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2017/08/08/how-bitcoin-solved-this-serial-entrepreneurs-problems/#27f63a88309c
