Bitcoin could become a financial freedom tool for Afghan refugees and women’s empowerment

Roya Mahboob is Afghanistan’s first female tech CEO, one of the most influential people in the world according to Time magazine, and one of the first entrepreneurs to introduce Bitcoin to Afghanistan.
She was just 7 years old when the Taliban first took over her country in 1996 and invaded her hometown.
One day, she was playing with her bicycle in her front yard wearing her favorite red scarf when a group of armed men drove up in a jeep and screamed at her father in a language she didn't understand. After that, she was no longer allowed to go out to play.
“My family took away my scarf and forced me to wear a black dress,” she said, “like all the other girls.”
The most disturbing thing is that she can no longer go to school. Instead, she is forced to go to the mosque and study the Quran. For her, all paths to knowledge have been closed and all bridges to the outside world have been burned.
Mahboob's family fled to Iran shortly after the Taliban conquered Afghanistan. She told me that her father was a secular leader and that it was too dangerous for him to raise a family in a new land of religious fundamentalism. She grew up in a strange land, a second-class citizen in Iran. But over time, she got used to life in Iran, and when her father decided to move the family back to Afghanistan in 2003, she was no longer afraid.
Because the United States had moved to stop the war in Afghanistan, she was able to return to her hometown city of Herat one day, and she remembers that night as strangely peaceful. Iranian state television had portrayed Afghanistan as a place of death and destruction, but Mahboob found her home region stable. As a teenager at the time, she was still forced to wear a headscarf, but she found the restrictions much looser than the Taliban's policies. While there were foreign troops everywhere, she thought there were many new economic opportunities and the security situation was much safer: "There was hope in the air."
Became Afghanistan's first female CEO
One of the places that attracted Mahboob the most in her new life back home was the internet cafe. Living in Iran, she was never allowed to go to a library or a bookstore. Her schooling was limited and mainly based on Islam. After returning home, she heard about a store that had small boxes (computers) that could communicate with each other. People could even talk to other people through electronic messages. However, women were not allowed to enter this kind of store.
“One day,” she says, “I forced one of my cousins ​​to take me in.” The cafe owner wouldn’t let them in, but she persisted, and eventually he relented and let her in for a trial run. She immediately fell in love with computers. Then she learned that the United Nations had set up a local computer course for women, and the teacher told Mahboob that if she could get 15 girls to sign up, they could start a class. She rounded up her cousins ​​and friends to make it happen. After six months of classes, she was hooked.
The following year, in 2004, Mahboob enrolled at the University of Herat to study computer science. Over the next four years, she learned how to code, and her desire to “change the world through technology” grew.
Unknowingly, Mahboob came into contact with a group of programmers thousands of miles away: the Cypherpunks. They believed that the best way to change society was through technology, not through government, and their philosophy was to innovate without permission. Yes, they shared Mahboob's wishes and invited her to join the Cypherpunk community.
She continued her studies and eventually graduated and was promoted to coordinator of the university's IT department, where she helped the college build the campus network architecture. She learned English and began working on a NATO initiative to help connect all of Afghanistan's major universities with fiber optic networks.
In 2009, Mahboob met with Paul Brinkley, the deputy secretary of defense. She learned that the United States wanted to build a technology incubator in her hometown. At that time, Mahboob had already established an association for young girls interested in technology and software. Deputy Secretary of Defense Brinkley asked her: "Why don't you start a company? We can hire you."
The slow remittance system forced her to research digital currencies
Mahboob founded Citadel Software under contracts with the U.S. government and multilateral organizations.
Why is it called this name?

“In the city of Herat,” Mahboob said, “there is a beautiful castle that looms over the rest of the city. It’s impressive, breathtaking even.” Mahboob said her company hopes to become a citadel for software programming and a place where women can safely pursue their careers.
She didn’t know it at the time, but she had already found herself in the same realm as many Bitcoin users, who often talk about “the castle,” a space where they can be free without external control. “I’ll see you in the castle,” was the classic closing line of Bitcoin podcaster Stephen Livera.
Mahboob also built her own "Citadel" and became the first female tech CEO in Afghanistan. To start Citadel, she used some of the money she saved while working at university and the Afghan Ministry of Education. Of course, she had less access to business financing than men, but a meeting with US Deputy Secretary of Defense Brinkley was a "turning point" in her life. The US government will pay her company to consult on the advantages, disadvantages and different approaches to building technology systems in Afghanistan.
A few months later, her company Citadel also won the cooperation of the Afghan government. In late 2011, an Italian businessman watched a documentary about Citadel. He was so moved that he eventually reached out to provide funding for the company and gave Mahboob a private investment in late 2012.

“Citadel is 85 percent female,” Mahboob said. “For every woman at Citadel, this is her first job.”
Because it is a predominantly female environment, conservative families prefer to have their daughters work there rather than in a male-dominated company.
Meanwhile, Mahboob founded a platform called WomanNX, which helps Afghan women students and college students work from home and get paid for their contributions, ranging from uploading short videos to writing articles or translating documents.
Initially, Roya paid her employees and contributors to WomanNX in cash. But the employees wanted to send money to their families and pay vendors in different parts of the country for goods. That’s when they used the Hawala system, an 8th-century remittance process that relies on a network of brokers and trusted intermediaries.
For Mahboob and the women, the age-old platform is inefficient and, worse still, the remittances are not recorded in the Hawala system, making it difficult to verify whether the full amount has reached the recipient.
PayPal was still unavailable due to U.S. sanctions. And the women didn’t have bank accounts, so she couldn’t send them money. Women had to get permission from their fathers or husbands to open an account, which was often not granted. So Mahboob researched the idea of ​​a digital currency.
Mahboob’s employees want digital control over their time and income.
“If I give them cash,” she said, “their father, husband or brother might find it and take it.”
“Bitcoin is not gender specific”
In early 2013, Mahboob’s Italian business partner introduced her to Bitcoin. He said it was a new type of currency that could be transferred between mobile phones without a bank account. Unlike Afghanistan’s local currency, which is controlled by the government, Bitcoin’s price would float on the open market. When Mahboob first learned about Bitcoin, it was trading at around $13. By early summer 2013, it had broken through $70.
“At first, I thought the girls wouldn’t believe in Bitcoin,” Mahboob said. “It was too hard to understand.”
But her business partner encouraged her, saying, “Let’s give it a try – what do we have to lose?”
So Mahboob taught her employees and contractors how to install Bitcoin wallets on their phones, how to receive funds and how to back up their savings. If the girls wanted to spend their Bitcoin, Mahboob would buy it back from them with cash.
“I started to understand Bitcoin as a digital upgrade of the Hawala system,” Mahboob said. She and the women like being paid in Bitcoin because they can keep it on their phones and no one needs to know how much money they have.
“The girls are happy to finally have money that the men in their lives can’t take from them," Mahbub said. "It gives them security, privacy and peace of mind.”
In the late summer and fall of 2013, the price of Bitcoin soared to over $1,000. Citadel had put all of its cash assets into Bitcoin. The women couldn’t believe their new wealth and financial freedom.
But in November 2013, Bitcoin crashed, losing 60% of its value against the dollar. Citadel’s assets suffered a devastating decline in value. Worse, its employees’ savings evaporated.
“Our competitors believe that Citadel is run by scammers who steal money from young girls,” Mahboob said.
2014 and 2015 were tough years for Citadel and Mahboob. She had to lay off a lot of employees, and WomenNX lost popularity. She didn’t shut down, but scaled back the business to give her more time and energy to help young women learn career skills through software. In 2014, she founded a nonprofit called the Digital Citizens Fund (DCF) to educate women on how to use computer technology.
“By that time, many Afghans had lost trust in Bitcoin. But I couldn’t forget its potential. It stayed in my mind and wouldn’t go away,” she said.
Later in 2016, she created a curriculum through the Digital Citizenship Fund that teaches women in schools how to use Bitcoin, set up wallets, and understand how the network’s “blockchain” distributed ledger system works. As of August 2021, thousands of women in the Herat region have learned about Bitcoin and gained more financial freedom thanks to Mahboob and the DCF’s nonprofit efforts.
Mahboob said the girls love that they can receive, save and spend Bitcoin without needing a bank account. It only takes a few minutes to set up a wallet and write down a seed phrase to back up their savings in case they lose their phone. They can send money anywhere in the world in minutes.
Perhaps the most powerful feature of Bitcoin for Afghanistan is that it is gender agnostic. Despite the 2013 crash, the technology is too interesting to ignore.
Bitcoin is a financial freedom tool for refugees and female empowerment Some Afghan women did keep Bitcoin from 2013. One of them was Farzan. Mahboob said Farzan worked for her as a network manager and earned 2.5 BTC during her time at Citadel. At today’s exchange rate, Farzan’s earnings would now be more than 100 times the average annual income of an Afghan.
In 2016, Farzan was threatened by the Taliban and other conservative Afghan groups because of her computer work. When they attacked her house, she decided to sell it and her assets and flee to Europe with her family.

Like thousands of other Afghan refugees, Farzan and her family walked, drove, and took trains through Iran and Turkey, covering thousands of miles before finally arriving in Germany in 2017. Along the way, nefarious middlemen and thieves stole their jewelry and cash. At one point, their boat crashed, sending more of their belongings to the bottom of the Mediterranean. It’s a tragic story familiar to many refugees. But in this case, it was different. Farzan kept her Bitcoin because she wrote her private key on a small, seemingly private piece of paper, and the thieves couldn’t find it.
When Farzan finally made it to Germany after all the hardships, she sold some of her Bitcoin for $2,500, earning ten times her initial income in U.S. dollars. Bitcoin helped her start a new life. Looking back at the countless refugees in recent history, Mahboob believes that Bitcoin could change many people.
Today, our story’s protagonist, Roya Mahboob, uses Bitcoin as a savings and investment for the future. The Bitcoin she acquired in 2013 for about $100 has increased in value 500 times. She often uses it to send money from New York to friends, family and suppliers in Afghanistan.
In the past two years, many users of the Hawala system have become aware of Bitcoin. In Herat, more and more people are willing to buy Bitcoin in exchange for cash. According to data company Chainanalysis, after adjusting for purchasing power and internet penetration, they report that Afghanistan ranks seventh in the world in terms of peer-to-peer transactions.
Mahboob sees Bitcoin not as a Western innovation or Silicon Valley creation, but as a global financial freedom tool that can empower women. Many girls and women in Afghanistan do not have IDs or bank accounts.
“Bitcoin can empower them. They can learn how to mine, code or trade, and when they make money, they can turn it into self-reliance, breaking away from the traditional role of Afghan women in the home,” Mahboob said.

Mahboob wonders if Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious inventor of Bitcoin, will ever realize how powerful it will become. To her, it’s the most world-changing invention since the internet.
“This is more than just an investment,” she said. “This is a revolution.”
Bitcoin is more important than ever for AfghanistanAfter the Taliban recaptured power in Afghanistan, Afghans fell into unprecedented economic distress. Even before this, as many as 14 million Afghans did not have enough food to eat. Of these, 2.5 million have fled Afghanistan. Now, all Afghan bank accounts have been frozen, economic activity has slowed, and remittances have stopped. ATMs have also been forced to close after withdrawals soared from hundreds to thousands per day.
The Afghan currency has fallen to a record low, losing 5% in a single day last week. To make matters worse, the US government pressured the International Monetary Fund to stop issuing $460 million in Special Drawing Rights to Afghanistan and confiscated more than 99% of it, a type of credit that can be exchanged for hard currency (metal or internationally reputable fiat currency). The German government has suspended $300 million in aid. The World Bank announced that it would freeze its aid mechanism, which had pledged more than $18 billion to Afghanistan. The Afghan economy may be strangled by sanctions rather than supported by aid.
Western Union and MoneyGram, the world’s two largest money transfer agencies, have cut off services to a vital lifeline for the country, accounting for nearly 4% of the economy, or about $800 million a year. But now Afghans are greeted with these statements when they receive money from abroad:
"Western Union understands that people have an urgent need to access funds, and we are committed to resuming operations for our customers in Afghanistan when conditions allow. We continue to monitor the situation closely and will keep all relevant stakeholders informed of further developments."
Mahboob noted that while the Taliban can crush local businesses or shut down financial modernization programs, they cannot stop Bitcoin.
Ajmal Ahmady, Afghanistan's former central bank governor who fled in the fall, has predicted capital controls, currency devaluation, rising prices and hard times for the poor. He said the Taliban would have access to only 0.1% to 0.2% of the country's savings. That, combined with a slowdown in remittances and aid flows, would cause the currency to collapse and lead to higher prices.
In this dire situation, experts predict hyperinflation and an economy that could shrink by as much as 20%. People holding Afghan currency try to exchange it for dollars or commodities, driving prices higher and higher. In a country where only 10% to 15% of the population has a bank account, the rapid decline in Afghans' purchasing power would be devastating. Some experts say that Russian or Chinese intervention could prevent the economic collapse, but Ahmadi calls this an "overly optimistic scenario."
“It’s always the case that no matter what the elites do, the poor suffer,” Mahboob said.
Afghanistan’s war – a legacy of corruption Afghanistan has made many achievements over the past 20 years, especially in women’s rights, elections and education. The number of Afghan girls attending first grade has risen from zero under the Taliban in 2001 to more than 60 percent in the past decade. But the government’s deadly sin is corruption.
“The elites only think about their own interests,” Mahboob said.
Afghanistan has waged the longest war in U.S. history, killing more than 240,000 people, yet the operation has received little scrutiny. As a result of the 20-year wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. faces a staggering $10 trillion debt: $2 trillion in debt financing to pay for the wars, $6.5 trillion in interest payments by 2050, and $2 trillion in spending on four million veterans. Much of the war funding has been wasted, as hundreds of millions of dollars in equipment have been destroyed or are currently under Taliban control.
Mahboob criticized the way the West "supports" Afghanistan. Tens of billions of dollars are invested in her country, but little actually reaches the Afghans, with most going to American NGOs and companies to implement and bring the money back to the US, rather than letting it seep into local society. $144 billion has been invested in Afghanistan since 2002, but 80-90% of the money ends up back in the US, a "complex ecosystem of defense contractors, Washington millionaires, and aid contractors."
One former U.S. soldier said: "The Afghan army was not real. The Afghan government authority was never real. They never collected taxes. It never existed... It was just a big jobs program funded by American money, and the minute it looked like the money was going to be spent, everyone went home."
Mahboob thinks a different future is possible, one in which Afghanistan is actually independent, not just something so dependent that it collapses without foreign support.
Bitcoin Could Be Afghanistan's Future
Mahboob believes Bitcoin could have helped many other Afghans over the past few weeks — whether they fled and needed to take their savings with them, or stayed and needed an alternative to the Afghan currency while she negotiated with the Taliban to try to keep her education program going.
Mahboob has spoken to Taliban spokesman Timothy Weeks about setting up technology and finance courses for girls in the Herat area.
In negotiations so far, the Taliban leader has told her team that in the city of Herat, women will be able to continue attending school once female-only buildings are built.
She vowed to double down on this effort, and as the Digital Citizenship Fund program moves forward, financial literacy and “becoming your own bank” will be key components, and Bitcoin will be a core part of the curriculum.