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Four months after the Afghan government fell into the hands of the Taliban, 22-year-old Asad Asadullah began a new life.
In his hometown of Samangan Province in northern Afghanistan, the former computer science student sticks the start and end of each day on the laptop screen.
Since late October, Asadullah has been participating in a virtual coding training camp organized by Code Weekend, a community run by volunteers of Afghan technology enthusiasts and donated by the Norwegian company Scrimba, which provides online programming seminars.
For a few days, Asadullah took a screen break for a football match, but in general, he didn’t see his friends so often anymore. He explained that under the Taliban regime, “old friends have become very frustrated”, and there is only so much he can handle. Instead, he told me, “My life is on my computer.”
Asadullah is one of millions of Afghan youths whose lives and future plans were upended when the Taliban retaken Afghanistan in August last year. When the capital fell, Asadullah had two semesters of university, and he was considering his graduation plan. He was not picky about his first job. Anything that allows him to save money will do. But he has bigger plans: Asadullah wants to start his own software company and share his love of computer science by teaching college and high school students. “When I start coding, I can forget everything,” he said.
Today, these plans are suspended-no one knows how long they will be suspended. The United Nations has warned that the country’s economy is in free fall, and at the same time, Afghanistan’s new ruler offers few solutions for its citizens.
In this dire situation, the coding bootcamp—a remnant of Afghanistan’s short-lived technological optimism—seems inappropriate. But for participants, it offers hope for a better future-although it remains to be seen whether such a future is still possible in Afghanistan.
Virtual learning
When the Taliban came to power in August, it was not clear what their rule meant for the Internet in Afghanistan. Will they cut off internet access?Use social media posts – or Government database-Identify and target their former enemies?Continue to pay The increasingly effective public affairs campaign?
Facts have proved that the Taliban have not cut off access to the Internet-at least not yet. On the contrary, for those Afghan students who can afford the Internet at home—especially women and girls who are officially banned from secondary and higher education by the regime—online learning has become one of the main sources of education.
Some of them are well organized, there are Encrypted virtual classroom Created by international supporters, and some are completely autonomous-learning through YouTube videos, maybe, or playlists of TED talks. Usually it is somewhere in between, using free or discounted online learning platforms.
Code Weekend’s virtual training camp falls into the latter category. 75 participants were admitted into the queue and are passing through Scrimba’s Front-end developer career path, A series of 13 interactive video learning modules, covering everything from HTML and CSS basics to techniques for handling job interview questions on JavaScript or GitHub.
Participants can complete the modules in their own time and in their own homes. Code Weekend volunteer tutors check weekly to answer questions, make sure they stay on track, and assist with logistics as needed-including Internet recharge to keep participants online. According to the organizers, approximately 50 members of the initial queue were active.
Ensuring internet connectivity is only one of the logistical and financial challenges of running training camps, or even virtual training camps, in Afghanistan. The other is to fight power outages that become more frequent every winter. In order to solve these two problems, Code Weekend Have been trying crowdfunding The cost of obtaining 3G credits and backup power through generators and battery storage units.
But there is another issue that worries organizers: “The Taliban’s ideas,” said Jamshid Hashimi, a software engineer who founded Code Weekend with friends seven years ago. The group did not want to know. “So far, we have avoided interacting with them,” he said.
To some extent, the virtual asynchronous format of the bootcamp helps Code Weekend keep a low profile. Under the Taliban’s extreme interpretation of Islam, women whose freedom of movement is greatly restricted are more likely to participate without leaving home—even interacting with male participants, which may also anger the Taliban.
19-year-old Zarifa Sherzoy is one of the female participants in the boot camp. She just graduated from high school and originally hoped to take the college entrance exam and start college courses this semester, but she and her seven siblings spend most of their time at home. With housework, power outages, and restricted Internet access, she only spent an hour or two attending a coding training camp. But even this provides a new structure and meaning for her life. “After the Taliban arrived,” she recalled, “I was tired at home every day, thinking about how to end it.” But since the coding training camp started in late October, she said that although her problem did not disappear, “I Life is going very well.”
The virtual format has another additional benefit: it allows coders outside the Afghan capital (such as Asad Asadullah) to participate.
Code Weekend Bootcamp
In June 2014, 23-year-old software architect Jamshid Hashimi of Afghan local technology company Netlinks launched Code Weekend in June 2014, bringing together Afghan programmers. Inspired by the technological optimism that swept Kabul.
A fast company An introduction to the country’s booming entrepreneurial scenePublished in 2012, it described hope everywhere: “Impossibly optimistic and utterly obsessed, Afghan potential tech tycoons believe that computing can not only help them make money, but also ensure the peace of their land.”
It’s not just technology companies that are full of hope. Code Weekend is part of a series of initiatives aimed at stimulating youth innovation, entrepreneurship, and ultimately promoting participation and leadership in the building of a more progressive Afghanistan-some of which are funded by international donors for a clear purpose.
Other examples include the TEDxKabul project, which first came to Kabul in 2012 with its “ideas worth spreading” (TEDx tagline), and other entrepreneurial-focused global franchises, such as the Founder Institute, which ran from 2014 to 2017 -Kabul. (Hashimi played a role in both projects, and so did I, at different times.) By 2016, even Google was stationed and launched Google for Entrepreneurs’ Startup Grind, an aspiring startup company The founder’s community.
But all these initiatives of Code Weekend are more lasting than all of them, even after some of its own leadership team (including Hashimi) left Afghanistan. In the seven years since its establishment, this group of volunteers has held about 100 face-to-face meetings at universities, incubators, and offices of famous Afghan technology companies. Virtual.
Attendees gathered to learn everything from the basics of WordPress design and JavaScript language to data collection tools in the field. (Afghanistan’s aid-oriented economy has a keen interest in investigations and employs many ICT staff.) They listened to letters from local startups and engineering teams and introduced their new applications.They discussed books popular in the global tech world, such as Enthusiastic programmer (Introduced by Hashimi). Once, at an all-night event, open source enthusiasts gathered to live broadcast Laracon Online, which is a global conference on the open source Laravel Web development framework.
Then, in 2019, after years of these mostly weekend events, Code Weekend decided to expand: the organization launched a face-to-face coding bootcamp. The first cohort ran a pilot project of 15 developers, 12 of whom graduated from the four-month project. According to Hashimi, some people have found jobs because of their participation.
The 24-year-old Elyas Afghan hopes to become one of them after completing the training camp. His two older brothers also work in this field-one of them works at Hashimi’s company Rapid Iteration-partly because of their influence, he said, using a computer is what he has always wanted to do. More specifically, he hopes to find a job for a global technology company.
After the pilot was successful, the organizers of Code Weekend planned to hold a second group, but the coronavirus slowed their efforts. Then, in late August last year, the Afghan government collapsed-but this did not end their plan, but accelerated their plan.
“When the government collapsed, many dreams were shattered,” recalls Hashimi, who had moved to Vancouver, Canada at the time. Like many Afghans living in the diaspora, he has a strong “urge to do something.” He said that he decided to continue to help in the way he knew best: to support Afghan programmers. “People need hope,” he said — and because early events focused on technology or innovation provided hope, he hoped the coding bootcamp would do the same.
Hashimi’s goal in the training camp is to “provide a more sustainable way for Afghan youth to learn new and market-driven skills,” he wrote in our initial email communication, and use these skills to “start to help Earn income for yourself and your family.”
For many bootcamp participants with a common goal, the potential of online work may be their only option. In the 19-year-old Sherzoy’s family, only her father is currently working-and his income is barely enough to support her and her six siblings.She said that after the training camp, she hopes to “help my family and do something for my future.” She added: “I don’t want to be illiterate. [uneducated]. “
However, so far, most of the revenue opportunities have come from Hashmi’s other efforts: In addition to Code Weekend, he also runs a software development company that employs or signs contracts with more than 20 Afghan programmers, most of whom Still in Afghanistan, and as Online freelance platform, Yagan Kar (meaning “some work” in Dari), for freelancers in Afghanistan.
This is an adjustment to his original pre-Taliban plan. Even after leaving Afghanistan in 2016 to study for a master’s degree in innovation management in the UK, he used to spend three or four months in his home country every year to support the emerging technology community. “My dream,” he said, “is to own the largest software company in Afghanistan.”
To some extent, this is still his goal. “I hope to bring 1,000 jobs from abroad by 2023,” he said. “This will help many freelancers, young people and developers, and the economy.”
He said that “all Afghans want to leave”, but the reality is that most of them are not eligible for resettlement and evacuation. They will stay in Afghanistan and need new sources of income. Hashimi sees the international technology community as a potential provider of income, whether it is remote work or freelance work.
But all this takes time, and the country faces more pressing challenges.
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