The Flowers of Afghanistan (August 2021)

This song was written for my Afghan friend Sarah and inspired by the true-life story of Roya Mahboob, soon after the tragic events of 15 August 2021 which catapulted a United Nations-proscribed group into de facto power in Kabul. Over the past year and a half, the "international community" has allowed the violation of basic human rights of women and ethnic groups in Afghanistan to fester, with the result that today half the population of Afghanistan (20 million women) are denied the basic right to education and employment. Sadly, there is as yet no international campaign to restore these rights or to ensure an inclusive representative government in that tragic country.

The status quo in landlocked Afghanistan invited reflection on the betrayal of hopes, optimism, initiatives, and hard work that had given a buoyant momentum to the Afghanistan in transition that was connecting with the world as never before. Women and children were an integral part of this, and it had not been easy for them to have come thus far and, for some of them, to have realized their passionate dreams. People across the world took notice; some of them shook their heads in disbelief: wasn’t Afghanistan “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma” with two major tribal confederations and divided among regional warlords, diverse languages spoken, the clergy most influential, even zealous about sharia Islamic law taking precedence over civil law? Three quarters of it covered by 3,000-4,000 feet high mountains impacting on social mobility and transportation, long war-scarred Afghanistan was writing an unprecedented chapter in its history.

Time magazine in 2013, in its annual list of the 100 most influential people, carried 25-year-old unassumingly ambitious Herat technology entrepreneur and CEO of ACSC (Afghan Citadel Software Company) Roya Mahboob’s name and photograph as well. Keen to change society through technology, Roya worked in novel ways to dispel the continuing Afghan cultural stereotype restricting a woman’s work to her home and caring for her family. At age 23, working at the information technology department for the Ministry of Education, Roya had launched ACSC in 2010, which initially consisted primarily of female engineer graduates with computer science degrees.  Roya and her colleagues competitively developed software and databases for private firms, government ministries, and worked on the key universities in Afghanistan being linked up with fiber-optics via NATO’s Silk Road Afghanistan project. Roya’s philanthropic involvement in the restructuring of Afghanistan through building free internet-enabled classrooms in high schools across the country to connect female students—initially over 160,000--to the world, enabled them to gain new knowledge in computer science for information and communications technology. With myriad obstacles to contend with, not least for gender reasons, Roya realized she could be a digital citizen and locate clients outside Afghanistan’s borders, successfully launching a new company with an American investor and business partner: Women’s Annex raised money through advertising, facilitating Afghan women to write their blogs and upload videos for making themselves heard and for which they were paid, helping change the way the world viewed Afghanistan.

 The non-profit company Digital Citizen Fund (DCF) that Roya founded with her younger sister Elaha Mahboob, trained new generations of Afghan girls and women in Herat and Kabul in understanding blockchain technology, major cryptocurrencies Bitcoin and Ethereum, coding and financial literacy, which made them capable of managing their own money in their homes and launching businesses. Whereas the ancient, informal hawala system continued to be tapped by families in Afghanistan, for women not possessing bank accounts or the requisite documentation for one, financial freedom came through earning bitcoins. By being able to utilize and save their money easily, cheaply and relatively securely, Afghan women were equipped to resolve entrepreneurial difficulties too.  A decade since Roya’s staff and freelancers were paid in bitcoin, after the Taliban takeover of Kabul in August 2021, several Afghan women were able to use their digital wallets to move their money out of Afghanistan, help evacuate their families and resettle in other countries. 

DCF also sponsored the Herat all-female Afghan Robotics Team—a social media sensation--coached and mentored by Roya, that went on to challenge stereotypical gender norms and win international renown by using science and technology innovatively. The "Afghan Dreamers" team competed to win the first prize in Estonia for a solar-powered robot to assist poor farmers in fields; funding for the project partly came with a bitcoin award Roya earned in 2017 at the annual Blockchain Summit on Necker Island in the British Virgin Islands. During the hardship and heartbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020: with family incomes plummeting and many people displaced, the five girls worked positively to support Afghanistan’s health system save lives by developing a low-cost prototype ventilator, using spare parts from old cars. The exhibition display showcased the capabilities of girls in Afghanistan to the world. Team leader 17-year-old Somaya Faruqi was on the BBC list of 100 inspiring and influential women from around the world for 2020.

Education in Afghanistan changed the lives of a great many women and girls, who contributed to positive change in their communities. My song was also written with the following in mind:

Agri-entrepreneur from the arid province of Herat, Sima Ghoryani, Managing Director of Negin Saffron and founder of the Ghoryan District Women’s Saffron Association; ministers Dilbar Nazari, Dr. Sima Samar, Dr. Suraya Dalil; provincial governor Habiba Sarabi; parliamentarians and senators Shukria Barekzai, Fawzia Koofi, Sabrina Saqeb, Belquis Roshan, and Dr. Anarkali Kaur Honaryar; civil society leaders Shinkai Karokhail and Nargis Nehan; anticorruption campaigns champion Seema Ghani; president of the Afghan Red Crescent Society Fatima Gailani; journalists Shakeela Ibrahimkhil—an advocate for women’s rights and education,  Najiba Ayubi, and television anchors Shabnam Dawran, and Beheshta Arghand; singer Aryana Saeed; and graffiti artist Shamsia Hassani.

To augment higher productivity skills for rural women, Sima Ghoryani organized literacy classes and facilitated training workshops on cultivating, harvesting, and processing saffron; beekeeping; financial and human resource management, and strategic planning for business capacity-building. Equipped thus with important life skills and an opportunity for a sustainable source of income beyond the saffron growing season, women came to have a greater degree of independence. With an initial $155,000 inflow of capital through a loan from the Afghan government’s Agricultural Development Fund (ADF), supported by the U.S. government and other donor agencies, the Ghoryan Association saffron farmers were able to purchase fertilizer and meet their living costs, repaying the loan after drying and storing the saffron at the end of the harvest, and finding bidders. Initially constituted of 117 women, the Association went on to sell saffron directly to domestic and international markets, including wholesalers in Europe, and was one of several organizations channeling loans to more than 800 female agribusiness entrepreneurs. With no free handouts but competitive economic opportunities, the industrious female farmers of saffron—the most expensive spice in the world--enjoyed genuine economic empowerment.

Najiba Ayubi,  a human rights activist, excelled as Managing Director of the Afghan non-profit, independent print, broadcast, online media network The Killid Group (TKG). It  had a presence in all 34 provinces of Afghanistan, publishing two of the country’s most popular magazines--Killid Weekly and Mursal Weekly, and included eight radio stations with approximately 12 million listeners.

The UNICEF-supported accelerated learning centres in remote areas provided basic literacy and numeracy skills for girls and women, and imparted critical life skills such as cooperation, teamwork, communication, and creativity.

There were visible novel benefits of community education for facilitating children of the traditionally semi-nomadic society of Afghan Kuchi tribes-- some of the poorest and least represented people in the country--through mobile schools in eastern Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province with support from the Central Asia Institute (Asya-e Markazi) and its partner Star of Knowledge Organization (Sitari Irfan). With the secure learning environment of tent school classrooms to move along with the Kuchi tribes to winter and summer grazing grounds for their sheep herds and camels, children equipped with portable black boards, school supplies, and a teacher with a motorcycle to travel easily with the tribes, illiterate parents saw a better future beyond tending animals for their children. It was linked with literacy and the need to attend these schools to read and write to learn the important skills required as they grew up.

With so much more that needs to be done, however, access and support for education are negligible now. A UNICEF report (Kabul, 24 December 2020) put the number of schoolchildren out of school in Afghanistan at 3.7 million, 60 per cent of them girls; approximately 85 percent of out-of-school children being girls in hardest to reach areas and conflict zones. That figure  worsened over the past year and a half, snuffing out hope for generations to come.

Lyrics: THE FLOWERS OF AFGHANISTAN

The flowers of Afghanistan,

They bloom everywhere,

By their very essence

They steal your heart away,

You can’t just drop them and be on your way,

Their memory with you will always stay.

Through the darkness of the decades,

Through the wars and terrors too,

The blooms bent and trampled,

Straightened up anew,

Surprising the world over

By bitcoin and blockchain,

With Roya as their inspiration—

A springboard for change.

With passionate dreams, courage, determination,

And the heart’s aspiration,

Things so new were learnt

In hard-to-reach Afghan villages,

Towns and cities not a few,

Life skills, vocations, novel directions,

Professions were mentored too.

A fresh hope for Afghanistan

Were these brave women and children,

Overcoming daunting barriers

In the everyday life they knew.

The success of a “connect-to-the-world” story

Came squarely into view,

From kindergartens, community tent schools,

Accelerated Learning Centres,

Internet high school classrooms,

And skilled tech-market graduates.

And also governors, parliamentarians, senators,

Saffron-growing grassroots entrepreneurs,

Successful businesswomen,

Software company CEOs,

Independent journalists and artists,

Civil society leaders—

New Afghan voices.

Ever-blooming, the flowers of Afghanistan

Earned world fame beyond that space,

With the world’s helping hand they marched on

With initiative and dignity innate,

On the roads taken

Leading them on and ever on,

There could be no turning back,

The cynics and motley messianic wreckers

Have got it all wrong!

But betrayal and heartbreak

Have cast the die anew,

And an unfolding scenario appears on cue.

My friends are before me

And them I can’t forget,

A people so beleaguered,

The jet engine images rivet.  

The flowers of Afghanistan,

They bloom everywhere,

By their very essence

They steal your heart away,

You can’t just drop them and be on your way,

Their memory with you will always stay.

© Vanita Singh, New Delhi                                 

17 August, 2021