Twelve words to take away your savings. In 2013, Roya Mahboob – to whom we dedicated a portrait in 2023 – ran an IT company in Herat, Afghanistan, most of whose employees are women. Paying them in cash puts everyone at risk and doesn't even guarantee them keeping their paycheck. She then decides to pay them part of their remuneration in bitcoin.
Thirteen years later, the co-founder of the Digital Citizen Fund returns to this experience in a personal column published by the Wall Street Journal. His story does not present Bitcoin as a perfect solution, but as a tool that can be used when banks and payment networks become inaccessible.
Bitcoin: A salary that Afghan women could keep
Every payday worried him, says Roya Mahboob in the columns of the WSJ. Carrying a large sum of cash through the streets of Herat exposed him to theft. Once the money was distributed, its employees faced another risk: their father, their husband or their brother could take back their remuneration.
The problem grew when her company partnered with a New York media company to create a platform that paid for articles and videos produced by Afghan women. Several hundred contributors gradually joined the project.
And even if Afghan women could legally open a bank account, cultural constraints and the country's low banking system made this possibility largely theoretical. Western payment applications did not work either in this country ravaged by conflicts for decades.
Roya Mahboob already knew hawala, this traditional network of brokers which allows money to be moved without going through a bank. Bitcoin seemed to him to follow a comparable logic, but without depending on an intermediary responsible for validating and settling each transfer.
Her team therefore taught contributors to create a wallet before starting BTC payments. For some, it was the first income received directly, which they could save and use without asking permission.
Experience has nevertheless shown the limits of the device. After the peak reached by bitcoin in 2013, its price fell sharply. Competitors then accused the company of deceiving its employees. She claims to have compensated some of them according to the previous value of their remuneration, at a significant cost to her company. Volatility then constituted the main (and only?) fault of this tool.
Afghanistan: Twelve words to cross a border
However, a colleague saw its interest a few years later. Threatened, it left Afghanistan in 2016 and crossed Iran then Turkey before reaching Germany. She lost most of her possessions during her exile, but retained access to her bitcoins thanks to the twelve recovery words in her wallet. His funds were not transported to his phone: this sentence just allowed him to regain control from a new device.
The fall of Kabul in August 2021 obviously confirmed the fragility of other means of payment. Banks limited withdrawals, cash became scarce and international transfers were disrupted. Roya Mahboob's own parents faced difficulties accessing their savings. We then noted an increase in Afghan interest in cryptocurrencies in the face of the blocking of the banking system.
However, his work remains focused on education. The Digital Citizen Fund now offers clandestine courses and a learning platform called Afghan Dreamers Academy. The organization is also developing technology training centers in Afghanistan and beyond.
