07
July
2014
|
09:38 AM
America/Los_Angeles

Afghan Female Entrepreneur Roya Mahboob In Silicon Valley For Fundraiser

Roya on Fox News

Susan Lucas-Conwell is helping to organize a fundraiser for Women's Annex Foundation, at IBM's offices in Foster City this Thursday July 10, featuring Roya Mahboob, a young female entrepreneur from Afghanistan. She is building classrooms for female students and runs her own IT company.

Dana Nachman, award winning documentary filmaker will interview Roya. Pre-registration is required: An Evening with Roya Mahboob Tickets, Foster City - Eventbrite

Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg wrote about Roya Mahboob in Time's 100 Most Influential.


Though women's rights in Afghanistan have improved since the fall of the repressive Taliban regime 12 years ago, many Afghans still believe that a woman should work only in the home, caring for her family. Technology entrepreneur Roya Mahboob is working in clever new ways to change this continuing cultural stereotype. Mahboob's Afghan Citadel Software Co., an IT consulting firm founded in 2010, employs 25 people, 18 of whom are women. Her employees develop software and databases for private companies, government ministries and NATO. To make these jobs more accessible to Afghan women, five of the employees are able to work from home.

Mahboob's plans are even more ambitious. Most public access to the Internet in Afghanistan is restricted to urban Internet cafés, which are often uncomfortable or unsafe places for women. That doesn't work for Mahboob -- so she is building 40 free Internet-enabled classrooms across Afghanistan to allow more than 160,000 female students to connect to the world. She also founded a multilingual blog and video site to give these women a platform for telling their stories. Nearly 300 female student bloggers have posted on the site, making themselves heard and changing the way the world sees Afghanistan ... and how Afghan girls and women see themselves.