Code to Inspire — Afghanistan's First All-Female Coding School, Now Interrupted

Code to Inspire (CTI) was founded in November 2015 by Fereshteh Forough, an Afghan computer-science professor who had taught at Herat University before leaving the country, to give young Afghan women aged 15–25 free training in web and app development, graphic design and related digital skills. The school operated a physical campus in Herat, providing laptops and internet access alongside its curriculum, while being run and fundraised remotely from the United States.
In a July 2020 profile submitted to MIT Solve, a vetted social-innovation initiative run by MIT, CTI reported that "200+ students have received education from CTI," of whom "60% have found work in their communities and 20% have founded their own tech ventures," with annual capacity of around 100 students in Herat and an operating budget near $120,000. These figures are self-reported by the organisation as part of a grant application rather than independently audited, and predate the events of 2021.
Afghanistan's political collapse in August 2021 and the Taliban's December 2022 ban on women's education have since disrupted or halted CTI's physical Herat operations; secondary press accounts (The Story Exchange, Boston University's Center for the Study of Asia) confirm the school's founding story and its subsequent struggle to continue but do not provide updated, independently verified enrolment or employment figures for the post-2021 period.
CTI is therefore best catalogued as an interrupted rather than an ongoing practice: its pre-2021 outcomes, if accurate, would represent a meaningful talent-retention result in one of the most restrictive environments in the world for women's economic participation, but its current operational status and any continuing impact cannot be verified from public sources.

Read the full analysis: https://www.codetoinspire.org/