In land of patriarchy, Afghan girls create their superheroes
Herat, Afghanistan: Like the princess who hops over goblins and throws daggers at evil wizards in the video game they built, a team of women coders in patriarchal Afghanistan wants to inspire a generation of girls to smash obstacles.
The young women are part of an after-school training programme called Code to Inspire in the western city of Herat, where they learn tech skills and create games and apps to educate girls across Afghanistan and beyond. Their highestprofile success has been this year’s release of “Afghan Hero Girl”, built over six months by 12 young women, a phone app in which a princess wearing a green veil leaps around a crumbling castle in a quest to defeat a wizard and rescue her family.
Fereshteh Forough, a computer science teacher and a former refugee who founded Code to Inspire in 2015, said students were sick of the lack of female representation in the gaming industry and told her they were bored of “playing games where men are superheroes”.
The game represents “the challenges and obstacles that women are facing every day in Afghanistan and despite all the backlashes they keep fighting and going through it,” Forough, who is now based in New York, said in an email exchange with AFP.
In a country where girls often have limited educational opportunities, internet access is patchy and women face deeply ingrained discrimination, Forough sees tech skills as having a transformative potential.