In this post, the authors share their personal reflections of what went into the writing of a journal article (published in Technology in Society) based on the experiences of urban women in Afghanistan and their technology usage. The authors invite readers to share their thoughts, queries and comments with Nova (nova.ahmed[at]northsouth.edu).

In 2019, we organized a SIGCHI sponsored Summer School in Bangladesh, where two female participants from Afghanistan also joined us. The conversation with the participants, particularly the ones Nasim had, opened up a common interest around understanding the barriers and opportunities for women to access and use of technology. All three of us have been working in this fields of enquiry and have been trying to understand the challenges and opportunities for a while – mostly in the context of Bangladesh (Ahmed et al., 2022, Ahmed et al., 2020a, Ahmed et al., 2020b, Van Staden et al., 2019, Iftekhar et al., 2015). Mahbuba has always been keen to study this field, being an amazing data scientist herself; so we immediately started with a plan to explore further on this topic with particular reference to women in Bangladesh and Afghanistan.

As we started to talk to the urban women living mostly in Kabul, it was clear that the Afghan women navigated the world of technology in a unique way. So, we decided to explore their experiences separately rather than combining our study with women in Bangladesh. So instead of a comparative study, we focused exclusively on Afghan urban women.

We talked to a total of 23 urban Afghan women through the period of December 2019 to June 2020. Nasim, being from Afghanistan, used his personal connections and known circles to reach out to participants, using a method known as Snowball sampling (Goodman, 1961). The discussions with the participants took place through focus group discussions and through individual conversations. In some of these conversations, Nova and Mahbuba (who are researchers from Bangladesh) joined the discussions online. The participants were all working while also studying, simultaneously. Only one of the participants was married. The age of the participants ranged from 20 to 35. Three of the participants were refugees at a younger age and returned to their motherland later as returnees. The unique struggle of these three participants showed us a lot about the struggles one could face while being eager to be educated. One of the participants shared how the refugee communities struggled to enter formal systems of schools and colleges, which was a reason for them to initiate their own schooling systems. Here, the refugee community would engage in teaching and learning among themselves.

The other participants were similarly affected by the war and post-war conditions along with various social barriers that impact women. The women who joined us were technology users but often used it with caution. One participant who was pursuing education at a university in India, share that women often hide their profile photos within Afghanistan, but they would enable their profile photos once they were out of the country. It was clear that the online presence of women was restricted by social constraints the same way it hampered women’s access in the physical world. There were also differences in resources available to women. For instance, several participants shared that women could not visit or access the internet at cyber cafés since social restrictions did not allow women to access such public resources. One participant suggested that all-women cyber cafes could be made available to circumvent existing social restrictions.

In our study, the struggles faced by women in using technology were similar to those described in existing studies that cover challenges faced by refugee communities or those faced by women in similar contexts. For example, Sambasivan and her team studied women’s access to technology resources in Bangladesh, India and Pakistan and found various social barriers hampering technology proficiency (Sambasivan et al., 2018). That study showed how women remained far behind men in learning and accessing technology as households prioritize male children over female ones in South Asia. Such patriarchal practices impact female users in the digital space and they face more abuse over different online platforms. However, our study also revealed the resilience among urban Afghan women. They were all engaged in voluntary activities beyond personal development. The desire to change the current situation was a strong element shared by every individual participant, something that moved us personally as researchers. These efforts and wishes to make positive changes to society by contributing directly, appeared to be unique to urban Afghan women in comparison to those in other studies.

The experience of working with urban Afghan women was illuminating for us as researchers as we also had misconceptions about Afghan women, particularly in terms of technology usage. The research work was intended to provide a clear portrait of our research participants who were trying to bring about changes for many. All the participants unanimously shared their aspiration and desire to create opportunities along with their personal development. It must be noted clearly that the picture of technology usage and women’s free access to education and opportunities were limited in certain areas in Afghanistan where Taliban regime was ruling as the participants shared. The study being a qualitative one, is not representative of the entire country, it only shows about a particular community in depth.

As we were writing and finishing up the research paper, the Taliban Government took charge of the country and we were wondering how all the amazing women might have been affected. We have not been able to follow up with the participants out of fear of placing them in danger. We only hope and wish that this work remains as a snapshot of urban Afghan women’s technology access and usage.

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Dr. Nova Ahmed (nova.ahmed[at]northsouth.edu) is a computer scientist and a Professor at North South University, Dhaka, Bangladesh. She did her PhD from Georgia Institute of Technology, USA and returned to Bangladesh to contribute to her motherland. Her work focuses on social justice and feminist human computer interaction. She has used her expertise in sensor technologies to fight social challenges such as developing systems to protect women from sexual harassment. She continues to use her work to support marginalized communities by developing low cost, locally available tech solutions. She has worked with Google to explore inclusion of women and marginalized communities in technology. She is currently working on a project funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to enhance inclusion of women in digital finance through enabling better technology designs.

Mahbuba Tasmin is a research engineer in the fields of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). She graduated from North South University, Dhaka, Bangladesh in 2020 with a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Engineering. For the last two years, she has served as a Software Engineer (AI/ML) in the Bangladesh tech industry. Her research interests include Human Computer Interaction, Qualitative Research, Machine Learning in the fields of Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing (NLP). She is an incoming PhD student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and will be pursuing research in the field of healthcare, in the department of Computer Science.

Sayyed Moh Nasim Ibrahim is from Kandahar, Afghanistan. He has completed his bachelor degree in B.Tech (IT Engineering) from VIT, Pune (India) in 2017 and completed his Master’s degree from Bakhtar University of Kabul Afghanistan from the Department of Computer Science (Software Engineering) in 2020. After returning to Afghanistan, he has worked with different national and International NGOs. Earlier in 2017, he worked as a Software Engineer with Real Soft Technologies, and later as a lecturer in Department of Computer Science in Sharq Institue of Higher Education in Kabul. Later, he joined the UN as MIS officer and now as Senior Information Management Associate. He also works with Afghanistan International School as a part time lecturer to train the youths (between the ages of 12 to 18) on robotics and Computer Programming. He has participated in various International Conferences of WOSY (World Organization of Students and Youth).