Fereshteh Forough: Code to Inspire

Limitless Grit Podcast

Fereshteh Forough is the Founder and President of Code to Inspire, the first coding school for girls in Afghanistan. Fereshteh was born as an Afghan refugee in Iran. One year after the fall of Taliban, She moved to Herat, Afghanistan with her family where she received her bachelor’s degree in computer science from Herat University and later a Master’s degree from the Technical University of Berlin in Germany. She taught as a professor in the Computer Science Faculty of Herat University for three years. Fereshteh was a 2013 TED Talks speaker and a 2015 Clinton Global Initiative. Her passion is to empower young women from Afghanistan by improving their technical literacy. Her goal with Code To Inspire is educating Afghan women with in-demand programming skills, empower them to add unique value to their communities, and inspire them to strive for financial and social independence. Fereshteh is an advocate of using Bitcoin and the first to formally promote its use in Afghanistan. My show notes 10 THINGS TO LOOK OUT FOR Fereshteh talks about her experience of being born as a refugee and her life in Iran. How her mother inspired her to be a social entrepreneur. We talk about her family coming back to Afghanistan from Iran after more than a decade and how it was being a foreigner in her own country. Unique challenges of setting up in Afghanistan like living with only 3hrs of electricity per day, dealing with gender bias and cultural stigma attached to women in the work place. she explains how she deals with criticism and negativity on social media. 5. Why she thinks there are less females in technical fields and what we can do about it. 6. Accidentally stumbling into computer science and how she went from hating it to loving it. 7. Coming to the United States and how she was able to create this organization within a year while being unemployed. 8. We talk about how she was able to get fund and recognition in such a short period of time. 9. How code to inspire works and what is her vision for the next 5 years. 10. What is a definition of courage. go to limitlessgrit.com for show notes Follow Fereshteh: http://codetoinspire.org Twitter: https://twitter.com/codetoinspire?lang=en Connect with Shristi Limitlessgrit.com [e-mail] instagram https://www.instagram.com/shristigajurel/?hl=en Twitter: https://twitter.com/search?q=shristi%20gajurel&src=typd