Afghan women coders inspiring girls to smash obstacles in patriarchal Afghanistan
- The young women are part of a programme teaching them how to create games and apps to help boost female representation in the gaming industry
- ‘Afghan Hero Girl’, the highest-profile success so far, is a phone game where a princess in a green veil must defeat a wizard and rescue her family
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.
Their highest-profile success has been this year’s release of Afghan Hero Girl, a phone app built over six months by 12 young women 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,” says Forough, who is now based in New York.