Young women coders in Afghanistan are getting a chance to use ethereum's cryptocurrency.
Revealed exclusively to CoinDesk, Code to Inspire (CTI), a non-profit for teaching women in Afghanistan to write code, has partnered with the Bounties Network to allow students to accept ether (ETH) for fixing vulnerabilities for businesses or projects posting bounties. And according to Fereshteh Forough, the founder of CTI, the women have already begun earning the second largest cryptocurrency by total value.
The partnership was first inked in May, and once the women were set up with MetaMask accounts and software wallets, they began earning between $10 and $80 per bounty (depending on the project) they completed, Forough said.
While Forough didn't expand on how much ether altogether has been collected by the women, this isn't her first foray into facilitating crypto payments to remote workers in Afghanistan.
In 2014, Forough collaborated with fellow Afghan entrepreneur Roya Mahboob to offer Afghan women the ability to earn bitcoin by blogging. But the program ran into roadblocks since there wasn't a local cryptocurrency exchange to provide liquidity (cash for crypto) and most of the bloggers didn't have bank accounts anyway, whereby they could get a global exchange to transfer the converted crypto into.
"The challenge was how to exchange [bitcoin] to the local fiat currency," Forough told CoinDesk.
At the time, Forough and other CTI representatives would accept the women's cryptocurrency and give them cash in return, but this process had its drawbacks.