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In August 2023, our team traveled to Mardan to run a two-day digital literacy bootcamp for Afghan women hosted at PAIMAN Trust — one of the many ways Women Coders PK's parent organization, Women Technology House, has worked to bring practical tech skills to women who are too often left out of the conversation.
The training was led by Sadaf Shaheen Awan, CEO of Women Technology House, and welcomed 30 participants over two focused days.
Many of the women in the room ran small businesses or supported their families' income, but had never had the tools to take that work online. The goal was simple: give them practical, usable digital skills — not abstract theory, but things they could apply immediately.
The two-day agenda covered:
Day 1 — Marketing foundations Digital vs. traditional marketing, marketing platforms and channels, branding basics, and a hands-on logo design activity followed by a SWOT analysis.
Day 2 — Getting online Creating a Gmail account, setting up Facebook and Instagram business pages, taking and uploading product photos, handling customer queries, and using WhatsApp groups to reach and manage buyers.
The first day started quietly. Participants were unsure what to expect, and the room felt uncertain. By day two, that hesitation was gone. Some women arrived two hours early, eager to get started. Questions came steadily, curiosity was contagious, and the room shifted from cautious to genuinely engaged.
Not every participant had her own mobile device — but that turned out not to be a barrier. Women who had phones shared them freely, took notes for others, and in some cases, participants borrowed a male family member's phone just to keep practicing after the session ended. Language was never an obstacle either — nearly all participants were fluent in Urdu, which meant the training could move quickly and clearly, with nothing lost in translation.
A two-day bootcamp won't change an economy on its own. But digital literacy is often the first real door into economic independence for women who've been kept at the margins of it. Knowing how to set up a business page, take a decent product photo, or manage orders over WhatsApp turns a skill that seems small into a business that can actually reach customers.
That's the pattern we keep seeing across our programs: the barrier was never ability. It was access — to a first lesson, a first login, a first "yes, you can do this too."
Every woman in that room already had the drive. What she needed was someone to hand her the tools and step back and let her use them. That's the part training can actually fix.
And the ripple effect goes further than one participant. A woman who learns to run her business online often becomes the person her sisters, neighbors, and daughters ask first when they want to learn the same thing. One trained woman rarely stays the only trained woman for long.
Sessions like this one in Mardan are part of a broader effort to build stronger partnerships with organizations on the ground, and to keep showing up — even when day one doesn't go as planned. The Mardan bootcamp had a rocky start with some early coordination friction on-site, but by day two, that had turned into genuine collaboration. That's usually how it goes: the first day is about trust, and the second is about what people do once they have it.
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