Sara Wahedi was just four when she was forced to flee Afghanistan with her mother and brother. She now works to hold regimes accountable via technology
One of Sara Wahedi’s earliest memories is of being four years old, living in a refugee shelter in Buffalo, New York, with a heavy sense of responsibility. Her mother, having been forced out of her job as an English teacher by the Taliban, had fled Afghanistan with her two small children, hoping to begin a new life in North America.
While she worked at the shelter as a cleaner, she tasked her oldest child with checking a bulletin board each morning showing the surnames of refugees who had interviews for asylum in Canada.
“That was my job every morning for I don’t know how many weeks,” Wahidi recalls. “Then one day, I screamed to my mom: ‘I saw our name on the board!’ And she burst into tears.”
Wahedi has no recollection of her early childhood in Kabul. “I think my life and my memory really started in Canada,” she says. “Growing up in poverty – while my mom worked at least three jobs – and relying on shelters and food banks, humbled me from an early age.”
Years later, Wahedi began working with refugee support organisations in Canada during the summer holidays of her political science degree at the University of British Columbia. She deferred her studies to continue the work, and found herself questioning her own identity. “As a refugee,” she says, “if you integrate really well, it brings up concerns of: ‘Where did I come from?’” Then, by chance in 2017 she was offered a six-month internship by a research firm in Afghanistan that was hoping to build a ‘toolkit’ to support refugees.
Wahedi was thrilled, but her mother was fearful for her daughter’s safety: “[She said]: ‘I sacrificed my life to leave, and now you’re going back? How could you do that?’
After her internship, Wahedi stayed in Kabul and became a policy aide for the Afghan government. 'I was so much in love with the country, with being able to contribute to its development' she says. Image: EJ Wolfson.
After the internship, Wahedi stayed in Kabul and became a policy aide for the Afghan government. “I was so much in love with the country, with being able to contribute to its development,” she says. She was surrounded by likeminded young people, “many of us friends who were part of building this new Afghanistan, and the excitement of that,” she says,“entrepreneurs with startups, flower shops, schools.”
Nevertheless, terror attacks were a daily occurrence. Afteran assault on the largest hospital in Kabul’s provinces, Wahedi drove there to make sure a doctor friend was safe. “It was one of the most traumatic, horrific things I’ve experienced in my life,”she recalls, “[seeing bodies] stacked up on top of each other.”
One day in May 2018, Wahedi was walking home from work when a suicide bombing happened on her own street.“ It was right behind me, about 15 metres away,” she says. “I could feel the heat on my body.”
The suicide bombing happened right behind me, about 15 metres away. I could feel the heat on my body
As soon as she reached her apartment, another explosion happened. “For the next 12 hours, it was back-to-back explosions,” she recalls. “It was like watching a movie scene: suddenly everything is destroyed.”
Wahedi was stunned when a friend messaged her about the “ISIS [Islamic State] attack”. “I said, how do you know it’s ISIS? It’s happening right in front of my eyes.” It transpired that the friend, an employee at the US embassy in Kabul, received security text alerts. Discovering that such a system existed, but was only available to a privileged few “in a fortified concrete bunker” was a lightbulb moment for Wahedi. “This has to be accessible to every Afghan,” she thought.
So, she enlisted the help of one of Afghanistan’s biggest tech companies to create a free mobile app and launched Ehtesab, a word meaning transparency and accountability in Dari and Pashto. Wahedi employed a team to work on data analysis and crowdsourcing reports from users so that Ehtesab could deliver alerts to Afghans to help them keep themselves safe during emergencies. The app continued operating after the Taliban seized control of the country in 2021 before finally closing in September 2024 to prioritise the safety of its employees.
Currently studying at the University of Oxford, Wahedi is still excited by the power of technology as a ‘tool for good’. Image: Glenn Carstens Peters
Afghanistan’s collapse came as a huge shock to Wahedi. “I had no idea. The Afghan government was so good at keeping up this mentality that they would beat the Taliban,” she says. At the time, she was in New York looking forward to beginning a bachelor’s degree at Columbia University. She had received word from the US embassy that anyone in Afghanistan planning to study in the US should depart immediately.
Currently studying at the University of Oxford, Wahedi is still excited by the power of technology as a “tool for good”. But her approach, via her startup Civaam, now has to be undercover. “The work we’re trying to do is facilitating covert pathways to healthcare, to education and psychosocial support in crisis regions, that we do behind the scenes or underground.”
She hopes, one day, to return to an Afghanistan where all citizens can live in freedom and safety. For now, she finds inspiration in the Afghan women she knows who defy draconian laws every day, and in her best friend, “a brilliant education activist” who she says is managing 14 underground schools in Afghanistan.“
She told me the other day: ‘Sara, it’s only inevitable that you and I will get a little home in Afghanistan, and we’ll be sitting on our balcony with a cup of tea – and that’s what we fight for.’
Main image: Sam Bush
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