Real estate prices fluctuate upon demand. The same concept works for World Wide Web real estate.

Today, the first page of a search for Free Films in English is worth much more than the same search in Dari, Farsi, Tajik or Pashto. Today, in Afghanistan and many other developing countries, the number of people and demand online is limited, but it's growing exponentially, so with it, grows the web real estate value of the property. The exponential growth is the real economic opportunity of Afghanistan and other countries with limited Internet access.

For women, it's important to acquire today this real estate to consolidate immediate revenues and cash-flow, and also establish a valuable real estate value that they can use in the future for even bigger projects.

• The short term return on the investment is to be paid to write articles and blogs, and to manage social media and generate revenues with advertising. This is what Film Annex does.


• The medium term return is to control the first pages of a search and establish business opportunities associated to each keywords. For example: Free Films = be a thought leader in Free Films Distribution, reviews and advertising. Another example: Sharing on Social Media : be a thought leader in Social Media strategies for government, private and international clients. This is what Target Thinking does.

I don't look at Afghanistan just as a country, but as a conglomerate of 34 million individual users who have different prospective and needs. I look at it as a geo-location with thousands of towns, villages, families and I.P. addresses. Consequently, I can optimize thousands of keywords to establish an early leadership in thousands of topics, opinions and trades. Today, when the number of users online is limited, the cost to produce the content and leadership is very very low. The control can be easily given to women who benefit financially from the revenues of creating the content, uploading it, and in medium term, benefit from the return on the investment in addition to the advertising revenues.

Today, if I write an article on Free Films and Cinema in Herat in Farsi, I am 99% sure to be on the first page. If I do the same for Social Media Services in Herat, it's the same story, etc. Those keywords are very valuable in the Western world because millions of people search for it. It's a matter of months or years until it will be the same for Farsi speakers in Herat, or Pashto speakers in Kabul, etc.

 

Here below is the staggering growth for Key Telecom parameters of Afghanistan. This growth reflects directly on the value and investment of the web real estate properties that I mentioned above.

 

 

Our imminent goal is to target 10,000 valuable keywords in English and each of the native languages of Afghanistan, and extensively of Central and South Asia. We want to arm women with the tools to create and manage the content and with it, control the revenues and future value of the property. By doing so, their financial power will grow along with the growth of Internet and mobile services. In 2011, this growth was respectively 44% and 25%.

To achieve this goal, we must scale our efforts in Afghanistan and the rest of Central and South Asia. The best partners for this are educational institutions starting from the Film Annex schools in Afghanistan, the other 1,000 schools that need Internet access, and the 8 million students that can produce content to support this project.

By doing so, we empower the youth of Afghanistan, both girls and boys, so they learn how to create valuable digital content, blogs, articles and videos. This is the mission of the Examer Education Software created by Citadel of New York in collaboration with the Afghan Citadel and Film Annex. Along with this, we can provide women with the management of the content to generate revenues, manage social media, create additional content, and pay them for their work as writers and filmmakers.

 

Each Internet classroom is an investment of about $20,000 and allows up to 4,000 students to step into the world of the World Wide Web. Each digital film studio is an additional investment of $10,000 and allows the students and women to generate valuable video content, starting from corporate interviews to mini documentaries and how to videos. It goes along the path of the content available on the Khan Academy.

Thanks to Roya Mahboob's work since March 2012 we built 8 INTERNET classrooms, connected 35,000 students to the World Wide Web, registered 5,000 female students to the Examer educational software, opened two Women's Annex centers for Filmmaking and uploading in Herat and Kabul, selected and trained independent writers and film editors. Check the video below for a 1 minute introduction to our work.

 

 

Maura O'Neil, Chief Innovation officer at USAID, says it clearly: “I think that as women, we need to step up and step out”. From my experience at Film Annex, that has about 50 million monthly viewers, the best way to achieve this goal is with Digital Media and Target Thinking.