A phone credit of about 500 afghanis, roughly seven euros or around $8, is enough to connect an Afghan girl to an online school. That's one of the figures in a report by the Spanish news agency EFE, published on October 3 and picked up by outlets such as Infobae and El Financiero. From Canada, activist Wazhma Frogh coordinates a network of some 2,750 women spread across all 34 of Afghanistan's provinces. According to UNESCO, Afghanistan is the only country in the world where girls have been barred from secondary school and higher education, a ban in place since the Taliban returned to power in 2021.
The network runs on whatever is available: secret classes in people's homes, cheap phones, Instagram, tablets shipped in from abroad, young Afghan women overseas teaching English and digital skills to those still inside the country, and artificial intelligence for learning math. Frogh summed it up for EFE: they're using absolutely everything within their reach.
We're not going to turn this into an inspirational postcard. What matters here is the mechanism, because it dismantles one of the most comfortable excuses in the free world.
The missing-resource excuse
Most people who aren't making progress aren't living under any ban. They have schools, libraries, internet access and time. What they say they lack is "enough": the right course, a better computer, the right moment, the ideal mentor. Scarcity becomes an argument that defends itself, because something will always be missing.
The Afghan network flips the equation. It doesn't start from what's missing but from an inventory of what exists. A cheap phone isn't a university. But connect it to a "sister" abroad and an AI tool, and it becomes a classroom. We plan ambitious futures with tools we've never taken stock of, and that's why we mistake a lack of method for a lack of resources.
The impossible rarely is. It's almost always just something nobody bothered to break down into reachable parts. That's the whole engineering of the impossible.
The tool doesn't decide. The person using it does
Here's a detail that should make us uncomfortable. The same artificial intelligence that millions use to avoid thinking, to summarize what they don't want to read or to crank out filler, is being used here to learn algebra at real personal risk. The technology is identical. The difference lies in intent and need.
A tool amplifies the judgment of whoever operates it. Without judgment, it amplifies the void. That's why delegating isn't abdicating. Someone who learns with ChatGPT because there's no other door uses it as leverage. Someone who uses it to dodge effort uses it as anesthesia.
Obedience is a choice, too
A ban works when the people it targets internalize it. The women in this network don't negotiate with the rule. They route around it. They don't give speeches; they build a parallel system. That isn't romantic rebellion. It's calculation: if the official channel is closed, you open another one, with the risks measured and the means at hand.
Where nobody bans anything, obedience takes subtler forms: "That's not for me." "Nobody in my family went to college." "When I have time." Obedience dressed up as virtue rarely looks like submission. It usually passes for prudence, realism or humility.
And fear runs its own bureaucracy. When nobody audits it, it ends up governing decisions we think are our own. The difference here is that the risk is real, and it still gets managed. In most of our lives, the risk is imaginary, and it still stops us.
What this story doesn't say
It would be dishonest to conclude from this that anyone can do anything if they try hard enough. The ban is real, the cost is real, and an underground network doesn't replace an education system. What the story does prove is more modest and more useful: between "having everything" and "having nothing" lies an enormous territory, and almost all human progress happens there.
Freedom, in that sense, isn't the absence of obstacles. It's taking responsibility for moving forward with what you have, without waiting for the ground to get friendlier.
A practical test
- Take inventory before you complain. Write down what you have today: devices, contacts, hours, skills. It's almost always more than your excuse admits.
- Separate the real obstacle from the convenient one. A ban backed by punishment is a real obstacle. "I don't feel ready" isn't.
- Use the tool as a lever, not a couch. Ask yourself whether the technology you use makes you more capable or just more comfortable.
- Build a network. The "sisters" system works because someone who already made it out teaches someone who's still inside. Nobody learns alone at that scale.
No date and no ideal condition is going to decide for you; the calendar doesn't decide. The decision is still yours, even on hostile ground.
The PRAXMA mindset
The idea: Scarcity is rarely what causes stagnation. The real cause is never having taken stock of what you do have. People who build with what's available move forward while others wait for perfect conditions.
— PRAXMA, Logic over emotion
The fact: According to an EFE report from October 3, 2026, a network of some 2,750 women across Afghanistan's 34 provinces is educating girls in secret classes, using cheap phones and artificial intelligence, despite the Taliban's ban on secondary and higher education for women and girls.
PRAXMA's line: "If you wait to have everything before you start, you've already decided not to. If you start with what you have, you're already learning."
For anyone who wants to go further, we dig into the habit of taking inventory before you dream Spanish only. We also talk it through on the podcast.
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