Sara Wahedi is the CEO and Founder of Ehtesab, Afghanistan’s first civic technology startup. In 2022, Sara Wahedi was named as one of TIME Magazine’s ’Next Generation Leaders’, MIT Technology Review’s ‘Innovators under 35’ and the BBC's 'Top 100 Women', for her work in democratizing access to information for Afghans.
Ehtesab has been providing near real-time security and city service alerts to Afghans through the ‘Ehtesab App’ (meaning “accountability” in Dari and Pashto) since June 2020, which expanded from five cities to nationwide coverage in 2023. The application also allows users to send reports on incidents which occur in their vicinity - becoming the first citizen engagement platform in Afghanistan’s history. Due to the Taliban’s crackdown on women’s and girls’ education and self-agency, Ehtesab is working on providing instant-access digital guides instructing women about the procedures for dealing with threatening or emergency situations, providing women with tools to safely de-escalate, disrupt, and record their grievances in a method which will be integral for future accountability purposes.
By allowing citizens, especially Afghan women and youth, to engage and inform–in giving the right information and then disseminating that to local communities– the app is focused on providing viable civic technology solutions to serve the needs of communities and those who reside within them. This ensures that the impact of these practices in the technological landscape in Afghanistan is to increase democratic access to information, documentation of human rights violations, and a safe, simple and easily accessible method to report anonymously. The app is completely youth-led, with the team’s average age of 21.