Seven programmers from Iran received scholarships and completed a bootcamp at ConsenSys Academy, the education department of Ethereum’s incubator.
The grants, which are part of ConsenSys’s global program designed to help developers get started coding on the Ethereum blockchain, could offer people in the country additional opportunities largely cut off from the international tech community.
70% of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) graduates in Iran are women – more than in many industrialized countries around the world. But tech pros in Iran face more obstacles than their counterparts in Europe and the US
Iran is subject to severe international sanctions to prevent the country’s leadership from developing nuclear weapons. This affects the ability of ordinary people to send and receive money from abroad. At the same time, Iran makes a huge contribution to the Bitcoin network and provides around 4% of global hash power. The country is a lucrative place for miners and the blockchain community is active.
Sahar Rahbari, a trained IT manager and 38-year-old mother of two, was one of the participants in the 2020 class. She saw an announcement of the scholarships on Twitter for the first time, and informed CoinDesk via a direct message on the platform. At the time, she was working at a university in her town of Yasouj and running her website for selling local farm products.
Rahbari became curious about blockchain technology after a friend asked her to translate an article about it. She then decided to study and work in the field.
After completing the course, Rahbari started freelancing on local blockchain projects, she said. She doesn’t see much demand for such work in Iran right now, but there are only a handful of projects that would give her the experience she needs to be employed by an international company in the future, she added.
“I know that we can get crypto as a salary on international projects, and that is the most important thing in this area,” Rahbari said. “As we know, we are in a strange and bad political state in Iran. And personally, I cannot enter into financial transactions with other countries. But we can send and receive crypto in small amounts without any hindrance. And that’s a factor for me in choosing this field. “
Stop signs
Training like that at ConsenSys Academy could help Iranians learn new skills and potentially increase the chances of an Iranian developer getting a work visa and emigrating. Unfortunately, this is not enough to solve the geopolitical challenges that many ordinary Iranians face.
US and European companies are often reluctant to employ Iranian nationals or send money to local residents because of concerns about potential sanctions violations.
“Lots of work and study positions [abroad] (like system security) are banned for Iranians, ”said Sanaz, another 2020 class graduate of ConsenSys Academy who is now working towards her PhD. in IT at the University of Oslo, Norway.
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“I’ve seen people get rejected [by companies in Europe] because some American contractors are working with this European company, “said Sanaz, adding that she had heard such stories from people she knew. She asked that her last name not be published.
Sanctions make even freelance work difficult or impossible for Western companies, said another alumna, software engineer Aysha Amin.
Coogan Brennan, director of developer relations at ConsenSys Academy, told CoinDesk that Iranian workers actually face more barriers when trying to build a global career. He noted that Iranian students were particularly strong in last year’s class.
But still: “You have to do a dance to propose such candidates to companies. And being an Iranian is synonymous with a record scratch for some people, ”Brennan said over a phone call.
Diplomatic mission
One hundred students around the world received scholarships from ConsenSys Academy last year, Brennan said. The 2020 class, which ran from September to December, included students who had paid to learn blockchain skills as well as those who received grants through local NGOs, mostly in developing countries, and were able to take online courses for free .
The students who received scholarships also included developers from Haiti, South Africa, Nigeria, the United States, England and a few other countries, Brennan said. This year there were $ 100,000 in grants and the program has been running for five years. Brennan declined to reveal the total amount of grants over a five-year period.
Iranian students received $ 900 scholarships each, but not in the form of money. Rather, they could take online courses and receive mentoring for free.
“We don’t actually give them any money, we think it’s more of a diplomatic mission to give people who need it this opportunity,” Brennan said.
Also Read: Iran Is Ripe For Bitcoin Adoption Even As Government Restricts Mining
The ConsenSys Academy selected the students with the help of the local blockchain organization CoinIran and the semi-Iranian Thessy Mehrain from ConsenSys. Alums will host an online forum in Farsi to help more Ethereum-curious developers in Iran with their work.
“Hopefully this could be a good starting point for passionate developers in this field. And we want to expand the site to make it a place where developers can share knowledge, ask their questions, and discuss their problems, ”said Sanaz.
For them, the new skills are an opportunity to generate additional income, said Sanaz, but also a hope of “creating systems that cannot be stopped”.
