Empowering Entrepreneurship

By Catherine Kane ’26

In 2021, four days after Basir Talayee ’25 moved to the United States to enroll at Minneapolis Community & Technical College, his hometown of Kabul, Afghanistan, fell to the Taliban.

Talayee’s three younger sisters were also in the US, attending boarding schools on scholarships. Talayee recalls asking his sisters, who had remained in contact with their former schoolmates back home, about their schoolmates’ lives now that the Taliban enforced restrictions on education for women. The young women were no longer able to attend classes. 

“Some of them got married and some were just sitting at home,” he remembers hearing from his sisters. “But some of them asked us if we could help them get scholarships to go to school abroad.” Seeing the need, Talayee and his sisters—Adela, Rahila, and Nadira—decided to launch a program to help young Afghan women continue their educations abroad. 

After Talayee transferred to Macalester the following year, these conversations spurred over a year and a half of work by Talayee, his sisters, and Macalester students to support Afghan women who wanted to continue their studies despite the significant obstacles facing them. With this ambitious—and difficult—goal of empowering young, oppressed women through education, EmpowerED was born. 

In summer 2023, Talayee and Tim Delventhal ’26 (Hillsboro, Ore.) received joint funding from the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Department’s Live It Fund and The Zia and Priti Fund for Innovation and Impact to tutor Afghan women in English, math, and twenty-first-century skills. Nadira, now at Smith College, secured funding from Smith’s Entrepreneurship Department to coach the students applying for scholarships. 

With the help of his sisters, Talayee convinced their uncle, Shawkat, to take a risk and assist with program logistics and day- to-day operations in Kabul. Every day, Talayee and his sisters, working out of the Twin Cities, and Delventhal, working out of Oregon, beamed in to a residence in Kabul via video conferencing. Their work was extraordinarily dangerous, as girls attending classes past primary school is illegal in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, and teachers have been imprisoned. 

“We worried that the Taliban would come knocking on the door of the safe house and ask what we were doing,” Talayee says. “My sisters and I were teaching them about the West, about the Internet, and trying to bring them to the US—it was high risk.” 

That summer, EmpowerED’s first phase engaged a class of eighteen Afghan students in an intensive course of study to prepare them for applying for scholarships overseas. Talayee enlisted the help of Mac students at the Idea Lab and in the Educational Studies Department to serve as language partners. 

“Part of the volunteer work was helping the students get comfortable expressing their ideas,” he says. “Along the way, we developed a curriculum considering cultural needs based on which skills they can keep building up later and use abroad—English being the main one, along with navigating the Internet, leadership, and various forms of communication.” 

In spring 2024, around a dozen students were accepted into schools abroad, securing $1.2 million in scholarships. However, after the Taliban took over, many countries abandoned their embassies in Afghanistan, leaving the students without the ability to obtain student visas. Talayee and Shawkat worked with these students to obtain the necessary documentation and travel documents to be able to leave Afghanistan—a tricky task as their status as women restricted their ability to travel without an older male companion. Most had to travel to Islamabad, Pakistan, the nearest US embassy, in order to apply for student visas. 

Talayee says his ambition to support the young women in his home country was inspired by his parents’ great sacrifices, which allowed him and his sisters to access better education, and by his “life-changing” boarding school experience at Keystone Academy in Beijing, where he began to reflect on access to education and gender inequalities in Afghanistan. 

In Beijing, girls played on school soccer teams, but at home, his sisters received pushback from school administrators when they wanted to set up a soccer program for girls. He intervened, convincing the boys’ coaches to start coaching a girls’ team too. Talayee recalled the coaches being hesitant, unsure of what the community’s reaction would be. 

But Talayee was no stranger to controversy—he liked to prod his school instructors on the meaning of religion, earning him a rebellious reputation at school. His mother also held a job outside the home, a rare arrangement for which she faced criticism. “My mom didn’t care about what people thought of her working outside the house, despite the criticism,” he says. “That changed my life.” 

In summer 2024, Talayee worked with fellow students, faculty members, and resources from the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Department’s MacStartups to create a structure through which additional cohorts of students can engage. 

So far, Talayee and a dozen fellow students have helped around thirty-five Afghan women gain access to education, and secure scholarships for boarding schools and colleges in China, Canada, and the US. Fatima Wakili ’28, one of the women who received help, now attends Macalester. 

This year, Talayee and his team are working to support the second cohort of students throughout their college applications.