Why the 'Etsy of Afghanistan' expanded its focus to humanitarian aid

In the midst of a harsh winter in Afghanistan, the second since the Taliban took over last year, many Afghans are waiting in long food lines for basics such as flour, oil, salt, and lentils.

But 65-year-old Zainoba, who is looking after her three grandsons after their father was killed in a gunfight between the Taliban and former government officials, has had several food packages delivered to her door in Ghazni, a city in southeastern Afghanistan.

The aid comes from Aseel, an e-commerce startup with a hybrid model that allows people to buy handmade goods and send aid packages. Aseel — whose name means authentic in Pashto — originally launched in 2017 with the goal to be an Etsy-like marketplace for handicrafts from Afghanistan. But since August 2021, the company has transformed its app into a fundraising and aid distribution platform, repurposing its supply chain to focus on the humanitarian crisis in the country.

Now, Aseel is returning to its focus on helping Afghan artisans sell their products to global buyers while maintaining its humanitarian mission: It’s still encouraging those customers to buy food, medicine, and other essential supplies for Afghans. It is also trying to work more closely with the international aid system.

Nasrat Khalid, the founder of Aseel, was raised as an Afghan refugee in Pakistan, before returning to Kabul in 2009. He worked with a range of international development organizations, including the World Bank, before launching Aseel to promote Afghan art.

When the Taliban took over in August 2021, the international aid agencies evacuated.

“There was nobody there,” Khalid said. “We were the only ones.”

The Aseel team put a pause on their ambitions to get every Afghan artist on the platform by 2022 and create thousands of jobs in the process. Instead, they did what they could to help their fellow citizens as the country faced international sanctions and cutbacks to foreign aid.

All of Aseel’s staff members in Afghanistan are from the country, said Khalid, who’s now based in Washington, D.C. They have been there providing aid through all the shocks the country has seen in the last 18 months, reaching 500,000 Afghans through the platform.

Khalid said Aseel has directed 86% of funds raised directly to people in need.

How the model works

Since its pivot to providing aid, Aseel now has two main pillars to its business: Aseel Buy Good and Aseel Do Good.

Aseel Buy Good is a platform that helps Afghan artisans sell products. It’s sold over 10,000 items to date and recently expanded to Turkey, where it works with Turkish and Afghan vendors.

Aseel works with artisans such as Ismail, the founder of Nuristan Fashion, which sells hand-sewn clothing and other handicrafts such as pakols, soft, flat, round caps that reflect the culture of Afghanistan’s Nuristan province.

The other side of the company is its aid platform, Aseel Do Good. Among its innovations is an ID for every beneficiary, which allows Aseel to provide donors with details on the people who benefit from their contributions. They are called Omid cards —  which is Pashto for hope.

And it has a network of volunteers called “Atalan,” which is Pashto for heroes, that find the most vulnerable in each community, pack their vehicles with products from local wholesalers, and deliver aid directly to them.

Khalid compares Aseel Buy Good to the Etsy of Afghanistan, a nod to the American e-commerce company focused on handmade items and other crafts. He compares Aseel Do Good to Uber Eats, the online food ordering and delivery platform launched by the ride-hailing business.

Aseel is a for-profit company. As it seeks to expand its Do Good work, it’s interested in partnering with donors and nonprofits in the humanitarian sector. But so far, the money donated through Aseel has come from individual donors. Aseel has not had much engagement from the “international development apparatus,” Khalid said.

“We’re ready to scale,” he said. “It seems like everybody we’re talking to is stuck in the mindset of the past, and they don’t know how to work with a startup.”

When Khalid approaches larger international organizations about working with Aseel, he said, they typically say the company needs to grow its audience of global consumers, mostly from the United States, from 10,000, its current reach, to 100,000 or more.

But as it works to strengthen the Buy Good side of its business, Aseel has been distracted by its work on the Do Good side.

Disrupting the system

The Aseel website describes the platform as “the most efficient system for delivering humanitarian aid in the world.”

Aseel sends 86% of the funds it raises to beneficiaries, contrasting that figure with the United Nations World Food Programme, which gets 48 cents of every dollar raised to Afghan people.

In addition to being “hyper efficient,” as the site explains, Aseel offers transparency and verification with its Omid identification cards for beneficiaries.

But skeptics have noted how scaling this model from the 500,000 people Aseel has served so far to the 20 million people going hungry — or half the population of the country — may require a different toolset. 

These criticisms typically come from people working within aid institutions, Khalid told Devex.

He does not hold back in his critique of the kinds of development and humanitarian organizations he used to work for.

For example, he noted how much of the money raised by the WFP goes to overhead: According to the WFP, for every $1 an individual donor gives, 64 cents goes to programs supporting hungry people.

“That doesn’t work,” Khalid said. “People are dying, they’re hungry, and it’s not their fault that the whole government collapsed.”

Tech platforms such as Aseel, which bring underserved communities into the digital economy, could present an alternative to getting people the food and aid they need, he said.

“This is not just a problem in Afghanistan,” Khalid added, explaining that organizations like WFP should consider how to partner with tech-driven models in their work globally.

Khalid has a unique perspective on the humanitarian sector, having grown up as a recipient of aid, before going on to work with groups including Agency for Economic Cooperation and Development, or AED, now FHI 360, Chemonics, and World Bank.

“When things don’t work, we just sit in meetings and say, ‘Hey it didn’t work.’” he said. “There is no way these institutions can continue going this way.”

But he’s had a hard time convincing larger institutions like his former employers to partner with the startup.

Khalid said Aseel is part of a wave of digital platforms that will challenge the international aid system to work more efficiently and effectively.

“It’s a different age we live in,” he said. “A lot of grassroots organizations are mainly doing the work right now because nobody else can.”