‘I had 250 angry police officers banging at my door’: The CEO of Roshan on the promise and perils of providing mobile money in Afghanistan – By James Militzer
As the CEO of Afghanistan’s biggest telco, Karim Khoja has been at the front lines of that country’s struggles to modernize its economy. His experiences as head of a foreign-owned company in the tumultuous past decade have been both inspiring and nerve-racking.
In January 2003, after the U.S. military intervention began in Afghanistan, Roshan was awarded one of the country’s first mobile network licenses at a time when it had virtually no telecommunications infrastructure. It quickly grew from 30,000 to nearly six million subscribers, covering more than 60 percent of the population and making it Afghanistan’s leading telecommunications provider (and largest taxpayer). In 2008, it expanded its services into mobile money, partnering with Vodafone to provide a local version of the famed mobile money product M-Pesa.
But as Khoja describes it, the product roll-out was rather tense.
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