Giving Compass' Take:

• Farhad Wajdi won the Waislitz Global Citizens' Choice Award, which offers him $50,000 that he will put towards a women empowerment initiative: a solar-powered food cart cooperative called Banu’s Kitchen. 

• How can more donors help support social entrepreneurship? How are you utilizing charitable giving to promote women empowerment and entrepreneurship?

• Read about other women empowerment projects. 

Farhad Wajdi is not an engineer. He didn’t go to school for engineering, and he certainly didn’t get trained as one.

Yet he builds solar-powered food carts that people around the world are interested in buying and he also developed a biomass, low-pollution stove.

"I have a degree in business administration," he told Global Citizen from where he’s based in Kabul, Afghanistan. "I do a lot of research and sometimes I become an engineer, sometimes I become a chemist — thanks to the internet."

Wajdi’s resourceful, can-do attitude is not in service of gadget tinkering or exciting lab experiments that can be posted on YouTube. Instead, he’s trying to transform Afghanistan by empowering women, kickstarting the economy, feeding the homeless, and cleaning the environment.

His socially-minded ambition has earned him accolades and worldwide recognition in recent years and now he’s being honored with the Waislitz Global Citizens' Choice Award, which includes a $50,000 cash prize.

Wajdi plans to invest the prize money into his solar-powered food cart cooperative called Banu’s Kitchen, the cooperative he developed in 2018 to empower women as part of his larger social entrepreneurship nonprofit Ebtakar.

"The award will help my nonprofit buy necessary equipment for our upcoming project of launching 1,100 solar-powered carts, which will help 2,200 Afghan women to escape extreme poverty, and will encourage thousands of Afghan women to do businesses fearlessly," he told Global Citizen over email. "Out of 1,100 carts, we will produce 500 food carts which, as part of our social cause, will provide free food to hundreds and thousands of Afghans susceptible to hunger. Also, through specially designed food wrappers, we will educate millions of Afghans on climate change."

Read the full article about solar-powered food carts by Joe McCarthy at Global Citizen.