ASEEL, Save the World

The collapse of the Afghanistan government and resorting public and private sectors’ inability to pay their staff has been created a massive humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan. The care sector has been affected the most, for the months they haven’t received their salaries and especially women are restricted in most of the situation form their jobs.

Aseel Inc. is a digital platform focused on assisting the most vulnerable, desperate, marginalized communities through technology-embedded solutions. We believe technology plays a vital role in ensuring transparency, accountability, efficiency, and reliability.

Afghanistan’s care is sector is collapsed; a thousand teachers, nurses, doctors, caretakers are lost their jobs, and they have very little or no to feed their families; in Afghan culture, taking care of the elder, children, orphans, disabled consider the responsibility of the immediate family if not extended family or community at large like any other sensible communities, but without any social or welfare support from the government.  This add has to people’s misery, and the frustration exacerbates people’s mental health to self-help themselves or their families.

Aseel Inc in Afghanistan, to deal with this situation, support thousands of people through aid distribution, where our Aseel digital platform (Aseel APP) helps us reach donors, and their donation assists us with food distribution to get to the most vulnerable communities in Afghanistan.  

Aseel is an e-commerce platform initially designed to connect artisans from underdeveloped countries to global customers, as the humanitarian crises hit Afghanistan, Aseel pivoted several strategies to assist people in need.  

Aseel can become the preeminent large-scale solution provider in the service of human development globally. This is not only enormously positive for human development, which gives us global exposure and widespread support,  but given the future development of these untouched markets, using technology, we will be able to reap extraordinarily long-term value and returns to stakeholders. Future potential initiatives would use the underlying data and technology, in order to focus on human development initiatives in fintech, microfinance, women empowerment, and economic growth, amongst others.

Aseel is available on the web and mobile platforms, we have established a supply chain out of our first country of operations, Afghanistan, with a first mission to create 10,000 jobs there.

Our objective we are to focus on growing the localized economic sector and giving a platform for local entrepreneurs, businesses, enthusiasts with no global exposure, to access the global market. Supporting the artisan sector in underdeveloped countries empowers women, youth, and less educated individuals and will allow sustainable economic development from the grassroots level.

Our Solution: Solving underlying infrastructure issues such as digital payments, postal services, and supply chain management through a custom-made platform, in turn, can uplift economic growth for thousands of people.

Our platform will include options on self-help sessions, nutrition, wash, and mapping of the services providers to support local communities, especially those who are caretakers for their communities and families.

90% of global e-commerce is done in ten of the world’s top economies. In addition to access to the internet and digital literacy, three of the most important infrastructure challenges for e-commerce in Afghanistan or somewhere similarly underdeveloped are the lack of reliable postal service, digital payments, and sound supply chains. 

None of these underlying infrastructures for e-commerce are available in the least developed countries such as Afghanistan. Moreover, the continued advancement of global fin-tech systems has resulted in a growing divide between the developed and underdeveloped markets. Most of the traditional and government-driven interventions constrain the spectrum of available solutions, preventing any kind of innovative leapfrogging that can bring these countries on par with the rest of the world.

Since larger e-commerce companies avoid serving “higher risk, lower reward” markets, underdeveloped communities' customer bases remain stagnant with no way to reach international markets. This will only get worse with the impact of COVID19 in under-resourced countries, like Afghanistan. According to estimates, over 2 million Afghans are employed by the handicrafts industry. ASEEL’s solution is tapping into a profitable business area and encouraging wider participation and inclusion for artisans in underdeveloped countries. 

Successful Initiative 1: ASEEL Handmade

ASEEL Handmade enables artisans from Afghanistan to sell their products in the US and Australian markets – Intentionally chosen as one of the most challenging sourcing countries in the world with no postal and fintech infrastructure – Aseel successfully created the ASEEL Handmade platform (IOS, Android, Web) and the tools for artisans (Sell with Aseel, Fintech Infrastructure, and Supply chain).  40 Vendors, 840 artisans, and thousands of products transact through Aseel now.  The ASEEL Handmade platform is currently being rolled out in Turkey (Pick-up Country #2) and, through the funding from the Series A round, will also be rolled out into two other countries.

Successful initiative 2: ASEEL Emergency Response (ER)

After the fall of the government of Afghanistan in August 2021, the Aseel team created a solution to enable the delivery of humanitarian aid to Afghanistan. The ER initiative consists of food, medical, or other assistance packages that anyone globally can buy for affected people within Afghanistan; in addition, the platform allows people anywhere in the world to create a crowdfunding campaign that is implemented within the Aseel platform. To date, ASEEL ER (only currently rolled out for Afghanistan) has helped over 70,000 people in under 150 days. 

Nasrat Khalid, the Chief Strategist of the ASEEL project, is Team Lead. With twelve years of experience with the World Bank, USAID and the UN in 7 underdeveloped countries. Originally from Afghanistan, He is well equipped to understand the requirements of how to sustain development projects that are uniquely positioned to meet underdeveloped countries’ technological, economic and infrastructural needs. He is a G20 Young Global Changer, ICANN Fellow and a TEDx Speaker. 

Team more than 50 people work for Aseel.

Aseel looking for the financial resources to fund its digital platform and improve its services categories ranges, expand and reach more people.

Large, Risk-Averse Corporations: One competitor that has similar products to ours but has a different model of impact includes big firms such as Amazon Handmade and Etsy. These are very well resourced but not focused on impact and avoid entering markets with high risks and limited infrastructure.

Small, Retail Firms: Secondly, there are retailers such as Novica, Ten Thousand Villages, Ameri, etc that don't have any presence in underdeveloped countries they source from and are operating with traditional retail models. Another distinction is our continued focus to solve the underlying problems that prohibit underdeveloped countries from participating in the e-commerce market, such as a lack of postal services or financial infrastructure, rather than just “source and sell” products from those countries. 

Why We’re Different: Our solution is defined by our mission. The core of our innovation comes from our drive to take on underlying infrastructural challenges that define the economic realities of all underdeveloped countries. The platform is unique in that its goal is to innovate and establish access to global markets that a local artisan can directly benefit from. Cognizant of the business’s profitability, we design our supply chains to build the critical operational mechanics and make it sustainable at the local level for vendors to partner with us. We not only work to meet our global customers’ needs but also enable our vendors to build up their businesses and contribute to local economies from the grassroots level. Our innovative business model is tailored e-commerce with a cause.

Direct Impact: Through ASEEL, Afghan artisans can grow their customer base, sales, and employees from their communities, growing economies from the local level up. 

Building Sustainably: Artisan businesses in countries like Afghanistan are family-owned and hire limited employees due to the small, stagnant customer base of only people in their communities. Rather than artificially inflating prices of vendors’ goods, we want to build these businesses as independent and self-sustaining entities, without any need for subsidies or aid to encourage sales. 

Traditional Product Lines: ASEEL does not intend to build factories or disrupt traditional lines of production. By bringing vendors into our platform who are fully in control of their digital and physical stores, we ensure there are enough products to meet customer demand while also ensuring prices are kept competitive with our simple pricing formula. Our business model ensures a larger and more widespread impact on the economies of Afghanistan and future countries.

Scalability: Our solution is not limited to one country and is scalable to any under-resourced country with an existing handmade goods sector. As long as we can add vendors’ products onto our platform, we can connect local artisans with global customers anywhere in the world. 

Which dimension of the Challenge does your solution most closely address? (Required)

Select the dimension to which your solution is most aligned. Only select Other if your solution is clearly not aligned to any of the listed dimensions. If you select Other, be sure to explain your selection in the next question and clarify why your solution is still relevant to the Challenge.

Enable small and new businesses, especially in untapped communities, to prosper and create good jobs through access to capital, networks, and technology

We look for solutions that will have a transformational impact on millions of lives. Use this space as an opportunity to describe your impact goals and how you plan to achieve them, whether through your organization or through other approaches to scale, such as replication.

Near Term: Our mission until the end of this calendar year is to develop the platform so it becomes sustainable enough to where our sales support our current in-country operations. With that validation, as a new start up, we will be able to seek further investments into the platform. 

Short Term: We are committed to operations in Afghanistan until we create 10,000 jobs. This includes expanding our vendor network as well as the range of products we offer on the app, including food items and natural resources to our inventory. We have currently targeted this goal to be completed by the end of 2023. 

 Long Term: In 5 years, our target is to be a household name for consumers who are interested in purchasing ethically sourced handmade goods with an impact. At that time, we will have gone through multiple series of investments into the platform resulting in the provision of a lifeline globally between artisans and global consumers regardless of what country they are based in. We will then move into the second country of operations (TBD) while we also try to expand into more drop-off regions (Europe, Middle East and East Asia) where we will use all our lessons learned in terms of supply chain, fintech and operations to empower artisans globally.

From Top Down to Grassroots: Our primary theory of change is based in that the current model of development has dramatically failed. Every year international organizations and governments pour billions into commerce, education, health, and infrastructure projects in developing countries. Despite immense budgets, these projects fail because the projects rely too much on “trickle down” theory that if you give money to one central government or large business, the impact will spread into other sectors of the country. ASEEL believes development should start at the grassroots level, from the ground up. If you can network a group of vendors in a community to a global e-commerce app using technologies they can realistically access, you allow them to build their business and grow their local economies. Eventually, you can expand that small vendor network to the whole of the country, you can expand the impact on economies that your venture makes. 

Technology at the Heart: Rather than flooding a local or national economy with funds, we set out to first build the technology and infrastructure to support a robust e-commerce platform. We have focused our efforts on our application and web development as well as individually reaching out to vendors who would be willing to join us. Again, we have begun our commercial-with-a-cause project from the ground up rather than establishing a new business or trying to remake the e-commerce wheel. Using existing technologies and focusing on how we can employ those to give any business owner access to global markets, we built our supply chain. In countries like Afghanistan with little to no technological, commercial, or financial infrastructure, a dedicated team innovatively utilizing mobile technology can accomplish this. If you have a field team to interface with local vendor networks, you can better include them into a large e-commerce platform, handle specific shipment concerns for each country you operate in, and interface more directly with your vendor and products base. This allows a more seamless path between your local vendors and global artisans, rather than just assuming that merely an app will accomplish these goals. 

We use well-known and developed e-commerce web and mobile technologies to power ASEEL:

Customer-Focused: Our customer-facing platform utilizes mobile and web technologies. Currently, we have an iOS app and are in the process of developing our Android application. For our web app, we identify users based on their IP addresses to redirect them to their local stores. 

Transparent Backend: We employ e-commerce web technologies (Adobe Magento) for the back-end, so that our in-country team and our vendors can transparently track the purchases and customers can find us in any user platforms. Currently, the platform provides end-to-end information on all products, vendors, sales and customers. We built our financial back-end specifically enabling us to act as the third party between buyer and seller and process payments in Afghanistan through bank accounts, mobile money, cash and so on. We have built a transparent system so the vendors themselves can track their progress and earnings overall. 

Future Developments: We wish to implement augmented reality (AR) features to provide personalized experiences for the buyers. For example, when purchasing a carpet, customers could “view” the item in their space before purchase. In underdeveloped economies and with little manufacturing experience, vendors/artisans have a very limited understanding of the international markets and customer preferences. To that end, we also want to implement machine learning (ML) algorithms to build seamless clothes sizing for vendors to personalize customer experiences.

Backend: Magento is an e-commerce service widely used by Nike, Hermes, Ford, and others. The service is highly scalable and it being more technical than services like Shopify fits our future scaling needs as we create supply chains from countries that cannot currently access e-commerce markets. We empower artisans to create their own store within ASEEL where they share their stories, videos and products, track inventory, sales, and customer messages. Additionally, Magento feeds into our mobile applications through APIs. 

 Mobile App: The mobile apps are in iOS and Android. The AR features to be implemented are used by firms like Target and Inhaabit; the ML features are used by firms like mTailor. 

Data: All data are hosted in Google Cloud Virtual Machines, providing 100% uptime. We added multiple plugins to our backend to provide us accurate and real-time data on customer behavior. We use Google’s Firebase to understand how people respond to our app and where the customer engagement hotspots.

Marketing: We integrated our inventoried catalogue with an authorized Facebook shop that feeds our products to our social media  pages. Users can click on product photos to receive information about price and description of the product and buy it from there in two steps.

Aseel is equal opportunities for everyone without any discrimination of race, gender, ethnicity, religion, or beliefs, Aseel wants to create an environment of positive working culture for all its employees that emphasizes women empowerment inclusion, and diversity.

Assel has HR, Code of Conduct, Protection Against Sexual Harassment and Abuse policies and procedures are in place.

our innovative business model has tailored e-commerce with a cause. 

Customer-Focused: Our customer-facing platform utilizes mobile and web technologies. Currently, we have an iOS app and are in the process of developing our Android application. For our web app, we identify users based on their IP addresses to redirect them to their local stores. 

Transparent Backend: We employ e-commerce web technologies (Adobe Magento) for the back-end, so that our in-country team and our vendors can transparently track the purchases and customers can find us in any user platforms. Currently, the platform provides end-to-end information on all products, vendors, sales and customers. We built our financial back-end specifically enabling us to act as the third party between buyer and seller and process payments in Afghanistan through bank accounts, mobile money, cash and so on. We have built a transparent system so the vendors themselves can track their progress and earnings overall. 

Future Developments: We wish to implement augmented reality (AR) features to provide personalized experiences for the buyers. For example, when purchasing a carpet, customers could “view” the item in their space before purchase. In underdeveloped economies and with little manufacturing experience, vendors/artisans have a very limited understanding of the international markets and customer preferences. To that end, we also want to implement machine learning (ML) algorithms to build seamless clothes sizing for vendors to personalize customer experiences.

Since inception, our biggest constraint is getting seed funding for the project, given that investors tend to think of underdeveloped countries as ‘risky’ and the dispersed operation scale tends to scare investors away. However, we funded the project ourselves from our savings that have supported the creation and validation of the platform. However, those funds are not sufficient to do targeting marketing in the ever-increasing cost of social media advertising.  

Institutionalization and Partnerships: In the long term, market responsiveness, quality improvement of our vendors, and institutionalizing the infrastructure for such a project would be a key challenge yet our biggest achievement. We also see high potential in promoting our business as such to be able to attract large-scale international brands for direct manufacturing partnerships and create a larger accessible target audience we work with.

We actively pitching to investors and donors to receive funds in order to expand and improve and reach wider communities and design a subscription-based fee structure.

As we get the initial funding and start gaining momentum on investment partnerships, we will be able to scale our business up to the level that an international organization or government would be willing to fully partner with us. That level of partnership will ensure that we are able to solidify and institutionalize our solution from a small pilot supply chain into a global effort connecting local artisans to any consumer around the world, creating a sustained and worldwide pipeline from underdeveloped countries into global markets.