Transcript:

The Background

When most people came to Afghanistan in 2003, to rent a place would cost you $10,000 per month and you would pay one year's rent in advance. Knowing that Roshan had specific needs, we found a very rundown building with a patch of something that was not even grass, and we had to build a headquarters building. So we basically built it to Canadian or North American specs. We have fire regulations and two generators that supply us with electricity-like a town. If any of our systems go down, then our customers don't have service. Today we supply over 400.000 customers in 25 cities with a telephone service comparable to Rogers or to Telus. In fact, our customers can do data, fax, conference calling, access the Internet, everything that I can do in Vancouver on cable or you can do on your cell phone. Juxtapose that to a country that has been through 23 years of war, and that is what we, at Roshan, have had to deliver.

We make sure that our young Afghans are trained. For example, Shamsia here is a good example of how we mentor and train staff. Shamsia started with us as a trainee and then worked as a cashier in our shop. From trainee she became the cash supervisor in our shop. Now she works in the finance department, doing financial reporting.

Sitting next to her is one of our Indian employees, an ex-pat who is really here as a mentor and is teaching our Afghan staff good accounting skills.

India

, as you know, has very good accountants. So we mix and match those skills to get our young Afghans up to speed to be able to deliver.

One of the other things that we do is encourage intern programs. We bring students in from different universities. We have a young guy here from the University of Western Ontario who is a first-year law student and doing his internship here. We have put him on a treadmill and are making him run really fast-we are giving him more work than he ever got at law school! He is here for the summer, and at the end of it I'm not sure who will benefit more! So this is another Canadian student who is going to get some experience of

Afghanistan

. Last year we had Michelle, who is a law student from the University of British Columbia. We try to have six or seven interns from different universities to help us. Typically we try to take three Canadians-I guess you could say it's a bias of the CEO.

The Office

When we arrived, finding building contractors was very difficult. And if you wanted to build something, you had to fly the building materials in from Dubai. There was very little locally made, such as windows or doors. What you see in front of you is actually a bunch of containers; we put 40 of them in here and made an office. We have been quite creative in the way that we have structured our headquarters building.

In this facility we have about 350 people working for us today. We are very brand aware, so everywhere you go you will see our colours and our latest promotions. We are also very sensitive to the local ethnicities and religions, so as you can see we have a prayer room.

This is not a company where you bring in foreign practices and impose them. Roshan is a melting pot of 19 different expatriates and nationalities, and among the Afghans we have every single ethnicity of

Afghanistan

working for us. But when we interview, we don't interview a Hazara or a Pashtun, we interview an Afghan. We are very clear about that.

The Store

On July 26 when we launched service, that very first day we also opened up our Roshan shop. This is a store where 99 percent of the customers are Afghans, not foreigners. By the way, you can see that we use our real estate extremely well, because it is very expensive in

Afghanistan

. We have an international gateway, we have antennas for our cellular phones, we have a generator in the back of the building, in fact we have two generators.

For people who can't afford to buy a phone, we have created a product called the PCO-the public call office. It's like a pay phone except that it's a manned pay phone. What we have done on the social development side, coming back to the Aga Khan Development Network's philosophy of helping people, is a trade of arms for phones. With the help of the United Nations, the mujahideen give up their arms. The UN then will buy the PCO phone and give it to them. They will then operate it in their village and earn the money from that. We support the DDR (Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration) program.

We want people to experience our retail store. Our customers come in here and within 10 minutes can leave with a working phone. A salesperson will explain the services to them, they can make their decisions, and when they've made their decisions they will go over here to place their order at the cash desk and pay.

One piece of advice I give to everyone who comes to

Afghanistan

is: don't bring substandard products or substandard services and treat the Afghans as if they are not human beings, because these people have been downtrodden for 23 years. They have a lot of pride and they have a lot of money. Treat them well, treat them with respect, and you know what? They really do respond to it.