Somaya Faruqi

Career

In 2017, when she was 14, Faruqi became part of the six-member Afghan Girls Robotics Team, a group started by Roya Mahboob. That year they went to the United States for the FIRST Global Challenge robotics competition. The following year, the team trained in Canada and spent months traveling across the U.S. for more contests. After their American visas ran out, Faruqi kept competing with the team in Estonia and Istanbul.

By early 2020, at 17, she was named captain of the squad, which met daily after school. That March, the governor of Herat, facing a ventilator shortage during the pandemic, asked for help designing cheap ventilators. The robotics team was one of six groups the government reached out to. Working from an MIT design and with advice from MIT engineers and California surgeon Douglas Chin, they built a prototype using Toyota Corolla parts and a Honda motorcycle chain drive.

Faruqi’s father drove the girls to their workshop, taking back roads to avoid checkpoints. UNICEF helped them get needed parts over the three months it took to finish the prototype in July 2020. In December 2020, Minister Nizar Ahmad Ghoryani provided funding and land for a factory to produce the ventilators. Under mentor Roya Mahboob, the Afghan Dreamers also created a UVC robot for sanitization and a spray robot for disinfection, both approved by the Ministry of Health for manufacturing.

Did You Know?

• Faruqi became interested in engineering as a child by watching and working with her father in his car repair shop.
• Her mother was unable to have a formal education past the age of ten due to Taliban restrictions on the education of females.
• The ventilator prototype built by Faruqi's team used Toyota Corolla parts and a chain drive from a Honda motorcycle.
• As of August 26, 2021, Faruqi stated, 'We left Afghanistan for our education and one day we will come back and we will serve our people and our country.'