In this episode of Money Tales, our guest is Morwari Zafar. Morwari was born in Kabul, Afghanistan to a father who was a diplomat and a mother who was a doctor. As Morwari tells us, in this culture social capital has a much higher value than financial capital. Politics and geopolitical challenges caused her family to move around the globe requiring her parents to take on different, less prestigious jobs in order to take care of their family. They ultimately settled in California. This is where Morwari first began to understand the importance of financial capital. As a young adult in love, family social pressures caused Morwari to decide to marry even though she knew in her heart she wanted to remain single and not have children. During the marriage social capital and financial capital collided. Morwari decided to leave the marriage and pursue the independent life she craved.
Morwari is an anthropologist and the founder/CEO of The Sentient Group, a human-centered research, education, and training consultancy in the Washington DC area. She is also an adjunct professor of Afghanistan’s Political History at Georgetown University. She has worked in both the international development and defense sectors, focusing on diaspora engagement. She served as a Next Generation National Security Leaders Fellow at the Center for a New American Security in 2016, and as a research fellow at the University of Oxford’s Rothermere American Institute conducting an ethnographic study of county militias and gun rights activism in Virginia. Morwari has a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Oxford.
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