Fatima Nasser is empowering Libyan women through her food delivery app Yummy.

Oil-rich Libya was once one of the wealthiest countries in Africa before it’s long-time leader Moammar Gadhafi was overthrown spiraling the country into political instability, armed conflict, and economic challenges which displaced most of the country into chaos.

Slowly the country is rebuilding itself with a new generation eager to spark change, one such is 21-year-old Fatima Nasser. Born in Sabha, a city in southwestern Libya. She’s the founder of Yummy, an app that connects women making & selling meals from their own kitchen to customers ordering food. Nasser now has 300 cooks registered after concluding trials successfully in hometown Sabha. The app launches this month in Libya’s second-largest city Benghazi, and the capital Tripoli.

Yummy acts as a conduit, offering anonymity options for the cooks, and allows women to take food orders from men without having to speak to them.

Just one in four Libyan women are employed, according to World Bank data. Nasser hopes her app will help change this statistic.

When you come up with a new idea in a society like this, you really have to take into consideration the traditions and the social limitations. We didn’t want to come up with an idea that people would be afraid of. I’m just doing something to help women that I know deserve better. They need opportunities, just like males – Fatima Nasser.

• One major threat is delivering food in unsafe areas with high carjacking rates. To solve this, Yummy has set up neutral meeting points within the city, so that the order can be delivered as close to the customer as possible without endangering the driver.
• Another is the dodgy internet, but in case of a blackout, Yummy provides a phone number so that the delivery can be handled manually.

Here they won’t accept that women work. Here your father or brother is responsible to give you money and everything that you need as a woman in the house. Working with Yummy is wonderful and has made things a lot easier. The work itself is not hard, society is. Ekhlas Ekrim, 26-year-old who’s part of the women selling her food through Yummy.