No individual #WMF grant for a #Wikidata economics project

One of our best and brightest is from #Iran. He is a very prolific contributor both to Pywikipedia and to Wikidata. His bot has the highest number of edits as a bot and, he is trusted to run his bot as admin.

Amir is part of a team that hoped to bring economic data to Wikidata. Their plan was sadly denied. The reasons given are imho a bit upsetting. Amir is from Iran and we cannot pay money into Iran it is said. Really? We do not have to pay into Iran, what is asked is to make funds available for a project. It does not follow that the WMF itself has to transfer money into Iran.

Another reason is that currently Wikidata does not yet support units properly.. That is in this instance not really much of an issue either because before the data is ready for upload, a lot of preparatory work is to be done. Getting the data, proposing missing properties, analysing the data you name it. Oh and yes, preparing the software that can handle this type of data.

In my opinion the decision not to grant this proposal is a mistake.
Thanks,
     GerardM