A Year After the Taliban Took Over, Leadership Programs in Afghanistan Still Raise up Girls

A Year After the Taliban Took Over, Leadership Programs in Afghanistan Still Raise up Girls
7/21/2022 by Clara Scholl
“Our goal is to become active and powerful women. We learn what our rights are, how we can define our rights, how we can raise our voices.”


17-year-old Farzana tells Ms. that a local NGO that provides support for women and girls has been a lifeline in the face of the Taliban occupation. “We must continue and try to help the community around us in different ways, even though the worst situation is here,” she says. (Direct Relief / Flickr)

On the morning of Aug. 15, 2021, seventeen-year-old athlete Farzana* woke up and prepared to run twenty kilometers down the streets of Kabul, as she did every morning. She was training for her upcoming track race competing with an all women’s team for the city of Kabul, Afghanistan. As she walked to the door, her mother stopped her and told her she was not allowed to leave. “She told me that the Taliban would kill me if I left the house in the athletic clothes I was wearing,” Farzana said in an interview. “I got into an argument with my family because I did not believe them. I could not imagine that the Taliban had come.” She did not believe it. As a teenager, Farzana was relatively independent. She had lived in Kabul since she was six with her seven siblings. Ever since her father died five years ago, her mother had supported their family. Farzana went to school and did extracurricular activities, such as running and participating in a program with a local NGO that works on leadership development for Afghan youth. She joined the program when she was in kindergarten. (For security purposes, the NGO will go unnamed).
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In 2017, Farzana was a founding participant in a new program created by the NGO, based on the principle that women and girls can help and learn from each other, while supporting one another. Not only does the program provide a safe space for girls to learn and empower each other, it also allows the transfer of information to other girls outside of the program. “We wanted to have a program for girls to raise their voices and talk in a relaxed setting, which was different from other places,” Farzana said. “We wanted educational classes to help us to improve our lives and access the new world which we could transfer to other women.”

Many girls were accepted into the new program, especially those who had few resources for extracurricular activities outside of the NGO. “In Afghanistan, most families are poor and cannot support girls in their family,” said Farzana. “In my family, no one is educated so they can’t help me with my studies. The NGO program helped me to continue my school lessons. Now, I am in first position at my school.” As the program grew to include support groups, educational classes, vocational training and public speaking, Farzana took on a leadership role as a senior member and began mentoring younger participants.

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After the U.S. left Afghanistan and the Taliban took over the country in Aug. 2021, the NGO temporarily stopped its in-person activities. The uncertainty of the new situation and the sudden change in routine left the girls feeling isolated and lonely. Farzana understood that Afghanistan had lost its government and the Afghan women had lost their rights. “My heart broke. I sat at home and I cried a lot. For a few days, I didn’t go outside,” she says. “We lost everything, our freedom, our rights, our lessons, our schools, our university, our positions. We had no reason to be alive, but what should we do? For a month we were depressed. We cried and slept a lot. It was in these days that we wondered what became of our hopes.”



Afghan women march as they chant slogans and hold banners during a women’s rights protest in Kabul on January 16, 2022. (Photo by WAKIL KOHSAR/AFP via Getty Images)


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https://msmagazine.com/2022/07/21/afghan-women-girls-leadership-programs-taliban-ngo/