The New York Times: If Afghanistan is one of the worst places to be a woman, then Ghor, a province so lawless that people often wonder if there is a government there at all, may be the country’s capital of gender-based violence and abuse. Week after week there are reports of women abused or killed in
Tolo News: Faryab ladies this week welcomed the opening of their first ever fitness center in the provincial capital, Maimana. The gym is a privately-owned business and has the capacity to allow 30 women to exercise at any given time. Click here to read more (external link).
Khalil Noorzai VOA News July 5, 2017 A team of Afghan girls who were denied visas to come to the U.S. for a robotics contest aren’t letting that roadblock stop them. Instead, they sent their homemade robot to Washington to compete without them. The six Afghan teenagers are members of the first-ever Afghan robotics team.
Gulf News: Zeerak the bespectacled orange muppet is the latest innovation from Sesame Street in Afghanistan: a children’s TV character who reveres his educated older sister, brought on to screens to show a new generation that a woman’s place is beyond the home. Click here to read more (external link).
Reuters: When women do report abuse or are arrested themselves, they find themselves at the mercy of Afghanistan’s patriarchal judicial system, shaped by sharia law, women’s rights campaigners say. Click here to read more (external link).
Forbes: Their robot may have permission to travel, but six teenage Afghan inventors are staying put this summer. They’ve been rejected for a one-week travel visa to escort their robot to the inaugural FIRST Global Challenge – an international robotics competition happening in Washington DC in mid-July. Click here to read more (external link).
AFP: The first women settled on this stony slope outside Kabul in the 1990s hoping to escape the stigma they were forced to endure. Today it is known as Afghanistan’s ‘hill of widows’, home to a cluster of women who have eked out independence in a society that shuns and condemns them as immoral. Click here
Washington Post: One recent morning, three figures in white lab coats descended cautiously into a pitch-black netherworld beneath a crumbling bridge in the Afghan capital. They picked their way through garbage and sprawled limbs, passing hundreds of huddled men whose gaunt, wary faces were briefly illuminated by the flare of matches and drug pipes. The doctors
iNews: Afghanistan is one of the world’s most challenging societies to fight for women’s rights, but that hasn’t stopped Jamila Afghani teaching imams what they have been doing wrong The story of Jamila Afghani and the impact of her work can be distilled down to one episode, played out on a street corner on the outskirts
LA Times: Mohammad Mohaqeq has been doing something unusual in Afghan politics: posting pictures of wife Waheeda on social media. In one recent image, the senior government official poses beside her and their 7-year-old daughter, Hadiya, in front of a crystal-clear lake in the northern province of Bamian. Click here to read more (external link).