Category: Afghanistan

Afghanistan will hold presidential and provincial council elections tomorrow. The elections represent a pivotal moment in the history of Afghanistan, which will conduct its first democratic transition of presidential power once the vote is complete. There has been growing excitement in Afghanistan leading up to the elections. The Afghan Independent Election Commission (IEC) reported a […]

The Afghan Ministry of Interior Affairs (MoIA) announced this week that it has recruited 13,000 women to work on security procedures at polling centers for the upcoming April 5 presidential election day. There was some concern last summer that there would not be enough women security officers to work at the polling stations set aside […]

Fawzia Koofi, a female member of the Afghan parliament, published an open letter this week to American women, urging them to continue standing shoulder-to-shoulder with women in Afghanistan. Koofi’s letter, entitled “A Letter to My American Sisters,” dispels the media myth that women’s lives have not improved since the fall of the Taliban regime in […]

Candidates for Afghanistan’s upcoming April election kicked off their presidential campaigns on Sunday. According to TOLO News, many of the 11 candidates have focused on similar, broad issues so far, including security, human rights, women’s participation in government, corruption, and economic development. Activists and members of Afghanistan’s parliament pointed out the lack of specific goals […]

The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) and the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) released their annual report on violence against women in Afghanistan yesterday, revealing mixed results of the country’s Elimination of Violence against Women Law. “A Way to Go: An Update on Implementation of the Law on […]

The United States and Afghanistan have agreed on the final language of a Bilateral Security Agreement (BSA) that will help determine the role of the U.S. forces in Afghanistan post-2014. The agreement is now being considered by the Loya Jirga, a council composed of 2500 members including Afghan political, community, business, youth and non-profit organization […]

Secretary of State John Kerry, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and former First Lady Laura Bush called for increased support for Afghan women during the “Advancing Afghan Women: Promoting Peace and Progress in Afghanistan” symposium held in Washington, DC last week. The US leaders asserted that women must be a strong part of Afghanistan’s […]

Registration wrapped up on October 6 for both the Afghanistan presidential and provincial council elections. Twenty-seven candidates have registered for the presidential race, and 2,327 candidates registered to run for the provincial council, including 240 women. Every one of the country’s 34 provinces has one or more women candidates running in that election. Of the […]

Afghanistan held its first social media summit this week in Kabul, the first in a three-part project. The summit – entitled “Paiwand,” meaning “connection” in Dari – was organized by local digital media agency Impassion Afghanistan and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Themed “Social Media for Social Good,” the summit brought together over 200 […]

UN Women, the United Nations agency committed to gender equality and women’s empowerment, condemned the recent intimidation and targeted killings of Afghan women government officials. Several prominent women have been intimidated, abducted, and killed – including Afghanistan’s most senior female police officer, Lieutenant Negar, who died on Monday after being shot by an unidentified gunman […]

At a four-day conference at the Afghan Supreme Court in Kabul last week, over 180 female judges affiliated with the Afghan Women Judges Association (AWJA) and other leaders discussed strategies for improving the number of Afghanistan’s female judges and ensuring justice to those who come to the courts. Women now make up 10 percent of […]

A case of three Afghans who were jailed for torturing a girl has been reversed by the Afghan Supreme Court. Sahar Gul was sold for $5,000 to a 30 years old man New York Times said . She was forced to marry in 2011 in her 13 or 14 years of age. As a result, […]

A day after the Taliban announced that it will agree to peace talks with the United States and Afghanistan, the Afghan government has announced it will not participate until Afghanistan plays a larger lead role. Senior US officials confirmed that two key conditions of the negotiations would be that the Taliban breaks ties with al-Qaeda […]

Najia Seddiqi, the head of women’s affairs for Laghman province and known women’s rights activist, was murdered yesterday on her way to her office. She was getting into a rickshaw when two gunmen on a motorbike shot her. She was traveling with no bodyguards despite multiple requests for protection from authorities, according to her family. […]

Politicians, economists and activists gathered at the Bonn Conference in early December expressed concerns regarding the impact of the withdrawal of th US on maternal mortality. Sarah Pickworth, a public health specialist in Afghanistan stated, “The greatest risk at present is through aid levels dropping off precipitously. Without sufficient funding, there is likely to be […]