Jamila Afghani

Jamila Afghani (@JamilaAfghani)  is an educator, peacebuilder and women’s rights activist in exile from Afghanistan in Canada.  She is an expert on humanitarian aid delivery in Afghanistan.  She has trained and educated 6000 Imams from 22 provinces on women’s rights and gender equality from an Islamic perspective.

She is a member of the board of  the Noor Educational and Capacity Development Organization, where she worked 2001-2015. NECDO was established in 2001 to provide community literacy programs and empower girls and women to understand their rights and get access to resources and opportunities in peace processes. NECDO now provides community-level food and cash assistance to women, youth and children in Afghanistan with World Food Program emergency food support.

She is president of the Afghanistan section of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and vice president on WILPF‘s international board. WILPF Afghanistan helps with catch-up programs in math and other subjects for students, as well as humanitarian aid and pyschosocial support for women in despair amid denial of education to girls, widespread unemployment and rising domestic violence since the Taliban takeover in August 2021.

From 2015-2017 she served as a deputy minister of Labor, Social Affairs, Martyrs and Disabled.  In July 2019, she was part of an 11-woman delegation to the intra-Afghan peace dialogue in Doha sponsored by Qatar and Germany. Jamila has also lived in Pakistan, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Turkey and Norway, where she fled with her family when the Taliban returned to power , moving subsequently to Kitchener, Ontario in Canada.

She was honoured in 2022 with the seventh annual Aurora Prize for Awakening Humanity.