*update december 2021*
After the Taliban took over Afghanistan in August 2021, the group severely curtailed the rights of Afghan women and restricted the country’s once-free and lively press corps. By October, 2021, all Sahar Speaks alumnae had managed to safely leave Afghanistan. They are currently scattered around the world, including the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, The Netherlands, France, Germany, Turkey and Pakistan. We will continue to support them as they carve out new lives and futures for themselves and their families.
Sahar Speaks is unique: it is the first programme of its kind to produce consistent, high-quality journalism from Afghan female correspondents in a global media outlet.
Sahar Speaks was founded in 2015, in order to equip Afghan female journalists with the skills, networking and publishing opportunities needed to give them a voice in international media. The project was developed in 2014 by British-American journalist Amie Ferris-Rotman during her John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship at Stanford University, in response to the lack of Afghan women working for the foreign media outlets in Kabul. To date, we have trained 23 Afghan female journalists from around the country on how to work for international media. In June 2016, the multimedia work of the first 12 participants was published in the HuffPost, marking the first time a global media outlet featured the work of so many Afghan female reporters. In September 2017, our second round, this time focused on visual storytelling, was published in the HuffPost. A month later, the London theatre company Palindrome Productions adapted three stories by our alumnae for the stage. A new collaboration with the theatre is coming soon. Throughout 2018-2020, we published stories from our third round, with the Guardian's Global Development desk.
Their compelling reportage offers an intriguing and rare glimpse into the lives of Afghan women today, stories that only Afghan women can unlock and have access to.
Since training and mentoring, our alumnae have gone on to work for the BBC, al Jazeera, die Welt, The New York Times and News Deeply, amongst others.
Success is: the world hearing and reading Afghan women’s stories, in their own words, as relayed via the global press.
An entrepreneurial news project, Sahar Speaks will ideally serve as a model that can be enlarged and replicated in the future.
*Photo: Amie Ferris-Rotman