Afghanistan’s Nila Ibrahimi wins Children’s Peace Prize

When Nila Ibrahimi got down to construct a web site telling the tales of Afghan women, it wasn’t simply to present them a voice.

The 17-year-old Afghan refugee was additionally decided to remind her fellow Gen Zs in her adopted nation, Canada, that they have been comparable – they even listened to Taylor Swift identical to different teenage women around the globe.

“I want to make them as real as possible so that other people, especially young people, Gen Z specifically, can put themselves in their shoes,” she informed the BBC.

Nila spoke to the BBC earlier this week, earlier than choosing up the International Children’s Peace Prize beforehand received by schooling campaigner Malala Yousafzai and local weather activist Greta Thunberg.

Nila’s is, maybe, not a simple process. The plight of Afghanistan’s ladies and women can really feel a world away to younger folks dwelling in Canada, the place Nila discovered a house after fleeing her residence nation because the Taliban took over three years in the past.

In that point, the Taliban have banned teenage women from schooling, banned ladies from travelling lengthy distances and not using a male chaperone, and now ordered them to maintain their voices down in public – successfully silencing half the inhabitants.

The Taliban have defended the rulings to the BBC beforehand by saying they align with non secular texts.

“The differences [between Afghanistan and Canada] are vast, so it makes it hard for them to feel connected,” acknowledges Nila.

That is why she helped arrange HerStory – a spot the place she and others assist share the tales of Afghan ladies and women in their very own phrases, each inside and in another country.

“So many times we are lost in the differences that we don’t see the similarities and that’s our goal, to show that to the world.”

Nila Ibrahim was chosen from 165 nominees because the twentieth winner of the celebrated prize.

The award recognises not simply the work accomplished on HerStory, but in addition her ardour for standing up for girls’s rights in Afghanistan.

Nila’s first stand for girls’s rights got here in March 2021, when she joined different younger Afghan women in sharing a video of her singing on-line.

It was a small however highly effective protest in opposition to a decree by the then-director of education in the Afghan capital, Kabul, who tried to ban girls over 12 singing in public. The tried order was by no means applied.

“That was when I really understood the importance of performing, the importance of speaking up and talking about these issues,” explains Nila, who was a part of a bunch referred to as Sound of Afghanistan.

But lower than six months later, every part would change – and, aged 14, she must flee together with her household because the Taliban arrived.

The household – who’re a part of Afghanistan’s Hazara minority – made the tough journey to Pakistan, the place they spent a yr earlier than being granted asylum in Canada.

It was, after 12 months with out schooling, a “breath of fresh air”, she says.

There, Nila was reunited together with her buddies from the singing group.

She was additionally invited to talk at occasions, about her experiences of Afghanistan, permitting her to advocate for all the ladies left behind.

People, she says, have been shocked at how eloquent she was. But Nila knew there have been hundreds of thousands of ladies and women in Afghanistan who have been simply as succesful – though with much less entry to the alternatives she had.

“So I thought if my potential can surprise these people and they don’t know about how educated girls from Afghanistan can be, what if that information was accessible to them?”

HerStory – the web site which grew out of this thought – began in 2023. It options interviews and first individual accounts from each refugees and ladies inside Afghanistan.

The concept is to create a secure house the place a bunch of people that “grew up with the stories of the first period of Taliban and how horrible the lives of women were at the time” share their tales – and their “shock and anger” at discovering themselves in an more and more comparable state of affairs.

The anger is a sense Nila tries to maintain separate from her work.

“When you see Afghanistan going back in time in 20 years, of course it makes you fear,” she says.

“It’s a shared feeling. It’s a shared experience for girls anywhere.”

The award, she says, is an opportunity for Afghan women to as soon as once more remind the world in regards to the restrictions they face every day – a reminder “not to forget Afghan girls”.

Marc Dullaert, founding father of the KidsRights Foundation, which runs the award, identified {that a} “staggering” variety of younger ladies have been at present being excluded from schooling.

“Nila’s inspirational work to provide them with a voice that will be heard across the world makes her a truly worthy winner of this year’s 20th International Peace Prize,” he added.

It is also a reminder that her generation – while young – can make a difference, Nila hopes.

“I feel so many instances once we speak about points and totally different causes, we speak about it with the very grownup like strategy of oh, that is very severe,” she says.

“The world is a really scary place, however there’s an strategy that’s extra Gen Z-like… and we are able to take little steps and… do no matter we are able to.”