Kabul, Afghanistan — The 4th Annual TEDxKabul event took place on March 30th and 31st at Kabul University, with the speaker line-up including two participants from USAID’s Promote Women’s Leadership Development (WLD) program.

Ms. Zohra Wandaa and Ms. Parisa Jamshidi, both from Herat, are recent graduates of the USAID leadership development course curriculum. In addition to successfully completing the training requirements, the two women, along with some of their classmates, launched an anti-street harassment campaign to educate the public on how to treat and respect women.

The girls are excited to take their project to a larger platform such as TEDx. Zohra explains, “We are excited to use the TEDx platform to raise awareness about street harassment. This is a root cause for many problems for women in Afghanistan. We face street harassment daily, but one has really taken it seriously before.”

Their project raises a conversation of significant importance to the Promote program overall, and to the Women’s Leadership Development project specifically. Najlla Habibyar, the Public-Private Partnership Manager at WLD, comments, “This will be first time that there will be a practical discussion against street harassment in public in Kabul – and we are happy to have such a topic raised by our graduates. The speeches and the drama that they will be presenting will be thought-provoking and will challenge the audience to understand how street harassment could impede the country's development and progress by sidelining women from active participation.”

“TED” is a nonprofit devoted to spreading ideas, usually in the form of short, powerful talks (18 minutes or less). TED began in 1984 as a conference where Technology, Entertainment and Design converged, and today covers almost all topics — from science to business to global issues — in more than 100 languages. Meanwhile, independently run TEDx events help share ideas in communities around the world. TEDxKabul has been organized annually in Afghanistan since 2012.

Promote Women’s Leadership and Development aims to build on the gains Afghan women have made over the last decade by providing 75,000 educated women between18 and 30 from across the country with leadership skills to advance into decision-making positions in the political, economic, and social sectors of Afghan society.

For more information about Promote for Afghan women, please go to: https://promoteafghanwomen.org/en