Biography

My name is Roya Rahmani. I work as a project coordinator for the International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development (Rights and Democracy). We are working on a women's rights fund. This program is entirely funded by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA). It started in 2003 and is still ongoing.

I was born in Afghanistan in 1978 and resided there until I was 13 years old. Then I moved to Pakistan with my family and from there I received a scholarship to study in Canada. The way my scholarship worked is that it would grant me Canadian citizenship after living there a few years. I went as a landed immigrant to study in Canada in 1998. I resided in Montreal and went to McGill University to study computer science-software engineering-and graduated in 2003. I worked for a year, and since October 2004 I've been back in Afghanistan working as a project coordinator for Rights and Democracy.

Women's Rights and Afghanistan Fund (WRAF) project

The Women's Rights and Afghanistan Fund (WRAF) project started in 2003. Women's rights is one of the four goals that Rights and Democracy is implementing. The project is designed to help empower women and advocate women's rights. The project makes small grants to local women's non-government organizations (NGOs) as well as other groups who are not registered in the system as NGOs. The NGO groups are implementing the projects themselves with the grassroots-level women in different provinces. We provide financial support as well as guidance, capacity building, workshops and training that we either initiate ourselves or provide in partnership with other organizations.

At the beginning we had to get the women up and running. It was hard to get local women's groups out of their houses for training. The women would find it useless; they would feel insecure and they could not see the need for it. Of course that was a hard time, but as time has passed there are now many organizations and groups that are approaching us. Women are becoming more active, participating in the public sphere much more than before. We are helping them in building their capacity and at the same time doing it their way-they design a project, they plan it and then they come to us. We give them ideas and advice if we think they need it. We are not dictating the project to them; we are just giving them ideas. If we have experience in a region where we think a certain project might not work, we would tell them. Apart from that, it is totally their own initiative. We support them financially with small grants, then they do it and we monitor them.

One of the initiatives we are working on is to coordinate with our partners. We are trying to build a coordination system, where we would invite our partners-for example, the group who is working for legal aid, or the group who is working for the literacy project-to share their experiences, to make a decision about what things are needed, what is missing and how we can do it. This way they can learn from and coordinate with each other.