Partners

The Afghan Women's Network (AWN)

The Afghan Women's Network (AWN) is a non-partisan network of Afghan women's organizations that was founded by Afghan women in 1996.

AWN seeks to enhance the ability of Afghan women to fully participate in their communities. AWN works to accomplish this goal by increasing the effectiveness of its member organizations and by fostering partnership and collaboration between its members. AWN also undertakes some advocacy and lobbying efforts on behalf of Afghan women.

At present, AWN is composed of 72 Afghan women's organizations and approximately 3,000 individuals.

Some examples of AWN's activities include workshops on gender-based violence and women's legal rights, gender and media training, gender training for government employees, women's leadership training, and conflict resolution training.

For more information on AWN, please see its Web site: www.afghanwomensnetwork.org

Higher Education Project

Since July of 2007, the Alliance has partnered with the Afghanistan Higher Education Project to provide its Armchair ESL Program to Afghan women faculty members of Afghan universities. The Afghanistan Higher Education Project (“HEP”) is a USAID funded project, jointly implemented by the Academy for Educational Development, Indiana University and University of Massachusetts. HEP works with 16 Afghan institutions of Higher Education across the country, training faculty members in a number of areas, including English language. HEP improves access to quality education throughout Afghanistan by building sustainable capacity to deliver quality teacher education for future secondary school teachers. The project hopes to deliver short-term improvements by training faculty and administrators, and long term, sustainable improvements by strengthening the human resource base and institutional capacity.

In 2007, HEP’s focus in on strengthening individual and institutional capacity of faculties of education offering four year degrees in teacher education. The project will help establish institutional mechanisms for planning and implementing improvements in the education system, and will support the implementation of these development plans through training, scholarships, material support, and English language training.

For more information about HEP, please see the following websites: http://afghanistan.usaid.gov/en/Activity.48.aspx; http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/2868.html

Afghan Women Toward Peace

Afghan Women toward Peace (AWP) is a non-governmental, non-political social association, established in 2004 in Kabul city by a group of Afghan women activists. The association was founded when a group of Swedish women activists in cooperation with Afghan women activists researched and prepared a documentary film about women’s rights in Afghanistan and the harsh living situation of Afghan women and girls. The film inspired international donors to help support the newly created Afghan Women toward Peace. AWP is formally registered with the Ministry of Justice of Afghanistan. AWP more than 100 individual members, including Afghan women faculty and female students, government staff members and civil society organizations.

AWP’s mission is to provide social and economic help to Afghan women to help them become self sufficient and live peacefully. Specifically, AWP’s objectives include:

• Empowerment of women by providing educational services
• Building the capacity of the women through providing them vocational and business management training
• Providing awareness-raising programs for women to improve their social and political knowledge
• Raising awareness of women’s rights to help women understand their human rights and support women’s rights