In the informal or artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) sector, women’s participation is estimated at up to 50 percent. But despite their contributions, women across the region are subjected to discrimination—which results in fewer socioeconomic and professional opportunities—in addition to sexual and gender-based violence.

Today, the increasing demand for critical minerals has led global powers, including the United States, to consider critical-mineral deals globally in order to create stronger and more sustainable supply chains. African countries thus have a newfound opportunity to prioritize their development goals—but they first must address the discrimination and violence against women taking place across the industry.

For African countries to empower their women miners, they must tailor formalization pathways of women ASM miners and support grassroots organizations as operational partners, while deploying policies aimed at addressing gender biases in the industry and on a macro scale.

The reality for women miners

In the ASM sector, where working conditions are unsafe, women face gender-based discrimination and physical harm. Women miners are ninety times more at risk of death than their male counterparts, according to the World Bank. Women miners also face sexual violence, which is especially prevalent in conflict areas: For example, amid the ongoing conflict between Congolese armed forces and Rwanda-backed M23 rebels, women (both miners and not) reported 895 rapes in the last two weeks of February 2025, averaging sixty reports per day.

In the ASM sector and in large-scale mining (LSM), women have also been allocated fewer technical jobs in addition to unequal access to mining rights, tools, and financial resources, all diminishing their ability to achieve financial growth. Their restricted economic mobility often confines them to ancillary services such as preparing food and cleaning mineral ore. But regardless of the roles they take, women miners often receive lower wages than men for the same labor. Discrimination also results in women miners taking on a disproportionate burden of labor overall, as many are responsible for housework in addition to mining activities.

Legal infrastructures also reinforce discrimination against women miners: For example, the DRC’s Mining Code stipulates that pregnant women are not allowed to work in mining. Similarly, sections 55 and 56 of Nigeria’s 2004 Labor Act prohibit women from working in industrial undertakings, including mining, during nighttime hours and from doing any manual labor underground. These unequal legal measures can push more women to informal mining practices, making them more vulnerable to physical and gender-based harm.

Tapping the opportunity

African countries, for their development and economic growth, must address the challenges women in both ASM and LSM face, with policies that are tailored to the needs of local mining communities.

African countries must offer easily navigable pathways for ASM miners to formalize—and such pathways must be customized for local contexts. Formalization is particularly complex in regions with conflict and legal pluralism. There are frameworks available to guide African governments in this endeavor. For example, a nongovernmental organization called Pact has publicly put forth the model it uses to engage communities in formalization, tailoring the approach to the needs of local artisanal miners. Such a model includes stakeholder engagement and educational training for miners, in addition to support with securing licenses and land access and with addressing human rights and safety concerns.

African governments should also support local grassroots organizations in operationalizing these efforts to improve the well-being of women miners and their economic prospects. In the ASM sector in particular, these organizations are integral to reaching women miners, especially in spaces where governments lack reach. For example, Tanzania’s Women Miners Association economically empowers women miners through initiatives that organize savings and credit cooperative societies and support women as they work to acquire mining licenses and market access. An organization called IMPACT leads initiatives for women-led mining businesses to improve women miners’ safety and foster inclusion in global supply chains. IMPACT supported the building of at least fifty village savings and loans associations in the DRC and Burkina Faso, involving nearly three thousand women and men who saved more than $176,000.

In addressing women’s challenges in the mining sector—both ASM and LSM—more broadly, African governments must also deploy policies that are gender inclusive and women-centric in order to alleviate the gendered struggles of women in the mining sector. There are already positive examples of such policies on the African continent, some being South Africa’s programs to improve women’s participation in the LSM sector. In addition, the Rwanda Mines, Petroleum, and Gas Board implemented a gender strategy to improve awareness about the role of women in mining and to boost capacity building. Governments should also encourage women’s participation in mining governance.

Leveraging partnerships

Safeguarding and empowering women is essential for upholding human rights and fostering inclusive sustainable growth. While ensuring peace and stability, African countries need to leverage partnerships to advance their development goals.

As countries move forward on critical-minerals deals, they must do so ensuring that there will be mutual economic gains from such agreements. For example, the DRC must leverage its potential mineral deal—in which the United States would provide security against the Rwanda-backed M23 rebel attacks in exchange for access to DRC’s critical minerals—for community development. While signing any deal, governments should foster multistakeholder partnerships with grassroots organizations that can help reach women miners and advance development goals in Africa’s booming mining sector, for an inclusive and equitable future for all.

Neeraja Kulkarni is a researcher, writer, and development practitioner with experience in decarbonization, community resilience, and international development. The views expressed in this article are her own.

The post Empower women miners now for a just future in Africa appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Members of the UN Commission determined that Russia was engaged in the deliberate targeting of civilians and concluded that the drone attacks were “widespread, systematic, and conducted as part of a coordinated state policy.” The report detailed how civilians were targeted “in various circumstances, mainly when they were outdoors, both on foot or while using any type of vehicles,” and noted that on a number of occasions ambulances had been struck by drones in an apparent bid to prevent them from reaching victims and providing vital medical assistance.

During the ten-month period covered by the United Nations probe, Russian drones killed almost 150 Ukrainian civilians in and around Kherson, while leaving hundreds more injured. The constant threat of attack has created a pervasive climate of fear throughout the region, with people afraid to leave their homes. Terrified locals say they feel hunted and refer to the drone attacks as a “human safari.”

In addition to daily drone strikes, Russia has sought to maximize the psychological pressure on residents of the Kherson region via social media channels. UN investigators reported that video footage of drone attacks on Ukrainian civilians is regularly disseminated on Russian Telegram channels, some of which have thousands of subscribers. This video footage shows drone strikes along with the resulting deaths and destruction in the style of video games, often accompanied by background music. Meanwhile, menacing messages posted on Telegram call on Ukrainians to flee the region. “Get out of the city before the leaves fall, you who are destined to die,” read one message quoted in the UN report.

As the world watches the Russian invasion of Ukraine unfold, UkraineAlert delivers the best Atlantic Council expert insight and analysis on Ukraine twice a week directly to your inbox.

This is not the first time UN investigators have accused Russia of committing crimes against humanity in Ukraine. A March 2025 UN report reached a similar conclusion regarding the Kremlin’s large-scale program of detentions and deportations targeting Ukrainians living under Russian occupation. “The evidence gathered led the Commission to conclude that the enforced disappearances against civilians were perpetrated pursuant to a coordinated state policy and amount to crimes against humanity,” the report stated.

Meanwhile, the International Criminal Court in The Hague has issued a number of arrest warrants for senior Russian officials in relation to alleged war crimes committed in Ukraine including the targeted bombing of civilians and critical civilian infrastructure. The most high-profile ICC arrest warrant is for Vladimir Putin himself, who is wanted for his alleged involvement in the mass abduction of Ukrainian children.

At least 20,000 Ukrainian children are believed to have been kidnapped since the start of the full-scale invasion and taken to Russia, where they are subjected to indoctrination to rob them of their Ukrainian heritage and impose a Russian national identity. The nature and scale of these mass abductions may qualify as an act of genocide according to the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention.

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Russia’s deadly “human safari” drone campaign against the civilian population in southern Ukraine’s Kherson region is part of the Kremlin’s strategy to make the area unlivable. The city of Kherson was occupied by the advancing Russian army during the first days of the full-scale invasion and was officially annexed by Russia in September 2022. However, Kherson and the surrounding area were liberated by the Ukrainian military soon after. The scenes of joy that accompanied the liberation of Kherson were deeply humiliating for Putin, who had personally proclaimed the city to be “forever” Russian just weeks earlier.

This setback forced Putin’s invading army to retreat across the Dnipro River, creating a major physical obstacle for the Russian invasion and limiting the occupied zone of Ukraine to the eastern half of the country. Nevertheless, Moscow continues to insist that Kherson and the surrounding region are now part of the Russian Federation and must be handed over within the framework of a future peace deal.

Ukraine has completely ruled out any such concessions. This is hardly surprising. While some temporary territorial compromises may prove possible during peace negotiations, Ukraine’s stance on Kherson is unlikely to change. After all, allowing the renewed Russian occupation of Kherson would be suicidal for Kyiv. It would present Russia with a priceless foothold across the Dnipro River that could be used as a gateway to seize Ukraine’s Black Sea ports and complete the conquest of the country.

For now, Russia appears to have little chance of seizing Kherson militarily or of acquiring the city at the negotiating table. Instead, Moscow seems to be intent on terrorizing local residents and forcing them to flee. Putin claims that the population of the Kherson region are Russians, but he has no qualms about his soldiers using drones to hunt and kill them mercilessly. This tells you all you need to know about Putin’s cynical posturing as the protector of the Russian people in Ukraine.

Peter Dickinson is editor of the Atlantic Council’s UkraineAlert service.

Further reading

UkraineAlert May 8, 2025

Russia’s coming summer offensive could be deadliest of the entire war

By Mykola Bielieskov

As the US-led peace initiative continues to falter, the unfolding summer campaigning season in Ukraine promises to be among the bloodiest of the entire war, writes Mykola Bielieskov.

Conflict European Union

UkraineAlert May 21, 2025

Putin aims to destroy Ukraine and has zero interest in a compromise peace

By Peter Dickinson

Russia’s ongoing campaign to destroy Ukraine as a state and as a nation is taking place in front of the watching world and makes a complete mockery of US-led efforts to broker some kind of compromise peace, writes Peter Dickinson.

Conflict Disinformation

UkraineAlert May 29, 2025

Fiber optic drones could play decisive role in Russia’s summer offensive

By David Kirichenko

Russia’s emphasis on fiber optic drones is giving it a battlefield edge over Ukraine and may help Putin achieve a long hoped for breakthrough in his coming summer offensive, writes David Kirichenko.

Conflict Defense Industry

The views expressed in UkraineAlert are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Atlantic Council, its staff, or its supporters.

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UkraineAlert is a comprehensive online publication that provides regular news and analysis on developments in Ukraine’s politics, economy, civil society, and culture.

The Eurasia Center’s mission is to enhance transatlantic cooperation in promoting stability, democratic values and prosperity in Eurasia, from Eastern Europe and Turkey in the West to the Caucasus, Russia and Central Asia in the East.

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The post UN probe: Russia’s ‘human safari’ in Ukraine is a crime against humanity appeared first on Atlantic Council.

So far, the Taliban has adopted more than two hundred decrees targeting women and girls. The bans and restrictions affect all aspects of life—from banning girls’ education past the seventh grade and limiting women’s employment to curtailing their freedom of movement and social engagement. To implement these decrees, Taliban authorities exercise broad discretionary powers to interpret and enforce the law, relying on a range of extrajudicial methods such as physical coercion, social control, and public intimidation.

In effect, the Taliban regime has employed the instruments of lawmaking and law enforcement to establish a system of control and oppression of women that amounts to gender apartheid. The system was reinforced with the adoption of the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice Law on August 21, 2024. While women’s rights and freedoms were already curtailed by earlier Taliban decrees, the adoption and implementation of this law has had far-reaching consequences, stripping women of even more basic rights and personal autonomy and exacerbating their economic dependence and social isolation.

To combat the Taliban’s institutionalization of gender apartheid in Afghanistan, international actors and civil society groups should document both the regime’s human rights abuses and the system of lawmaking and law enforcement that produces them. Documentation strategies should be geared toward supporting ongoing cases at international courts and catalyzing further accountability processes. An international investigative mechanism, modeled on the United Nations’ (UN) International, Impartial, and Independent Mechanism for Syria (IIIM), can help to hold the Taliban accountable for implementing gender apartheid and the specific rules and tools they use to maintain that system.

From constitutional order to rule by executive fiat

Prior to the Taliban takeover, the legitimacy and legality of the Afghan state were vested in the 2004 Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, which served as the supreme law of the country for seventeen years.

The Constitution was preceded by a Constitutional Loya Jirga or “grand council,” held in 2003, and was approved by consensus in January 2004. It provided an overarching legal framework for the relationship between the Afghan government and Afghan citizens and stipulated a set of constitutional principles and rights, such as separation of powers, due process of law, freedom from persecution, and freedom of expression.

In the new order created by the Taliban, by contrast, there is no constitution or equivalent supreme law. Laws and regulations are issued by the Taliban’s leader, Hibatullah Akhundzada, by his leadership council, and by a host of public officials and religious authorities in an ad hoc manner. Sometimes they take the form of written decrees, such as the “Virtue and Vice” law, but often they are only issued verbally. For example, officials from the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice set the law in declarations and conference speeches, while clerics do so in sermons—bypassing any formal process of lawmaking and ignoring basic requirements that laws must be general, prospective, clear, and stable.

Lawmaking and law enforcement as instruments of control and oppression

In the absence of a constitutional framework that anchors the legal order, regulates the exercise of state power, and protects the rights of citizens, Taliban law draws on a range of other sources. They include extremist religious ideology rooted in a rigid—and contested—interpretation of Sharia law, which has been influenced by the Deobandi school of thought, as well as patriarchal tribal norms and practices.

These sources inform and justify the system of control and oppression of women that has emerged and expanded under Taliban rule, which includes bans and restrictions on women’s education, employment, and a range of fundamental rights and freedoms. While the system is built on a multiplicity of verbal and written decrees and directives, the Taliban is aware that its effectiveness depends on more systematic codification and consolidation. This may explain the broad remit of the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice Law, which, inter alia:

• Bans women from travelling without a male guardian and denies them access to parks, gyms, and other public spaces.
• Requires women to cover their faces and bodies in public; for example, Article 13(8) stipulates: “If an adult woman leaves her home for an essential need, she must cover her voice, face, and body.”
• Declares that women’s voices are awrah (private), which means that women should not be heard in public.

The law’s sweeping, vague language gives the Taliban broad discretionary powers to interpret its provisions, creating ample space for abuses. Article 17, for example, requires media outlets to adhere to religious guidelines, prohibiting any content that may be deemed contrary to Sharia law, without clarifying what that means in practice. Taliban forces are tasked with ensuring compliance with the law—especially by women—and violations are punished with warnings, fines, flogging, and imprisonment. Article 17 gives them broad surveillance and enforcement powers: “Taliban forces are present in markets, streets, universities, offices, and public transportation to ensure that people, particularly women, comply with the imposed laws.”

Such provisions of the “Virtue and Vice” law have further strengthened the core characteristics of law enforcement under the Taliban. An array of authorities—Taliban officials and forces, imams, and other religious figures—are exercising broad discretionary powers to enforce a growing number of vaguely defined rules in arbitrary ways, free from due process constraints and safeguards such as judicial review. Any attempt to resist or circumvent the regime’s bans and restrictions is met with a brutal response, often involving punishment on the spot. Human rights groups have publicized several cases of female activists being detained, disappeared, or killed for protesting Taliban laws. They have documented cases of women getting arrested for secretly teaching young girls and have reported on women being flogged for minor infringements and entire families being ostracized or punished for resisting Taliban edicts. The “Virtue and Vice” law reinforced this brutal system of arbitrary law enforcement with new written edicts that Taliban authorities could use to justify human rights abuses.

Pushing back on gender apartheid: Documentation and accountability strategies

Afghan women are already living in a system of pervasive control and oppression that is best described as gender apartheid. Left unchecked, the Taliban will further institutionalize and entrench that system, making it even more difficult to challenge and reverse in the future. International actors—including international organizations, concerned states, human rights groups, and Afghans in the diaspora—must take appropriate steps to prevent that outcome.

Documentation and accountability strategies offer a path forward. Documenting human rights abuses is critical but given their widespread and systematic character, it must be complimented with documentation of Taliban lawmaking and law enforcement—the rules and practices that produce these abuses. And it must involve structural investigations to show how egregious abuses of power and human rights violations are not byproducts of the system of gender apartheid in Afghanistan but are rather its very means and ends, central to maintaining the system.

Building robust documentation can support ongoing accountability processes and initiatives, such as the case against the Taliban at the International Criminal Court for gender persecution as a crime against humanity. It can also strengthen an anticipated case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). In January, Germany, the Netherlands, Australia, and Canada announced that they intend to sue the Taliban at the ICJ for gross violations of women’s rights, invoking the interjurisdictional clause of the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women.

The experiences of other countries affected by widespread and systematic repression and human rights abuses suggest that documentation efforts can open other, potentially unforeseen pathways to accountability—when such efforts are scaled up and institutionalized. Afghanistan needs an international investigative mechanism modeled on the IIIM for Syria. The Syrian IIIM was established by the UN General Assembly—bypassing the Security Council—and has contributed to a spike in universal jurisdiction prosecutions of Syrian offenders for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

An IIIM for Afghanistan can serve both as a catalyst and repository for gender apartheid documentation. It can also help build structural investigations and prepare criminal cases for prosecution when jurisdictions are able and willing to take up such cases in the future. This would create a vital resource and build momentum for the growing movement to criminalize gender apartheid in international law and ensure that its architects are held to account.

Wesna Saidy is a poet and researcher with a degree in law and political science, focusing on human rights and gender justice in Afghanistan. She is a fellow at the Civic Engagement Project focusing on documentation.

Iavor Rangelov, PhD, is a research fellow at the London School of Economics and has extensive experience with documentation, justice, and accountability strategies in the Balkans, Central Asia, East Africa, the Middle East and Latin America.

This article is part of the Inside the Taliban’s Gender Apartheid series, a joint project of the Civic Engagement Project and the Atlantic Council’s Strategic Litigation Project.

The post How the Taliban is using law for gender apartheid, and how to push back appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Current Russian troop movements and battlefield dynamics indicate that the coming summer offensive may be one of the largest and most ambitious of the entire war. If successful, this campaign could allow Russian troops to push the front line tens of kilometers forward into Ukrainian-held territory and overrun parts of Ukraine’s Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Dnipropetrovsk provinces.

The cities of Kostyantynivka, Pokrovsk, and Kramatorsk are high on the list of likely targets. They have all experienced significant damage and large-scale displacement as a result of Russian bombardment. If these cities and others in the surrounding area fall to the Russians in the coming months, the wider region could become depopulated as large numbers of people flee the fighting.

As the world watches the Russian invasion of Ukraine unfold, UkraineAlert delivers the best Atlantic Council expert insight and analysis on Ukraine twice a week directly to your inbox.

Based on current trends and previous displacement waves, at least two hundred thousand Ukrainian civilians living close to the current front lines of the war could be forced to leave their homes by fall 2025. This is not speculation; it is informed by experience gained during Russia’s full-scale invasion.

Since the beginning of the invasion in February 2022, Ukrainian organizations have been on the front lines of the humanitarian response. They have provided essential aid, temporary housing, psychological support, and ongoing reintegration counselling to help Ukrainians displaced by Russia’s invasion rebuild dignity and restart their lives.

Ukraine’s civil society has worked wonders over the past three years but cannot realistically hope to absorb another 200,000 diplaced people without international support. The situation is even more alarming due to the recent closure of USAID, which was a major player in the humanitarian response to Russia’s invasion. With Putin’s troops already advancing, Ukraine’s Western partners must not ignore the looming danger.

According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), more than 3.6 million people remained internally displaced within Ukraine as of early 2025. Most are women, children, and elderly individuals. Many have already been forced to flee multiple times. This population of displaced people may soon become considerably larger.

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Drones, defense, and diplomacy: Negotiations and the battlefield in Ukraine

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Compounding the crisis, European governments are beginning to phase out temporary support programs for Ukrainians. While the EU recently agreed to extend temporary protection through 2026, enforcement is sometimes patchy. Meanwhile, there are indications across Europe that resettlement fatigue is growing.

In the UK and US, political rhetoric on the topic of Ukrainian refugees has shifted ominously. Most recently, reports emerged that the Trump administration is exploring options to repatriate Ukrainians who entered the United States following the start of the full-scale Russian invasion.

If these trends continue, millions of Ukrainians could find themselves trapped between advancing Russian forces and a closing window of international asylum. While Ukrainians in the east of the country flee Putin’s invading army, many Ukrainian refugees may be forced to return home with uncertain prospects.

If the overstretched Ukrainian military is unable to contain Russia’s summer offensive, the fallout will reverberate far beyond Ukraine’s borders. The displacement of at least 200,000 more civilians would severely strain humanitarian corridors, destabilize border regions, and sow chaos in Ukrainian cities already struggling to absorb previous waves of refugees.

Ukraine’s Western partners still have time to prevent this, but they must act with a sense of urgency. While the Trump administration has been clear that it does not plan to provide Ukraine with further military aid, it should continue sharing intelligence with the Ukrainians while confirming its readiness to sell arms to Kyiv. Europe must speed up the delivery of promised weapons and should expand supplies significantly to improve Ukraine’s position on the battlefield.

In parallel, European countries should take steps to provide reassurance and protect the legal status of Ukrainian refugees. Donor organizations can help by strengthening partnerships with Ukrainian civil society groups that have demonstrated agility, transparency, and high levels of local trust.

The next phase of Russia’s invasion is not just being fought on the front lines of the war. It is taking place across the country in bomb shelters, train stations, and temporary accommodations. Russia is trying to break Ukrainian resistance by making large parts of Ukraine unlivable and destabilizing the country. Ukraine’s partners can do much to counter these efforts, but they must act now before the military and humanitarian situation deteriorates further.

Viktor Liakh is president of the East Europe Foundation. Melinda Haring is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center and a senior advisor at Razom for Ukraine.

Further reading

UkraineAlert May 8, 2025

Russia’s coming summer offensive could be deadliest of the entire war

By Mykola Bielieskov

As the US-led peace initiative continues to falter, the unfolding summer campaigning season in Ukraine promises to be among the bloodiest of the entire war, writes Mykola Bielieskov.

Conflict European Union

UkraineAlert May 21, 2025

Putin aims to destroy Ukraine and has zero interest in a compromise peace

By Peter Dickinson

Russia’s ongoing campaign to destroy Ukraine as a state and as a nation is taking place in front of the watching world and makes a complete mockery of US-led efforts to broker some kind of compromise peace, writes Peter Dickinson.

Conflict Disinformation

UkraineAlert May 13, 2025

Drone superpower: Ukrainian wartime innovation offers lessons for NATO

By David Kirichenko

Today’s Ukraine is now a drone superpower with an innovative domestic defense industry that can provide its NATO allies with important lessons in the realities of twenty-first century warfare, writes David Kirichenko.

Conflict Defense Industry

The views expressed in UkraineAlert are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Atlantic Council, its staff, or its supporters.

Read more from UkraineAlert

UkraineAlert is a comprehensive online publication that provides regular news and analysis on developments in Ukraine’s politics, economy, civil society, and culture.

The Eurasia Center’s mission is to enhance transatlantic cooperation in promoting stability, democratic values and prosperity in Eurasia, from Eastern Europe and Turkey in the West to the Caucasus, Russia and Central Asia in the East.

Learn more

The post Russia’s summer offensive could spark a new humanitarian crisis in Ukraine appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Many Ukrainian civil society representatives stress that peace must be more than a mere pause in fighting. Temporary ceasefires may lead to periods of relative calm, but unless the root causes of the war are addressed and justice is delivered, the conflict will merely be frozen and not resolved. Similarly frozen conflicts in Moldova and Georgia offer cautionary tales of how such outcomes can serve Russian interests. These unresolved disputes have allowed Moscow to destabilize its neighbors for decades while maintaining strategic leverage and control.

As the world watches the Russian invasion of Ukraine unfold, UkraineAlert delivers the best Atlantic Council expert insight and analysis on Ukraine twice a week directly to your inbox.

In order to avoid the geopolitical uncertainties and internal instability of a frozen conflict, Ukrainian sovereignty must remain non-negotiable. This means rejecting any potential peace deal built on territorial concessions, restrictions on the size of Ukraine’s military, or limitations on the country’s ability to form international alliances.

Instead, Ukraine needs concrete and comprehensive security guarantees from the country’s partners. With this in mind, many civil society representatives warn against repeating the mistakes of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, which saw Ukraine surrender its nuclear arsenal in exchange for toothless security assurances that failed to prevent Russia’s invasion.

Ukraine’s future security also depends on a strong military. Many women within the country’s civil society have sought to communicate this to their colleagues in the international feminist movement, which has often traditionally championed disarmament and non-violent conflict resolution. They stress that a durable peace cannot come at the expense of security or Ukraine’s fundamental right to exist.

Speaking during a recent visit to the United States, Ukrainian human rights lawyer and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Oleksandra Matviichuk emphasized that safeguarding Ukrainian sovereignty is about much more than protecting the country’s physical borders and also involves millions of human lives. Ukrainians living under Russian occupation are currently enduring the kidnapping of children, forced deportations, prison camps, sexual violence, widespread human rights abuses, and the methodical erosion of civil liberties. These are not isolated crimes. Instead, Russia is accused of seeking to systematically erase Ukrainian national identity in a campaign that many believe amounts to genocide.

Eurasia Center events

Online Event Tue, June 17, 2025 • 1:00 pm ET

Drones, defense, and diplomacy: Negotiations and the battlefield in Ukraine

Conflict Defense Technologies Europe & Eurasia Politics & Diplomacy

Ukrainian civil society leaders have stressed the need for broad inclusion in peace negotiations and post-war recovery processes. Their calls are backed by the experience of peace initiatives elsewhere. Research indicates that peace efforts are up to 64 percent less likely to fail in instances when civil society representatives are invited to participate in talks. This has been the case in places like Northern Ireland and South Africa, where a combination of official diplomacy and civil society dialogue helped forge lasting peace.

Excluding Ukrainian civil society from peace efforts could undermine the human dimension of the process and remove accountability from the equation. While defining what justice should look like at the local, national, and international levels will be an ongoing discussion requiring the involvement of diverse stakeholders, Ukrainian civil society activists emphasize that justice must remain at the heart of any peace agreement.

Demands for accountability are widespread throughout Ukrainian society. More than 70,000 war crimes have been documented since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion, including a large number of cases involving conflict-related sexual violence. Civil society activists have been at the forefront of efforts to secure justice for war crimes while also working for the protection of displaced people and the return of abducted Ukrainian children. Their demands include ensuring that the perpetrators of war crimes do not enjoy immunity, and that frozen Russian assets be directed toward rebuilding Ukraine and supporting victims.

Many Ukrainian civil society leaders believe the pursuit of justice in response to the crimes committed during Russia’s invasion is not only a national priority. Instead, they say Russia’s actions elsewhere from Syria to Africa reflect a wider pattern of impunity and argue that addressing this problem is a global imperative. As Oleksandra Matviichuk bluntly puts it, “Unpunished evil grows.”

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is a watershed moment in modern history that has directly undermined the foundations of the existing international order. Ukrainian activists recognize the scale of the challenge this represents, but argue that international law must be revitalized rather than being abandoned entirely. They see this moment as a critical test for the global community. How the world responds to Russia’s alleged war crimes will set precedents that extend far beyond Ukraine’s borders. Failure to act decisively now will not only undermine Ukraine’s sovereignty, but also embolden authoritarian regimes everywhere.

Ana Lejava is a Policy Officer at the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace, and Security at Georgetown University.

Further reading

UkraineAlert May 13, 2025

Drone superpower: Ukrainian wartime innovation offers lessons for NATO

By David Kirichenko

Today’s Ukraine is now a drone superpower with an innovative domestic defense industry that can provide its NATO allies with important lessons in the realities of twenty-first century warfare, writes David Kirichenko.

Conflict Defense Industry

UkraineAlert May 13, 2025

How much longer will Putin be allowed to continue stalling for time?

By Peter Dickinson

President Trump has made a legitimate effort to broker a generous peace, but the time has now come to acknowledge that Putin is not negotiating in good faith and will only respond to the language of strength, writes Peter Dickinson.

France Germany

UkraineAlert May 6, 2025

The shadow of 1930s appeasement hangs over US-led peace talks

By Oleksandr Merezhko

As the world prepares to mark the eightieth anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany, the shadow of events leading up to World War II hangs over efforts to end Russia’s current invasion of Ukraine, writes Oleksandr Merezhko.

Conflict European Union

The views expressed in UkraineAlert are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Atlantic Council, its staff, or its supporters.

Read more from UkraineAlert

UkraineAlert is a comprehensive online publication that provides regular news and analysis on developments in Ukraine’s politics, economy, civil society, and culture.

The Eurasia Center’s mission is to enhance transatlantic cooperation in promoting stability, democratic values and prosperity in Eurasia, from Eastern Europe and Turkey in the West to the Caucasus, Russia and Central Asia in the East.

Learn more

The post Ukraine’s vibrant civil society wants to be heard during peace talks appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Child marriage, and specifically the marriage of young girls to adult men, remains a long-standing problem in many parts of Iraq, even when forbidden under law. Tribal and religious leaders perform marriages outside the formal legal system, making it difficult for authorities to monitor or prevent child marriages. In areas stricken with poverty, conflict, and displacement, families are pushed to marry off their daughters as a means of economic survival or protection.

The original proposed text of the new amendments permitted the marriage of girls from the age of nine in certain circumstances, depending on religious interpretations, and granted religious authorities increased power over family matters, including marriage, divorce, and child custody. Proponents of those amendments, primarily conservative Shiite lawmakers, defended the changes as better aligning the law with Islamic principles and reducing Western influence on Iraqi culture.

Iraqi women’s rights activists protested that the amendments effectively “legalise child rape”, and constitute a dramatic rollback in the rights and protections previously guaranteed to women and children under Iraqi law. Their advocacy and pressure appear to have limited the amendments’ harm by retaining provisions for the minimum age of marriage, child custody, and polygamy.

Under the final text of amendments, which entered into force in February, Muslim couples concluding a marriage contract must elect whether the contract—which specifies right and obligations as regards marriage, divorce, child custody, and inheritance—is to be governed under the 1959 Personal Status Law or a Personal Status Code (mudawana), the latter to be developed by the Shia Ja’afari school of Islamic jurisprudence. For marriage contracts concluded and registered before the law’s effective date, either party may submit a request to the Personal Status Court to apply rulings of the Jaafari Shiite school of jurisprudence. If parties in a family dispute disagree on whether to apply the rulings of the Shiite Jaafari school in cases of divorce, the court will apply the choice of the husband.

The amendments also stipulate that the Shiite Endowment Scientific Council, with the assistance of judges and legal experts and in coordination with the State Council, shall develop a code of personal status based on the Jaafari Shiite school of jurisprudence, and submit it to the parliament within four months of the code’s effective date. This code must comply with existing provisions, including those of the 1959 Law, which sets the minimum age of marriage, with exceptions allowing marriage from the age of 15 with a judge’s permission and depending on the child’s “maturity and physical capacity.”

The Iraqi government issued a statement indicating that the amendments came at the request of the citizens represented by the Shiite component in the parliament. Baghdad also clarified that, under the new law, the rulings of the Shiite Jaafari school of jurisprudence apply exclusively to Shiite Iraqis and do not apply to the Sunni Muslims in Iraq.

While there have been some elements of relief that the Iraq parliament has pulled back from legalizing child marriage, the situation remains dynamic, with ongoing discussions concerning the implications of the amendments and the development of the new personal status code, applicable only to the Shia community.

Without enforcement of the law, the Iraqi government is continuing to fail in its duty to protect the rights of its most vulnerable citizens. Girl brides often have little power within their marriages and are less likely to complete their education or be employed, undermining their opportunities for personal and financial autonomy. If divorced or abandoned by their husbands, they have little to equip themselves with to escape cycles of poverty.

Many so-called early marriages constitute de facto forced marriages. Forced marriage is a violation in itself and is also the site of numerous other abuses, including sustained sexual and physical violence. For young girls, pregnancy and childbirth may come with numerous health consequences. According to the World Health Organization, pregnancy and childbirth complications are a leading cause of death among adolescent girls worldwide. Boys who are subjected to early and/or forced marriages are also harmed. Forced to become breadwinners in adolescence, boys suffer curtailed education and career prospects.

The attempts to roll back the rights of women and girls, and the Government’s empowerment of religious authorities to govern people’s personal affairs, underscore the urgent need to support Iraqi human rights activists, and women and children’s rights activists in particular. With Iraq receding from the international headlines and as US humanitarian aid cuts increase the fragility of human rights work, there is a danger that Iraq’s most vulnerable are being left behind.

Sareta Ashraph is a senior legal advisor for the Strategic Litigation Project at the Atlantic Council. 

The post Legalizing child marriage in Iraq: Stepping back from the brink appeared first on Atlantic Council.

As Turkey navigates a shifting global order, economic transformations, and regional conflicts, considering diverse perspectives from informed, visionary leaders—including women—will be crucial.

On March 6, the Atlantic Council Turkey Programs hosted a private roundtable to honor women’s leadership in Turkey in the days leading up to International Women’s Day. The event brought together women thought leaders, diplomats, and heads of businesses in Turkey to discuss global and regional developments, focusing on effective solutions to current challenges. These powerful women spoke under Chatham House Rule about their experiences navigating an increasingly complex world, and specifically about Turkey’s relations with the United States and European Union (EU), Turkey’s role in NATO and the Middle East, and the future of the Turkish economy.

US-Turkey relations amid a changing international order

Participants agreed that US President Donald Trump’s return to office has significantly altered the international order. Given its strategic geopolitical position, Turkey plays a key role in this shifting landscape, which presents Ankara with both challenges and opportunities, the participants said. Concerns were raised regarding the United States losing its status as a diplomatic reference point due to sudden foreign policy changes. Participants emphasized Turkey’s potential to become a full-fledged regional leader but warned against indecisiveness, drawing parallels to the start of the Syrian civil war in 2011, when some felt Turkey missed an opportunity to strengthen ties with the EU through its response to the migrant crisis.

Turkey’s increasing significance in the Middle East

Speakers emphasized Ankara’s evolving role in the Middle East and beyond. For example, as some participants pointed out, Turkey has managed to strengthen ties with Gulf nations while looking beyond their historical disagreements. One participant noted that Turkey has shifted from direct competition with Gulf states to a more utilitarian strategy, improving diplomatic relations across the region. Turkey’s position on Israel and regional security was also debated, with participants mentioning concerns over rising tensions since Hamas’s October 7, 2023 terrorist attacks on Israel. Additionally, Turkey’s influence in shaping the future of Syria was a critical point of discussion. Participants agreed on the difficulty of maintaining sway over the Damascus government without jeopardizing Syria’s legitimacy as an independent state.

EU-Turkey defense relations and implications for NATO

Participants welcomed signs of a more constructive EU-Turkey relationship in light of developments in Syria, cooperation in Ukraine, and the recent discussions of joint defense initiatives. However, skepticism remained regarding whether these bilateral ties can translate into broader EU-wide support for Turkey. The conversation highlighted Turkey’s strong relationships with key European nations such as Spain and Italy and also addressed the failure to leverage these relationships for more extensive regional backing. Some criticized the EU’s reluctance to deepen ties with Turkey due to Turkey’s historical tensions with France and Greece, urging Europe to recognize Turkey as an indispensable ally due to its military, geographic, and economic significance.

One participant underscored the necessity of rethinking NATO’s framework to better integrate Turkey’s interests and security concerns while addressing broader tensions between global powers. The participant reminded the roundtable that Turkey has historically been a bridge between the East and the West, and this role has only become more significant as global tensions rise. She said that Turkey has actively engaged with both Western allies and Russia, seeking to maintain a delicate balance in its foreign policy.

Turkey’s role in the new Syria

In discussing the future of Syrian refugees in Turkey, which currently hosts 3.1 million Syrians under temporary protection, participants noted how many Syrian immigrants have had opportunities in Turkey to establish their own businesses. This echoed the stories presented to the roundtable in a screening of an excerpt from the Atlantic Council Turkey Programs’ documentary, Do Seagulls Migrate?, which explores the experiences of four Syrian women refugees in Turkey.

Some speakers noted the social tensions prevalent in refugee-dense regions such as Kilis and neighborhoods in Istanbul, where the large influx of refugees has contributed to rising rents, decreased job availability, and strains on infrastructure. The discussion acknowledged that while refugees have played a significant role in certain sectors of the economy, the rapid demographic changes have also led to challenges for local populations. The women leaders emphasized the need for holistic policies to address these challenges.

Beyond economic repercussions, participants expressed caution regarding the leadership of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, given its former ties to al-Qaeda, and acknowledged the apprehension many Syrian immigrants—especially women—feel about returning to an uncertain and potentially dangerous environment. The women leaders also raised concerns about long-term integration challenges; while many refugees have settled in Turkey and are unlikely to return to Syria, the refugees’ repatriation remains a key talking point for politicians. The discussion also highlighted the growing presence of a new generation of Syrian children raised in Turkey, underscoring the need to consider their future role and representation within Turkey’s democracy.

Trade, tariffs, and the economy

Several speakers noted that Turkey’s economic trajectory remains closely tied to Europe. One of the most critical concerns raised was the impact of US tariffs and sanctions, which can add to the pressure on Turkey’s economy. Additionally, the participants noted, new EU environmental regulations such as the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism could further strain Turkish exports. However, there was also a sense of cautious optimism, with some speakers pointing to the potential for increased trade volume between Turkey and the United States; in 2024, that trade volume was $32 billion. The participants argued that in the face of global economic shifts, Turkey’s ability to maintain a balanced foreign policy will be essential for safeguarding its economic stability and fostering long-term growth. Striking a careful equilibrium between the United States and Europe—and between these Western allies and regional partners—will be key in mitigating economic uncertainties and capitalizing on new trade opportunities, the participants added.

Investing in Turkey’s human capital

Speakers noted that Turkey has a strong private sector capable of cutting-edge innovation. However, they added that if Turkey wants to maintain and strengthen its relevance in an increasingly competitive global market dependent on new technologies, it should focus on developing a highly skilled workforce. Therefore, speakers at the roundtable extensively discussed the need for aligning educational initiatives with labor market demands, particularly in sectors such as digital innovation, renewable energy, and advanced manufacturing. Speakers noted that university partnerships and investments in vocational training will be crucial in ensuring the continuous development of Turkish human capital. On the other hand, concerns were also raised about the impact of brain drain on Turkey’s innovation potential, with many young professionals seeking opportunities abroad. As one speaker put it, Turkey must focus on developing a highly skilled workforce to maintain its economic relevance in an increasingly competitive global market.

Zeynep Egeli is the project assistant of the Atlantic Council Turkey Programs.

The post How women leaders envision Turkey navigating today’s complicated geopolitical environment appeared first on Atlantic Council.

As we celebrate Women’s History Month in 2025, much of this history of African women has been strangely forgotten. Instead, the international community often treats African woman as an object for study and, frequently, misinterpretation.

On the one hand, she is perceived as the demographic symbol of the African continent whose population is doubling every thirty years and must be contained. On the other hand, she is the one who keeps communities together and, outside the house, tends to be the world champion of entrepreneurship. She is also the primary victim of African conflicts. To paraphrase the French dramatist Jean-Baptiste Racine, the African woman deserves neither this excess of honor nor this indignity.

In fact, the African woman carries within her both a universal dimension that makes her a woman like any other and a singularity that makes her exemplary. Through data from multilateral organizations, however, each dimension of her existence seems to be under scrutiny.

Marriage. While only 2 percent of the world’s population lives in polygamous households, it is in sub-Saharan Africa that polygamy is most practiced (11 percent of the population), with all the rivalries, suffering, and conflict that can often be caused by families composed of several co-wives. As the United Nations (UN) Commission on Human Rights concluded in a 2019 report, polygamy is first and foremost discrimination against women. The practice also feeds into the wider problem of gender-based violence, which impacts 42 percent of women in eastern and southern Africa.

Pregnancy. African women are 130 times more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications than women in Europe and North America, according to a 2024 report by the UN Population Fund. When they survive childbirth, their child is likely to enter the risk zone: according to the World Health Organization, the infant mortality rate indicates seventy-two deaths per one thousand successful births in Africa, the highest rate in the world.

At work. When women in sub-Saharan Africa work, it is, according to a 2018 report by UN Women, mostly (89 percent) in informal employment. Although the African informal sector is not always a curse (behind this economic practice, there is a valuable sense of solidarity within the communities and many advantages foreign organizations don’t see), most international organizations consider informal employment to be problematic, citing “low pay, long hours, no sick or maternity pay, unsafe workplaces.”

During war. In conflict zones such as the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo or Sudan, women are prime targets for rape as a weapon of war. They are also the most efficient actors when it comes to rebuilding communities torn apart by war, to the point of inspiring the landmark UN Resolution 1325 on women’s participation in peace processes.

As elderly persons. Despite all this, African women live longer than African men. However, among the world’s women, they have the lowest life expectancy (sixty-five years compared to more than eighty years in Europe and North America), according to 2023 data.

These terrific data have led development agencies and international financial institutions to praise the resilience of African women. Would this type of language be used for women from Norway or the United States? Yet, this reality is accepted when it comes to African women.

The celebration of the resilience of African women belies the fact that they still do not get enough support in facing their exhausting daily lives. It echoes the racist bias that Black people—and Black women in particular—are more tolerant of pain, a belief rooted in stereotypes in the medical community about Black people’s supposed physical attributes. These and other prejudices are likely at the root of the fact that pregnant Black women are significantly less likely to have labor induced and more likely to have caesarian sections than white women. Among American women, Black women are three times more likely to die in childbirth than white women. Higher incomes and educational attainment do not spare Black women from the effects of these health outcome disparities. A 2023 UN Population Fund report finds that maternal deaths among African-American college graduates remain 1.6 times higher than among white women without a degree. 

But while these statistics can help policymakers understand the work that remains to improve the lives of women in Africa, as well as in the diaspora, they neglect to say anything about the often-overlooked achievements of African feminism. Here are some less well-known statistics and facts that are no less important to understanding the lives of African women in 2025.

First, there’s women’s participation in national legislatures. While women heads of state and government are more often found in Western countries, it is in the Southern Hemisphere that the highest proportion of women parliamentarians are found. Rwanda tops the list, as 61 percent of the country’s members of Parliament are women.

Next, African women lead some of the most far-reaching and impactful multilateral organizations in the world. These include Nigeria’s Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the director-general of the World Trade Organization; Rwanda’s Louise Mushikiwabo, the secretary general of Organisation internationale de la Francophonie; and Uganda’s Winnie Byanyima, the executive director of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS).

And finally, some African nations have made significant strides on labor market equality. According to a 2024 World Economic Forum report measuring gender parity in labor market outcomes, Namibia ranked eighth in the world, higher than Spain (tenth), Belgium (twelfth), and Great Britain (fourteenth). South Africa ranked eighteenth, placing it above Switzerland (twentieth), France (twenty-second) and the United States (forty-third).

So this Women’s History Month, let us turn our attention not just to the litany of statistics cataloguing the challenges African women endure, but also their overlooked feminist breakthroughs. African women deserve recognition not just for the indignities they face, but for the heights they achieve.

Rama Yade is the senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center.

The Africa Center works to promote dynamic geopolitical partnerships with African states and to redirect US and European policy priorities toward strengthening security and bolstering economic growth and prosperity on the continent.

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What women have faced in Syria

Women’s rights in Syria have been neglected for decades. Before the Syrian revolution in 2011, any legal frameworks that offered women rights, privileges, and titles were symbolic and did not translate into meaningful social or political empowerment. These laws and policies were largely superficial, serving more as “window dressing” to give the appearance of progress while women’s actual roles and opportunities were limited in practice. Bashar al-Assad rose to power and led a regime that excluded and discriminated against women.

As the conflict ensued, women in Syria faced increasingly dire conditions. Over 90 percent of Syrians are estimated to be living under the poverty line, and women bear the brunt of this economic crisis. Mariam Jalabi, one of the founders of the Syrian Women’s Political Movement (which advocates for the participation of women in decision-making bodies) told us: “We cannot talk about women’s rights without first talking about human rights . . . A Syrian woman does not have food on her table, her children are not in school, she doesn’t have access to proper healthcare.” These issues are compounded by Syria’s economic collapse, which has increased gender-based violence, child marriage, child labor, and sexual exploitation.

The conflict’s gendered impact is evident in the experiences of female heads of households—the widows and wives of the hundreds of thousands killed, disappeared, or missing in Syria—many of whom are still seeking justice. The patriarchal nature of Syrian society and the Assad regime’s failure to make meaningful legal reforms (specifically regarding citizenship, personal status, property, and the penal code) put women at a disadvantage in providing for their families or making key decisions.

The window of opportunity is limited

Post-conflict contexts provide a unique opportunity for women to take on greater roles in political, economic, and social spheres as existing gender hierarchies get upended. As one study notes, peace processes pave the way for institutional reform and new strategies that promote gender equality. However, as this study also points out, these opportunities for meaningful advancements in women’s empowerment are often time-limited, and substantial effort may be needed to maintain commitment to furthering these advancements.

Syria’s civil society, both inside the country and in the diaspora, has grown stronger and has collected wisdom over years of operating under oppressive, authoritarian rule. Despite hardship, this resilient civil society has continued to adapt, organize, and advocate for a better future and has the potential to steer Syria, including its new leadership, toward a more inclusive, democratic future. This has set a foundation for swift action to promote gender equality during this pivotal but fleeting period.

But still, if matters related to gender parity are continuously postponed—whether until a constitution is solidified or lasting peace is secured—opportunities for equality may be lost.

The women shaping Syria’s future

The Syrian interim government has made some progress. It appointed several women to high-level positions, including Maysaa Sabreen, head of Syria’s Central Bank (the first woman to ever serve the role); Aisha al-Dibs, head of the newly established Women’s Affairs Office; and Muhsina al-Mahithawi, the first female governor of Suwaida.

These women have an opportunity to assert the legitimacy of women as valuable actors in social and political spaces. Their appointments also serve as key indicators of progress, which is being monitored closely by international governments and organizations, including the United States, European Union, and United Nations (UN), in advance of fully lifting sanctions, among other steps towards stabilization in Syria.

While these appointments are significant, questions remain about whether they are genuine efforts or symbolic gestures. For example, statements from officials (including al-Dibs and government spokesperson Obaida Arnaout) and the appointment of Minister of Justice Shadi al-Waisi, who has a controversial track record with respect to women, have been perceived as dismissive of the demands of Syrian women across the country. Syrians were quick to condemn these statements and say they did not reflect priorities for Syria’s future.

But in another sign of progress, ahead of the February Syrian National Dialogue Conference on the country’s political future, the interim government appointed a preparatory committee to set standards for the talks. The committee of seven included two women: Hind Kabawat (one of the authors of this piece) and Houda Attasi.

Kabawat and Attasi led the mediation team and organized thematic sessions within the broader dialogue, with a clear focus on securing the participation of women from across Syrian society, including professionals such as judges, lawyers, and politicians; artists such as writers and actresses; civil-society leaders; women living in displacement camps; mothers of detainees; and others. This included efforts to ensure that there were minimum quotas for women’s participation, set at 30 percent, for each defined category of participant (i.e. politicians, civil society representatives, human-rights activists, and intellectuals). In reality, this quota was not met (it was closer to 25 percent), in part because various religious groups and tribes have little to no female representation in their leadership.

Some attendees expressed concerns about the conference’s inclusivity, particularly of minority women. While invitations were sent out to members of the Yazidi and Kurdish minorities ahead of the conference—and Druze, Kurdish, and Christian men and women participated—there was indeed not a lot of time for Syrians, particularly those in the diaspora, to travel to Damascus to attend in person. In addition, some women participants also expressed concern about a lack of clarity from the interim government on how it would guarantee that the conference’s recommendations would be carried out after the talks; these women called for the implementation of an accountability mechanism.

Nevertheless, the Syrian National Dialogue Conference still marked a significant moment, seeing as over two hundred women participated in the National Dialogue Conference following decades of low women’s participation in Syrian governance and politics. In addition, over ten thousand Syrians from around the world contributed through an online questionnaire, 40 percent of whom were women. The conference’s final statement, which was presented by Attasi, included calls for transitional justice, peace, and respecting women’s rights and role in Syria’s future. These calls were inspired by the requests of women attendees and organizations such as the Syrian Women’s Advisory Board, the Syrian Feminist Lobby, and TASTAKEL, who participated in the dialogue.

Jalabi, who was formerly the Syrian Opposition Coalition’s representative to the UN, reflected on some of the criticisms currently facing the interim government: “Part of our job as active citizens is engaging actively with the current government. As Syrians, we can always expect better from our government. Syrian women . . . we want to be a part of high-level decision making, and not just in the abstract.”

What to do now

It is critical for women to be involved in transitional justice and constitutional reform processes in Syria. This can be enabled by several actors, including the interim government, international stakeholders, and, primarily, Syrian women themselves. 

The international community, particularly the United States and the European Union, should accelerate sanctions relief for Syria. Doing so will help the Syrian government improve women’s rights and revitalize the country’s ailing economy, which has been greatly affected by sanctions imposed on the Assad regime. Sanctions relief would allow women and their families to achieve a “normal” life and secure the resources needed to rebuild the country. Bottom line: If the international community wants to support the women of Syria, the priority should be sanctions relief.

Additionally, the international community should firmly call for Syria to shape a system of governance that includes women. There is precedent for this: For example, UN Resolutions 1325 (2000) and 2467 (2019) call on countries to prioritize the participation of women and the incorporation of gender perspectives in peace and justice processes.

The Syrian interim government must take proactive measures to ensure that women, particularly from minority communities, are represented in future National Dialogue Conferences and all high-level political dialogues. The interim government must ensure that at least 30 percent of representatives in decision-making bodies are women, as was achieved by the UN-facilitated Syrian Constitutional Committee in 2019. Establishing a new Women’s Affairs Office, while important, should not allow the isolation of women’s issues from broader governance. Instead, the office should ensure that such issues are considered in national policies. In essence, Syrian women need to be represented in all levels of government.

Syrian organizations that advocate for women’s participation in decision making should continue to cultivate strategic alliances and broad coalitions, including with regional and international actors, to promote gender equality and peacebuilding.

Furthermore, these organizations should work to further establish solidarity among women. That is essential for the long-term success of any effort to build a more inclusive and democratic Syria. Women working collectively, and without competition, with close alignment in visions and values, can drive efforts to bridge divides (across classes, locations, and sects) that have previously hindered Syria’s sociopolitical progress.

Syrian women’s organizations must work to reframe the debate on gender equality, highlighting that it is not just a fundamental right but also a critical component of a more inclusive and just society. In appealing to the interim government, Syrian women can show how progress in achieving gender equality can enhance the government’s image and reputation. This approach can help mitigate the backlash that has been seen in other post-conflict transitions.

Both women’s organizations and the interim government should together incentivize higher levels of representation by women in Syria’s decision-making bodies and processes. They should work together to ensure the quality and effectiveness of women’s roles, not just the quantity of those roles, in order to ultimately erase deeply ingrained gender stereotypes that undermine the legitimacy of women’s political participation.

While some progress has been made, the Syrian interim government, with support from the international community, must follow with concrete actions to advance women’s rights in Syria. Empowering women will not only benefit Syria in the short term but also set the country on a trajectory toward an inclusive and sustainable future.

Diana Rayes is a nonresident fellow for the Syria Project in the Atlantic Council’s Middle East Programs and a postdoctoral associate at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service.

Hind Kabawat is a nonresident senior fellow for the Syria Project in the Atlantic Council’s Middle East Programs and the director of interfaith peacebuilding at the Center for World Religions, Diplomacy, and Conflict Resolution at the George Mason University Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution.

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Ukraine’s resistance movement has evolved significantly in the eleven years since the onset of Russian military aggression against the country, with a dramatic escalation following the start of the full-scale invasion in February 2022. An extensive network of civil resistance activists, partisans, and military special forces units currently operates throughout Russian-occupied Ukraine, conducting everything from information campaigns to sabotage operations. The aims of the resistance movement include demoralizing the occupation authorities, undermining the logistics of the Russian invasion force, eliminating Russian troops and equipment, and providing vital intelligence to the Ukrainian military.

Geographically, the Ukrainian resistance movement is active throughout the occupied regions of the country, from Crimea in the south to Luhansk on Ukraine’s eastern border with Russia. Despite harsh Russian countermeasures and a Kremlin-enforced climate of fear throughout the occupied regions, Ukraine’s resistance network remains active and continues to expand, according to officials within the Ukrainian military who are charged with overseeing many of the operations taking place behind enemy lines.

As the world watches the Russian invasion of Ukraine unfold, UkraineAlert delivers the best Atlantic Council expert insight and analysis on Ukraine twice a week directly to your inbox.

While the exact structure of Ukraine’s resistance movement is necessarily shrouded in secrecy, it is possible to divide the country’s resistance efforts into three broad categories: civil resistance, partisan activities, and covert military operations.

The “Yellow Ribbon” movement and the “Zla Mavka” resistance group are two prominent examples of Ukrainian civil resistance in action. The “Yellow Ribbon” movement first emerged during the initial months of the full-scale invasion in spring 2022. As the name suggests, it allows activists to display their opposition to the Russian occupation by leaving yellow ribbons in public spaces or painting other symbols associated with the movement. Activists have also engaged in a wide range of information operations designed to intimidate Russian troops or lift the spirits of fellow Ukrainians living under Russian occupation.

The all-female “Zla Mavka” group takes its name from a traditional woodland spirit in Ukrainian folklore who is famed for luring unsuspecting men to their deaths. Members of this loosely knit group are known for using satire and engaging in creative mockery as they seek to boost Ukrainian morale and undermine the legitimacy of the Russian occupation forces.

A number of partisan groups are currently engaged in more direct acts of resistance including intelligence gathering, sabotage operations, and armed attacks on Russian forces in occupied Ukraine. One prominent example is “Atesh,” a partisan group that was founded in September 2022 in Russian-occupied Crimea but claims to have carried out attacks throughout the occupied regions of Ukraine.

The name “Atesh” comes from the Crimean Tatar word for “fire,” reflecting the group’s strong links with the Crimean Tatar community. In a July 2023 interview, Crimean Tatar community leader Mustafa Dzemilev said “Atesh” was able to operate “very deep underground” to avoid detection, but claimed that it could form the basis of a far larger partisan force in Crimea if Ukrainian troops were able to advance toward the peninsula.

Numerous other partisan groups are active across Russian-occupied Ukraine, often focusing on a particular city or region. These include the “Popular Resistance of Ukraine,” an umbrella organisation that claims to have conducted dozens of operations in occupied eastern Ukraine. Another example is the “Berdyansk Partisan Army,” which is active in and around the port city of Berdyansk in southern Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region.

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Unsurprisingly, the main source of resistance activities in Russian-occupied Ukraine is the Ukrainian military. Ukraine first created a covert resistance force back in 2014 during the early stages of Russia’s invasion. In 2021, this was formally established as a unit within Ukraine’s Special Operations Forces. Known as the “Rukh Oporu” (“Resistance Movement”), it is currently engaged in a wide range of support functions that include training, supplying, and funding activists and partisan groups, while also conducting its own extensive operations against the Russian occupation forces. These activities are thought to include the assassination of Russian officials and collaborators.

In addition to “Rukh Oporu,” Ukraine’s SBU (State Security Service) and HUR (Military Intelligence Directorate) are also thought to be heavily involved in military activities behind enemy lines. This includes operations in Russian-occupied territory inside Ukraine and across the border in Russia itself.

It is difficult to assess the overall impact that resistance activities are having on morale within the ranks of the occupying Russian forces or among local collaborators. At the same time, numerous specific attacks on officials, soldiers, equipment, and infrastructure have been confirmed via multiple sources. Resistance groups also support the Ukrainian military with critical intelligence on everything from Russian troop movements to the deployment of air defense batteries. This has enabled a large number of precision strikes on high value targets, while also proving important for the conduct of major operations such as Ukraine’s successful September 2022 counteroffensive in the Kharkiv region.

Ukraine’s efforts to resist the Russian occupation have become markedly more sophisticated over the past three years and are unlikely to end any time soon. If talks progress in the coming months and a compromise peace agreement begins to take shape that would allow Russia to retain control over currently occupied regions of Ukraine, the issue of further Ukrainian resistance operations will likely become the subject of heated discussions as Moscow seeks assurances that Kyiv will be reluctant to provide.

Omar Ashour is a professor of security and military studies at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies in Qatar. He is an honorary professor at the Security and Strategy Institute at the University of Exeter in the UK, and a nonresident senior fellow at the Ilko Kucheriv Democratic Initiatives Foundation in Ukraine.

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The views expressed in UkraineAlert are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Atlantic Council, its staff, or its supporters.

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Evolution of freedom

Indexes are only as good as the data they use and the methodology they follow. However, for Africa, indexes are an important determinant of how citizens perceive progress in the country, how bilateral donors make decisions on when, where, and how to extend support, and, lately, they are a fundamental component of rating agency assessments. As African countries seek to improve access to more affordable capital and crowd in more foreign direct investment, it is crucial that they pay attention to these indexes. Cameroon is no exception. In addition, indexes can provide rare insights into the linkages between issues such as environmental freedom and gender prosperity. The data on Cameroon suggest a strong link between economic freedom, health, education, and gender empowerment. This essay will focus on that and draw lessons for the future. 

Cameroon’s score in the Freedom Index (47.6) is well below the average for the African continent (64.03) and many similar countries such as Senegal (68.7) and Côte d’Ivoire (61.7). The overall freedom measure is a composite score of the legal, political, and economic subindexes, where Cameroon ranks 133rd, 120th, and 144th respectively, out of 164 countries covered by the Indexes.  

Cameroon’s poor performance in the Freedom Index since 1995 is mainly determined by the political and legal dimensions. The political subindex includes four main components: elections, political rights, civil liberties, and legislative constraints on the executive. Political power is centralized in Cameroon, unlike Senegal, for example, and as a result there is no effective system of separation of powers, with both legislative and judicial branches being dependent on the executive power. The level and trend of different components of the Index capture this general assessment.  

The low levels of legislative constraints on the executive and judicial independence, compared to Côte d’Ivoire, for example, reflect the high level of concentration of power in the executive. The judiciary is subordinated to the Ministry of Justice, and the president is entitled to appoint judges (this is not unlike the United States but the degree of independence of the judiciary is also about implementation of policies) and only the president can request the Supreme Court to review the constitutionality of a law. Regarding the legislative, the formation of political parties has been permitted since 1997, and political rights are protected by law. Parliament is also highly dependent on the presidency, which appoints thirty out of the one hundred members of the Senate, the second legislative chamber established in 2013.  

Strong executive power could and should actually benefit women’s economic freedom but currently does not. There are spillovers from the political subindex to other aspects of the institutional framework of Cameroon. This is visible in the economic subindex, which measures trade and investment openness, protection of property rights, and economic opportunities for women. Regarding the latter, Cameroon’s score in the women’s economic freedom component (60) is—surprisingly—among the lowest in the world, ranking 140th among the 164 countries covered by the Indexes. Despite a ten-point increase in 2018, reflecting the introduction of legislation dealing with workplace nondiscrimination and sexual harassment, Cameroon’s performance in this component is still significantly lower than that of other countries in the region, such as Côte d’Ivoire (95), Senegal (72.5), Nigeria (66.3), Gabon (95), and Kenya (83.8).  

Important areas affecting gender equality, where Cameroon does not yet grant legal protection similar to the countries mentioned above, include civil liberties such as freedom of movement and marital rights, and financial inclusion legislation regarding access to banking services, asset ownership, and administration. While implementation of some of the more restrictive legislation may differ from the reality on the ground—for example, women can own property in their name today—the lack of changes to the legal documents opens the door for predatory compliance and legal battles in some cases.  

Having women in government leadership positions has led many countries in the region to advance significant improvements in women’s rights and opportunities. One illustrative example is the case of Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala in Nigeria, who introduced several policies aimed at empowering women during her periods as finance minister (2003–06 and 2011–15), such as the Growing Girls and Women in Nigeria (G-WIN) program. This created a gender-responsive budgeting system that ensured a certain share of public procurement went to female entrepreneurs. Similar legislation can be identified in Kenya, with the Access to Government Procurement Opportunities program introduced in 2013, as well as in Côte d’Ivoire and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Adopting some of these tried and tested programs in Cameroon could help improve women’s economic freedom de jure and de facto.  

Cameroon’s commitment to open and free trade is ambiguous, despite its very strategic location. Total trade to gross domestic product (GDP) has decreased substantially in the last decade, from 50 percent in 2014 to 39 percent in 2023, well below the average for Africa (74.49 percent). On the one hand, the country imposes relatively high tariffs on imports besides primary necessity goods, established at 10 percent for raw materials and equipment goods, 20 percent for intermediary and miscellaneous goods, and up to 30 percent for fast-moving consumer goods, implying an average tariff rate around 18 percent, more than double the average for Africa. With women being the most active small and medium entrepreneurs in cross-border trade, 20 percent tariffs have the potential to disproportionately affect them as a group.  

On the other hand, Cameroon has signed trade agreements with the European Union, United States, China, Japan, and several other nations. In 2020, the country also ratified the African Continental Free Trade Area Agreement, the signature African trade agreement. Cameroon is also a member of the Economic and Monetary Community of Central Africa, which aims a common market among Central African countries. Nonetheless, Cameroon has a negligible trade relationship with Chad, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Central African Republic, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the other five member states. More generally, inter-Africa trade is still marginal, with only 12.7 percent of Cameroon’s export earnings coming from African partners, and less than 10 percent of total imports in 2023. For example, Cameroon’s trade with Nigeria—the largest economy in Africa—was less than 1 percent in 2021. The two countries having difficult and high tariffs undermines their collective prosperity. Policies to improve trade between the two countries will also disproportionately support small women-owned businesses.  

The most relevant factor regarding investment and capital movement regulations in Cameroon is the fact that the national currency, the Central African CFA franc, is shared by the five neighbors mentioned above, and is pegged to the euro at a fixed exchange rate. This has the benefit of providing stability and predictability but also constrains Cameroon’s capacity to autonomously determine its monetary, investment, and capital flows policies. Another factor certainly influencing the investment climate in Cameroon is the security situation in the country and the region. With low tariffs in the sector, foreign capital continues to focus on extractive industries and infrastructure, and the repeated efforts of the government to expand international investment to other sectors have not borne the expected fruits.  

Two other features of Cameroon’s institutional framework stand out in the legal subindex components, namely, the high levels of corruption across all levels of the administration, and the low level of security. Both of these unduly penalize women, who are generally the most affected by conflict and petty corruption. 

Cameroon is host to a large number of refugees as a result of the conflict in the subregion, and this has impacted civil liberties. With respect to security, relatively high levels of small criminality have combined with a surge in terrorist attacks, especially in the last decade, with the emergence of Boko Haram and other Islamist groups, as well as the unrest in the north and southwest of the country. These different violent conflicts, together with the substantial immigration flows coming from Nigeria, Libya, Central African Republic, Chad, and other neighboring countries, have increased the need for tighter security within the country. 

Evolution of prosperity

On the Prosperity Index, measured as the average of six constituent elements (income, inequality, minorities, health, environment and education), Cameroon performs better than its peers but still remains below the African average. The country has outpaced the low regional average in prosperity growth at least since 2005. Education, health, and environment seem to be the areas where improvements have been most palpable, and will be the focus of the following paragraphs. 

The health component of the Prosperity Index, based on life expectancy data, shows a change of tendency around the late 1990s. This is not a feature unique to Cameroon; a similar inflection point from decreasing to rapidly increasing life expectancy is also observable in other African countries such as South Africa, Gabon, and Côte d’Ivoire. An important push in the fight against AIDS, substantially financed by programs led by the international donor community such as the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, was instrumental in this case. Additionally, the increased availability of vaccines for different diseases and some progress in terms of infant and maternal mortality have contributed to this positive evolution.  

Nonetheless, there is still huge room for improvement. First, total public expenditure on health has been below 4 percent of GDP since 2001 (3.82 percent in 2021, the last year of available data), not yet close to the necessary level to ensure substantial and sustained betterment in health outcomes, usually estimated between 5 and 7 percent. For comparison, the average for Sub-Saharan Africa in 2021 is 5.1 percent, and for the Middle East and North Africa region reaches 5.76 percent. Similarly, health expenditure per capita in Cameroon was in 2021 just $155.56, substantially lower than in Nigeria ($220.40), Gabon ($411), or the average of the Sub-Saharan Africa region ($203.70). 

Not only is aggregate spending relatively low, but also the destination of healthcare investment is not optimal. In the last decades, Cameroon has consolidated a series of big training hospitals, mainly located in big cities. On the contrary, investment in primary and preventive healthcare has been deficient, especially in rural areas, creating wide inequalities across the country. Recent disease outbreaks underscore the need for improved strong healthcare systems at the local level. As for other least developed countries, the potential gains of basic health interventions to ensure generalized access to vaccination and maternal and infant care are enormous, as the experience of other African countries has shown.  

Turning to education, the data on school enrollment show a very significant acceleration since the early 2000s, when Cameroon started to grow faster than the regional average. It is important to note the very low initial level of this indicator, but the progress is still remarkable. Free primary education was introduced in the year 2000, and this is probably one important factor explaining the trend in the last two decades.  

Nonetheless, families still need to cover the costs of uniforms and books, which is a significant barrier for an important share of the population. Recall that, according to the World Bank, 23 percent of Cameroon’s population is today living in extreme poverty (under US$2.15 a day), and thus such costs are very significant for them. Moreover, secondary school tuition and fees are not subsidized, which constrains educational attainment for a much larger fraction of children.  

Two areas requiring substantial improvement are, first, the poor quality of the education received, which undermines actual learning outcomes of Cameroonian students. Learning poverty, the share of children not able to read and understand an age-appropriate text by age ten, is estimated by the World Bank at a high 71.9 percent, with girls especially disadvantaged.  

Second, there are important sources of educational inequality, particularly gender and regional based. School enrollment rates are significantly lower for girls than for boys at all levels of the educational system, heavily influenced by high rates of child marriage and early childbearing among girls.  

The attempt to impose French curricula across the whole country led to heated debate, protests, civil unrest, and ultimately, violent clashes in some parts of the country. As a result, schools closed for two years (2018–19), and before they had fully reopened, the COVID-19 pandemic hit and schools were closed again. This combination of shocks has probably generated a very significant slowdown in educational attainment that is not yet captured by the data used in the Prosperity Index.  

Cameroon’s score on the environment component is heavily influenced by one of the variables used to compute it: access to clean cooking technologies. Although this indicator has improved consistently in the last twenty-five years, from barely 10 percent of the population to almost 30 percent today using clean technologies, once again we observe striking spatial differences across the country and between rural and urban populations. Cameroon produces gas and therefore could rapidly improve on this indicator. New cooking stoves are widely available and easily diffused. The executive has the power to improve on this indicator and save lives while improving livelihoods.  

Most importantly, the Prosperity Index does not include any indicator on deforestation, which is extremely relevant for Cameroon, which has the second largest forest area in the Congo Basin, from which many women earn an income.  

The evolution of tree cover areas reveals a loss of 1.53 million hectares between 2001 and 2020, of which 47 percent was in primary forests. As a result, forest as a percentage of land decreased from 47.6 percent in 1990 to 43.03 percent in 2020. In 2021, Cameroon was seventh on the list of the world’s top deforesters, with 89,000 hectares of forest lost. This trend not only threatens to significantly alter weather and crop patterns in the country, affecting women disproportionately, but may lead to deteriorating health conditions as nature and Cameroon’s biodiversity are altered significantly.  

This situation is by no means unavoidable but requires a clear policy commitment if it is to be averted. Cameroon has important gas reserves, and the low usage of wood by households in cities proves that there are possible alternatives. Obviously, providing access to gas and other forms of energy to rural areas requires an important investment in infrastructure and creation of logistic networks that are not yet in place, but certainly should be a priority for the government and the international community in the near future. Cameroonian women not only suffer from a very unequal legislative environment, but also due to structural conditions on these areas that further hamper their personal development compared to men. 

The path forward

The strength of data lies in its capacity to tell stories and be scrutinized. The data on Cameroon need more attention and the authorities should work with the groups that collect the original data used to build these Indexes, along with the Cameroon National Statistics Office, development institutions, and other research institutions that collect data, to ensure representation of Cameroon is accurate, especially since these data are often used by market players to inform investment decisions.  

In the interim, one crucial conclusion from the data is the interdependence between the health, education, and environment components and the women’s economic freedom component. This interconnectedness is a double-edged sword, as weak legislative focus undermines women’s economic empowerment, which leads to poor health and education outcomes and in some cases may also lead to environmental degradation.  

Bottom-up or top-down policies could help move these indicators, building on the successes already achieved in these domains, first by focusing on laws that provide women with better economic empowerment. This essay has cited several examples of initiatives in other countries which could be adapted to fit the national context and implemented in Cameroon.  

Education remains the fastest way to economic empowerment of populations and women in general. In the long run it can help reduce costs of healthcare as educated women tend to adopt more preventive approaches for themselves and their children, reducing the cost of healthcare which is not only high but still comprises lots of risks for women. To this end, the policy of free primary education must be coupled with robust teacher quality and performance indicators to ensure that children are actively learning. A year of lost learning, even if it appears free, is costly for teacher, student, and parent. This kind of waste undermines the economy in the long run as an unskilled population is an economic cost to the country over time.  

Cameroon’s environmental resources, if well managed, could represent an important source of revenue for local populations and women in particular in an economic environment where carbon markets are growing, protection of fauna and flora is valued, and organic production commands a premium from markets. Support by government to reforestation projects could help generate resources for rural populations while promoting more nature tourism, building on the strengths of the country. An important component of the women’s health and environment nexus, however, would be policies which help women use cleaner cooking practices, as unsafe technologies claim the lives of many women.  

Overall, the policies needed to improve the economic freedom components for women are well within reach of the Cameroonian government, as many are policy-based first and foremost. In addition, it would serve the government well to work with the Indexes to scrutinize the data and scoring so that they can provide a more accurate report on the economic freedom of women in Cameroon. 

Vera Songwe is a nonresident senior fellow in the Global Economy and Development practice at the Brookings Institution and chair and founder of the Board of the Liquidity and Sustainability Facility. Songwe is a board member of the Mo Ibrahim Foundation and previously served as undersecretary-general at the United Nations and executive secretary of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa. Songwe’s expertise includes work on Africa’s growth prospects in a global context, with a focus on improving access to sustainable finance. 

The Atlantic Council and its staff, fellows, and directors generate their own ideas and programming, consistent with the Council’s mission, their related body of work, and the independent records of the participating team members. The Council as an organization does not adopt or advocate positions on particular matters. The Council’s publications always represent the views of the author(s) rather than those of the institution.

2024 Atlas: Freedom and Prosperity Around the World

Twenty leading economists and government officials from eighteen countries contributed to this comprehensive volume, which serves as a roadmap for navigating the complexities of contemporary governance. 

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Freedom and Prosperity Indexes

The indexes rank 164 countries around the world according to their levels of freedom and prosperity. Use our site to explore twenty-eight years of data, compare countries and regions, and examine the sub-indexes and indicators that comprise our indexes.

The Freedom and Prosperity Center aims to increase the prosperity of the poor and marginalized in developing countries and to explore the nature of the relationship between freedom and prosperity in both developing and developed nations.

Learn more

The post Cameroon’s future relies on empowering its women  appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Evolution of freedom

Morocco has substantially improved in all institutional dimensions during the last three decades, as measured by the progress in the Freedom Index. The Kingdom navigated the Arab Spring, which rocked certain countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. As a result, a diverging trend has emerged between the sustained improvement in Morocco and the deterioration in MENA’s regional average since 2013, resulting in a gap of more than eleven points in their respective Freedom Index scores. As this chapter will detail, there are many areas in which Morocco still needs to continue its reform effort toward fully free and open institutions, building on recent positive trends.

The economic subindex shows a very sharp discontinuity in the year 2004, where Morocco’s score jumps more than eight points, opening a very substantial gap with respect to the rest of the region. A closer look at the components included in the economic subindex evinces that it is primarily driven by an extensive improvement in women’s economic opportunities, produced by the implementation of a new Family Code, known as Moudawana, in 2004. This piece of legislation is seen as one of the most progressive of the region, expanding women’s rights and protections in relation to civil liberties like marriage, divorce, child custody, and inheritance; as well as labor and economic aspects such as workplace protection, equal pay, maternity leave, and access to credit.

Morocco has historically been fairly open to international trade and foreign investment. The European Union-Morocco Association Agreement that entered into force in the year 2000, creating a free trade area with the European Union, has certainly expanded exporting opportunities. Yet, the concentration of trade relations with Europe may have slowed down economic integration with neighboring countries in the Middle East and Africa. The signing of the African Continental Free Trade Agreement in 2018, and its ratification in 2022, will likely favor the expansion of Morocco’s trade and investment flows with the rest of Africa in the coming decades.

The different components of the economic subindex are not wholly capturing domestic aspects of free and fair competition. Like in most countries in the Middle East and North Africa, Morocco is subject to an important level of market concentration in many sectors, especially non-tradable sectors. That is despite progress made in the competition policy framework. Leveling the playing field will be paramount if Morocco wants to ignite productivity and job creation.

The political environment in Morocco is complex, as evidenced by the large differences in the scores of the four components of the political subindex. Following the Arab Spring, a new Constitution was adopted which aimed at fostering more democracy, reinforcing the independence of the judiciary, combating corruption, and better protecting women and minorities. As a result of the new Constitution, judicial independence and effectiveness scores increased by ten points. While the Constitution brought important strides, critics argue that the concentration of power has not changed. Political rights in Morocco are better protected than in most other countries in the region, but the overall level is still far from the most advanced countries of the world. Freedom of expression is fairly protected, but it is limited. As a result, the press cannot fully fulfill its role as a public watchdog, including on issues of corruption. Morocco performs poorly in the bureaucracy and corruption component of the legal subindex.

The positive trend in terms of reduction of informality reflects efforts by the authorities to formalize the economy. The enrollment of informal workers into the public health system is, however, proving difficult. The trend in informality is linked to progress toward poverty reduction in Morocco. Yet poverty remains pervasive, especially in rural areas. The informal sector serves as a shock absorber, Evolution of Prosperity and as such, adopting a more inclusive approach as opposed to coercion is desirable. Reduction in barriers to entry into the formal sector is the way to go to reduce informality.

Evolution of prosperity

The evolution of the Prosperity Index since 1995 illustrates the sustained improvement in standards of living in Morocco, which has reduced the gap with the average of the MENA region. It is important to note that the regional average includes several low-population, oil-rich countries, namely the Gulf monarchies, which partially explains the persistent gap.

An important factor that increased the cohesiveness of Moroccan society, and certainly improved the recognition and protection of minorities, is the acceptance of the Berber language as official in 2011. This historic step has produced positive spillovers in terms of cohesiveness but it remains to be seen whether this will translate into reduced regional inequality in the medium term.

Regional inequalities are significant in several components included in the Prosperity Index, The Path Forward such as income, education, and health. Increasing economic prosperity in the last decades has disproportionately benefited urban populations in cities, which have also been the destination of most investments and growth-enhancing public policies. As a result, there are still sizable pockets where poverty is severe.

The performance of the educational system reflects that duality. While access to primary education has become universal, the quality of education is uneven. Indeed, the quality of education is much lower in rural than urban areas, further exacerbating spatial inequalities. The situation of the healthcare system is not very different, and suffers from several issues already mentioned, like the large disparities along the urban-regional divide.

The path forward

Overall, Morocco has made notable progress toward economic transformation, but further efforts to balance its economic development are needed. Morocco’s experience with economic development is unbalanced. On the one hand, there are pockets of rapid development, and on the other, pervasive poverty remains, especially in rural areas. In 2021, Morocco has started to implement a “new development model” to improve human capital, boost productivity, and foster inclusion. Despite the progress, economic growth remains tepid and poverty is pervasive. What is more, Morocco is faced with a relatively high level of debt. The lack of fiscal space constrains government spending to reduce spatial disparities and support poorer households.

The danger for Morocco is that it could remain stuck in a so-called middle-income trap with low growth and high poverty, which could further ignite social tensions. To reignite growth and transform its economy, Morocco must level the playing field. To do so, issues of market structure and competition must become more central. That would help jumpstart productivity and create good jobs. Take the example of the telecom sector, where anti-competitive practices have long made the quality and cost of digital services expensive.

Barriers to the adoption of so-called general-purpose technology such as quality and affordable internet are an important factor keeping Morocco in the middle-income trap, and also could further the divide between urban and rural areas. The pervasive lack of contestability, and the slow pace of technology adoption, help explain why Morocco is stuck in low growth. Governments play a key role in the regulation of entry in key “upstream” sectors such as telecom. Meanwhile, the lack of availability of frontier technology may have forced firms into low-productivity activities and limited their trade and economic growth.

More generally, unfair competition that results from markets dominated by connected firms deters private investment, reducing the number of jobs and preventing countless talented youngsters Rabah Arezki from prospering. This lack of fair competition is the underlying reason that Morocco, like other Middle East and North African economies, is unresponsive. The lack of contestability leads to cronyism and what amounts to rent-seeking activity, including, but hardly limited to, exclusive licenses, which reward their holders and discourage both domestic and foreign competition.

Morocco has adopted a competition framework to champion open competition, but the limited independence of the competition authority reduces its ability to decisively shape the market structure of the economy. An integral part of the competition and contestability agenda is transparency and data availability. Morocco, like other countries in the Middle East and North Africa, trails behind other similar middle-income countries on government transparency and the disclosure of data in critical areas on the degree of competition in sectors. Greater transparency would help build a consensus over the need for more competition to stimulate growth and job creation.

Rabah Arezki is a former vice president at the African Development Bank, a former chief economist of the World Bank’s Middle East and North Africa region and a former chief of commodities at the International Monetary Fund’s Research Department. Arezki is now a director of research at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Studies and Research on International Development, and at Harvard Kennedy School.

The Atlantic Council and its staff, fellows, and directors generate their own ideas and programming, consistent with the Council’s mission, their related body of work, and the independent records of the participating team members. The Council as an organization does not adopt or advocate positions on particular matters. The Council’s publications always represent the views of the author(s) rather than those of the institution.

2024 Atlas: Freedom and Prosperity Around the World

Twenty leading economists and government officials from eighteen countries contributed to this comprehensive volume, which serves as a roadmap for navigating the complexities of contemporary governance. 

Read the Book

Trackers and Data Visualizations

Jun 15, 2023

Freedom and Prosperity Indexes

The indexes rank 164 countries around the world according to their levels of freedom and prosperity. Use our site to explore twenty-eight years of data, compare countries and regions, and examine the sub-indexes and indicators that comprise our indexes.

The Freedom and Prosperity Center aims to increase the prosperity of the poor and marginalized in developing countries and to explore the nature of the relationship between freedom and prosperity in both developing and developed nations.

Learn more

The post Morocco’s government must foster greater economic competition appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Denied medical treatment in Iran due to her activism on social media in support of the protestors, Tavakolian left the country to seek treatment in Italy. There she was fitted with a prosthetic eye and has undergone numerous surgeries. In exile, she has become a recognized voice for the Women, Life, Freedom movement, advocating for justice for victims of the Islamic Republic. In 2023, her efforts were honored with the Fondazione Minerva’s Women in the World for Human Rights award.

Former Atlantic Council nonresident senior fellow Holly Dagres had the pleasure of sitting down with Tavakolian to share her story and discuss the situation in Iran and what the West needs to do.

IRAN SOURCE: Can you retell what happened the night you were shot by security forces in September 2022? 

ELAHE TAVAKOLIAN: I was in Mashhad when Mahsa Amini was killed. All of Iran was angry and upset. I was one of those Iranians. It was a bad scene, and the news was painful. Because of the mandatory hijab, a girl would be murdered. And she was a guest in the city of Tehran; our girl was Kurdish—our Mahsa Jina. 

When I found out, I was very upset and felt as if she was my sister. I felt with all my existence how mercilessly they killed her. For two nights, I was in the streets of the city of Mashhad. We would chant and I was with my kids and my friends. My family was in Esfarayen [at the time].

Well, it was the end of summer, and my kids would need to go to school and needed supplies. I went to visit my family in Esfarayen. I went there and went into the street. That day, there was a nationwide call for a nationwide protest.

If you look up the city of Esfarayen in North Khorasan, it is very small. It has a total population of twenty to thirty thousand, and 90 percent of the people in that town are religious and traditional. It also has the largest number of martyrs and veterans—my own father is a veteran. It was really interesting. I saw with my own eyes that 70 percent of the people of Esfarayen were in the streets chanting. When a unity ring and crowd was formed with the chanters, I was in the main square. Suddenly, I saw the young people standing next to each other chanting, and I joined the crowd too.  

I was with my kids and my younger sister, chanting. We were chanting “Women, Life, Freedom,” “Man, Homeland, Prosperity,” “Death to the dictator,” and “Death to the IRGC.” We didn’t set anything ablaze. We didn’t destroy property. We just chanted. 

After I decided to join the crowds, my daughter asked me, “Why should we make chants?” She was a little scared, but my son said, “No, let’s go.” I said, “Because you should defend your rights. So that you learn that your lives should not be trampled by the regime, unlike my generation.”

When I was nine years old, my hair was very long and beautiful. I really loved it. Because of my age, I had to wear a chador and take part in school celebrations and they would take us to the mosque. Because my hair was long, I didn’t like to wear hijab. They forcibly cut my hair, so I made my first sacrifice at that age.

When I was older, I was forced to get married—I had an unsuccessful marriage. At that moment when I went to chant, it was my combined rage over the pain I had suffered and the rage I was experiencing over Mahsa’s killing. I put myself in the place of Mahsa. I could fully feel it. I felt so upset that, because of hijab rules, our girls are being imprisoned, raped, and killed. This was incomprehensible. We couldn’t forgive what happened. 

That’s why I decided to chant at that moment. I didn’t want my daughter to be sacrificed like me. I didn’t want my daughter to stay silent for all her years. At that age, you need to yell for your rights and not let the regime force you to say what they want.

IRAN SOURCE: It’s now the second anniversary of the Women, Life, Freedom uprising. How do you feel?

ELAHE TAVAKOLIAN: Nowadays, other injured protesters and myself all have the same feeling. But I always say that every Iranian who was forced to leave Iran has suffered and was injured. Yes, we were physically injured—we lost our eyes, lost our hands, or even our feet. But every Iranian who was forced to leave has suffered enough.

Those of us who were shot, saw blood spilled on the ground. Our eyes came out and we saw the blood. It was a bad feeling. Every year when September approaches, it’s traumatic—it triggers panic. That moment comes to my memory and my eyes. [In the lead-up to the anniversary], I was feeling terrible. I was at home for a week. It was as if my eye could remember what had happened to me two years ago. Up until two years ago, both my eyes were healthy. 

I still can’t look at my old photos because I get upset. I had two eyes and they were beautiful. I still say they are beautiful, but sometimes I miss them. It’s like you have lost someone dear to you. In these two years, I lived in pain and suffered a lot. In these two years, I’m bothered a lot. I’ve had a hard time.

When it’s the Mahsa Amini anniversary, it’s as if I can hear all the screams of the boys and girls in the street. Their yelling, “Women, Life, Freedom” rings in my ears. When they yelled in response, “Man, Homeland, Prosperity,” rings in my ears. “Death to the dictator” rings in my ears. 

The moment I was shot during the crackdown, my children were screaming, “They killed our mother,” and nobody was helping. I could hear the screams of “Don’t be afraid, we’re all together” and I would just shout and yell, “I’m burning! I’m burning!” 

Those moments replay over and over in my head. This is the trauma that I get every time the anniversary is near. It’s as if I’m back in that exact moment—I’d like to be back in Iran. I’d like to be back in that moment to yell—it’s as if I must take my rights back as if something is left back there. I still need to fight for it. I still haven’t finished my work. I feel like my job is incomplete. Whenever Mahsa’s anniversary arrives, I feel so much is left to do in the country.

IRAN SOURCE: Do you think the Iranian people will take back their rights and this regime will be gone?

ELAHE TAVAKOLIAN: Well, if we think that we are trying but aren’t getting an outcome, obviously we won’t get a good response. We need to spend a lot of time together, to build unity.

We shouldn’t stop. We must continue ahead on the path we’ve taken. There are difficulties in the way, including the cyber army that attacks us with their smear campaigns to create false divisions. These stop us from reaching our main goal. I might not have been a very political activist or speaker. Life and accidents have put me on this path. I was a protester and have now become a political and freedom-seeking protester and advocate, and a lawyer.

All Iranians are protesters, advocates, and political activists now because we don’t want the regime of the Islamic Republic. When [Iranians] rejected the regime, they have become political advocates. And I believe they must want it for union, for solidarity, to forge unity—and if they fight for what they want, why not? We will certainly see a positive result. 

IRAN SOURCE: For those not familiar, can you explain why security forces systemically blinded protesters during the uprising? 

ELAHE TAVAKOLIAN: According to a report, which was published by the Fact-Finding Mission on the Islamic Republic of Iran (FFMI), nearly 560 people reportedly lost an eye, or both of their eyes. This report included those who were able to publicize their cases and were verified. But many people in Iran are not able to talk or communicate about this issue because of the security conditions; they don’t have the financial resources and their families are still trapped there. If I want to ask about the main statistics, the rate would be more than a thousand people. But they have the right [to remain silent].

Security forces wanted to scare people. When I was in Iran, when I lost my eye, I quickly went to Mashhad because I had been living there for a few years. And there were security forces’ motorcycles everywhere. Every one hundred meters, there were twenty motorcyclists with batons, tear gas, and pellet guns, and I don’t know what else. They would rev their motorcycles and everyone would get scared and run away. Targeting our eyes had one goal, to sow fear. For people in the streets to see us and say, “What happened to you?” And for us to reply, “They shot and took our eyes out.” So that when the next protests happen, a mother, father, sister, or brother would not allow protesters in their home to join the demonstrations: “Don’t go out. See how they shot others? They will take your eye out.” For this reason, it made a lot of people scared. Fortunately, the current generation is utterly brave, fully aware, and not afraid; 50,000–60,000 have left Iran since and are still speaking up.

They did this so that the protesters would be silent and afraid to talk. But as you can see, the injured are trying to be a voice against the Islamic Republic and its crimes. The injured, wherever they are in the world, are talking about it and are living evidence of the Islamic Republic’s crimes. As long as they live, they would be questioned, “What happened to your eye?” “It was taken by the Islamic Republic.” “But why did they do it?” “Because we were protesting.” “Protesting for what?” “Because we wanted our rights and wanted freedom only.”

The regime didn’t think it would get a reaction like this. As you know, there are a lot of folks who are talking or spreading the news. 

IRAN SOURCE: If you were right now sitting in front of the president of the United States, what would you like to say to him? 

ELAHE TAVAKOLIAN: Well, when we were in Iran, everyone was watching television and social media. We expected instead of saying we condemn the actions, [that the United States would say] we stand on the side of the [Iranian] people. 

Because we have only heard for forty-five years that “we condemn.” But we want [the United States] to be on the side of the people, not the Islamic Republic. They should know that the Islamic Republic is different from its people. They should know that the Islamic Republic is not representative of the people of Iran. If I am with the president, I will tell them, “You should not have relations with the Islamic Republic behind the curtain.”

Maybe my words are too harsh, but this is what comes out of the hearts of the people of Iran. We always say, that until the United States, the United Kingdom, and other world powers want it to, this regime will not fall. This is the truth and can’t be denied. All the hope of the people of Iran is inside Iran, but also in the Western governments because they are powerful. 

They need to see, if I come and talk, that I took the risk. My family is in Iran. They may be under pressure; [the regime] may even create a plan against me. They may even force my family into giving false testimonies against me. But I risked it and came and talked, and I am ready to have face-to-face meetings and show and testify and demand that they stand by the people of Iran once and for all and turn their backs on the Islamic Republic.

IRAN SOURCE: What does the West not understand about the Islamic Republic?

ELAHE TAVAKOLIAN: If I want to talk about it frankly, I came from the heart of the people. I was apolitical. And they would say, “America just condemns but doesn’t do anything. On the sidelines it’s talking with the Islamic Republic, appeasing them and they are having relations with them, but giving the appearance of otherwise.” They [the West] say one day they want to sanction, the other day they don’t want to. My discussion isn’t about whether to sanction or not. The people of Iran have lost hope in the West. 

This has been happening since 2009 when all these people were killed. In the following years, the same thing happened in 2017 and 2019. We lost so many lives. How long does this have to go on until the United States sees the true nature of the Islamic Republic?

For forty-five years, the United States has been pretending to be asleep. You can’t wake up someone who is pretending to be asleep. This is something that the Iranian people have understood. And they say, “Well, now our hope is inside Iran.” But they can’t. The Iranian people are empty-handed. The Iranian people give one chant and they end up in prison or they are executed or raped. A lot have been extrajudicially killed in silence. I was only able to come out because of medical issues and was able to talk. But a lot are there and unable to talk. Our athletes abroad are successful, they have given their lives for Iran, but they aren’t backed and they can’t. The people of Iran are really tired. Their backs are bent over.

I don’t understand what the United States and Western countries want to see that they haven’t seen already. All this killing, all this living evidence of the crimes of the regime. In Europe, in the United States, they can talk to every one of these Iranians. They can see that all of these folks were protesters. I was not political; I was with my children and family chanting. The United States doesn’t want to see it because it doesn’t serve its benefit. I feel it is not beneficial for the [Joe Biden] administration. So many have been killed, so many imprisoned. You see the official announcement of the executions from all around the world. Iran is more genocidal than anywhere else.

IRAN SOURCE: In one of our previous conversations, you said that the Iranians living abroad had brought a lot of hope to protesters. Can you talk more about that?

ELAHE TAVAKOLIAN: When we were in Iran in the streets, one foot was in the streets and the other foot was watching the media. We would come home quickly when we were no longer able to be on the streets. We turned on the cell phone and satellite, and we checked the channels one by one. Every night, I would tune into the channels and news to see what they were doing [in the West] to cover what happened over here.

When I saw that there were about 10,000–50,000 people in front of the consulates, embassies, in the streets, I would be with my friends and we’d all say, “This year it’s over, folks. Look, the Iranians over there have created a hailstorm of protest. This year [the regime is] over. Oh yes, our Iran will revive.” We were all thinking of freedom and thinking of much more. We were hopeful. When we became united, we became very hopeful. It was as if there was a spark of hope in the heart of each Iranian. Anytime we turned on the channels and saw our pictures—the injured, the killed—in the hands of Iranians abroad who hadn’t even met us, it would bring me joy. I would say, “This is the Iranian spirit. This is an army of thousands of people outside of Iran.”

I don’t know if it was because of the end of the unity or the coalition, or the division between unity, but the Islamic Republic cyber army infiltrated all the groups. If you’re with them you’re not with us. If you’re with us you’re not with them. You can’t be with them.

As a result, everyone became scattered. Now that I came here [to the West], I lost hope. I saw that apart from the fact that there is an Islamic Republic in Iran, there is also an Islamic Republic here. Unfortunately, this prevented us from reaching the goal. They have to focus on unity and protests because in Iran we only looked at what people were doing. Who are the voices of Iran? Who is active in Iran? We didn’t have hope because we couldn’t go under the bullets. We risked our lives but they didn’t let us. They oppressed protests, they killed, they arrested, they didn’t let us go. But after that, our hope was really for the diaspora.

We were always looking at it. Well, we were more hopeful when we saw diaspora protests. We said, “Look, guys, when the pressure of all these Iranians is on the Western governments, we will get a response.” This trend, instead of increasing, has become less and less and less. It’s really disturbing. But we shouldn’t lose hope because it takes time.

It is a long road, but it is not a goal we cannot reach. We will reach 100 percent if our goal is the collapse of the Islamic Republic. We must remove hurdles from our way. We must give hope to each other. We must participate in gatherings. You can participate in the gatherings with any political beliefs you may have. With any Iran flag you like. We have the lion and sun flag and that is all. And let’s stand by each other. Now, if someone says, “I have this belief or that.” That will be determined during democracy, during free elections, and a free ballot box. Each of us will have a single vote in a free election. But stand together. You cannot reach free and democratic elections by smearing me.

IRAN SOURCE: You mentioned the new generation of Iranians. What is the difference between them and the old generation? 

ELAHE TAVAKOLIAN: The new generation is very aware. Now, it is the age of social media and cyberspace. The old generation came with newspapers and pamphlets at that time. They didn’t understand—they would say, “We saw [Ayatollah Ruhollah] Khomeini on the moon” and it’s laughable. I don’t know why they would believe such things.

And everyone came and said that they have a single leader. They were free, but they were not aware. But the current generation is very different. The current generation is aware, but they are not free. And now they want to be both aware and free to reach prosperity. This is the difference between the two generations.

Civil disobedience is still going on in Iran. Women go out without hijab, boys go with shorts, and many of our actors stand by the people. Our singers have sung songs for the [protesters], for the people of Iran, so many have stood by the people of Iran. Because they have come to a point where if you do not have the support of the people, you are not loved anymore. The Islamic Republic itself understands this. It understands that the people are aware. It understands that people don’t want it anymore. The reason it brought [President] Masoud Pezeshkian was because the system was crumbling. It needs a fake shock. Pezeshkian was brought to supposedly reform the new government and to work on it. However, he was a deception, and the cabinet ministers were chosen by the dictator, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

IRAN SOURCE: You were once in Iran watching what Iranians abroad were doing. Now that you’re abroad, how can you help the people in Iran?

ELAHE TAVAKOLIAN: Well, when I left, I did a lot of interviews and met with a lot of people who were victims of state violence like me. I went to the United Nations, for the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony for Narges Mohammadi. I went and spoke at a lot of places. They are hearing the real story of Iran—not just from my lips, but from others who have left. However, the expectation that I and others like me had was not fulfilled because divisions were sowed. They say, “If you’re going to talk, you shouldn’t belong to this or that group.” But no one should be seen as a member of this or that group. We’re all for Iran. When we were in Iran, we participated in the protests just for freedom, for the people.

I didn’t realize that the person next to me was Turkish, Lor, or Kurdish, or something else. Or which party I’m with. We would just shout with one voice. But when I came out [of Iran], I realized that what’s inside Iran is very different from what’s outside. The people of Iran are here. Some groups are helping each other. They are trying hard to meet with policymakers, talk to the governments, and expose the Islamic Republic’s atrocities. But our hopes and expectations are much more than this. 

We lost our eyes on this path. Let’s not lose sight of our goal over marginal issues. That would only make the Islamic Republic happy. 

(Translated from Persian by Holly Dagres and Khosro Kalbasi)

Holly Dagres is a senior fellow at the Washington Institute. Follow her on X @hdagres

The post Blinded Iranian activist Elaheh Tavakolian: ‘We lost our eyes on this path. Let us not lose sight of our goal’ appeared first on Atlantic Council.

DAMASCUS—Over a half-century of Assad regime rule, including fourteen years of a brutal civil war, had turned Syria into a state of mass oppression as well as a geopolitical black hole. In December, a startling advance by an umbrella of armed opposition groups, led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), led to an unprecedented takeover and a rapid transition in governance. Just a month ago, I (and the millions of Syrians both inside and outside of the country) would not have imagined this day would come. Now that it has, the challenges and opportunities of rebuilding Syria—a free, secure, inclusive, and prosperous Syria—are becoming clearer.

I am in Syria for the first time in nearly fifteen years. While visiting Damascus, Homs, and Hama days after the collapse of the Assad regime and the initial period of joy and uncertainty that followed, I saw Syrians slowly returning to business as usual. In Damascus (considered the world’s oldest inhabited capital city) policemen in orange vests whistled and directed the congested traffic, vendors reopened their shops, and students boarded school buses ahead of the holiday. Young children wove between cars selling revolutionary flags—the new Syrian flag, which features a green band along the top. License plates from Idlib, Aleppo, and Daraa suggested that many of these cars belonged to displaced individuals who were either returning to their homes or coming back to Damascus for the first time in years.

There were notable differences between this visit and my last. For one, across the city, posters depicting former Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s face had been torn by jubilant civilians. Another was that the tarnished statue of Bashar’s father and predecessor Hafez al-Assad, which once stood dauntingly outside of the al-Assad Library, had been toppled and was lying in front of the Damascene Sword monument across the street. Syrians stomped on it, celebrating their freedom from fifty-four years of tyranny. These symbols of state repression aside, the indication of Syrians’ newfound liberties that stood out the most was their speaking and assembling freely without the fear of being thrown into one of the regime’s prisons or being bombed by a Russian jet.

The Syrian civil war was the deadliest and most devastating conflict of the 2010s, with profound consequences for human security, regional security, and global politics. The toll on civilian lives, infrastructure, and the economy was staggering, and its ripple effects were felt across the globe. Over half of the country’s population—fourteen million people—had been displaced at least once, and over five million Syrian refugees fled to neighboring countries. During the global migrant crisis of the 2010s, over a quarter of the world’s refugees were Syrians. Migration proved a lightning-rod issue warping politics from Ankara to Berlin to London to Washington. The ramifications of a free and stable Syria are huge for vulnerable populations as well as the countries that host them. Discussions about repatriation are already underway, for example in European countries. However, these conversations are concerningly premature: Syria is not yet prepared to receive and integrate returnees, as significant humanitarian, economic, and political-military challenges must be addressed. 

Since the start of the conflict in 2011, Syria’s economy has contracted by a staggering 85 percent. The estimated cost of rebuilding the country ranges between $250 billion and $400 billion—figures that, given the extensive damage to the country’s infrastructure, appear increasingly accurate. For those returning, one of the most striking changes is the visible level of poverty that greets them within minutes of entering the city center. The toll on society is undeniable: Buildings, both public and residential, are unusable, dirty, and neglected, and streets and storefronts are damaged and in disarray. The road between Homs and Hama, normally a leisurely thirty-minute drive, took longer to navigate as it was littered with debris and had been subject to destruction by bombardment from the Syrian regime, Russia, and Iran-backed militias. But the visible destruction hardly captures the societal scars left behind.

“We are waking up from a long nightmare,” someone in Damascus told me. Others described it as “living in a dream” and said that many are in “denial” of this new reality. It became clear that the trauma of authoritarianism, for societies held in an iron fist like in Syria, is intergenerational. And it will likely take generations to heal. 

This was apparent in the days following the collapse of the Syrian regime, which led to the freeing of thousands of prisoners—men, women, and children— from Assad’s prisons. Their release shed new light on the decades of crimes committed by both Assads—Hafez and Bashar—and a harsh reminder for regional and international parties who sought to normalize with the regime. Syrians were confronted with a painful reality that they had long known but had been forced into staying silent about for generations. Families today are still searching the Syrian regime’s notorious prisons and mass graveyards for loved ones forcibly detained or disappeared.

In Damascus’s Martyr’s Square, I met with families hanging photographs of their missing loved ones, many of whom had been taken as prisoners as early as 2012. I spoke to two mothers: one who had identified her son in an online video released after the liberation and was still trying to find him. Another mother had heard her son, missing since 2014, had been spotted near their old home by a neighbor. “I will wait for him at the Umayyad Mosque, maybe he will turn up there,” she said, with a glimmer of hope in her eyes.

I also met with civil society groups, who highlighted that the greatest challenge continues to be providing support to the 70 percent of Syrians living in poverty and the one in four Syrians experiencing extreme poverty. Earlier this year, the United Nations reported that over 16.7 million Syrians—around 79 percent of the population—are in urgent need of humanitarian assistance. 

Syrians know they will not get what they need to rebuild as a society, stabilize their economy, and set up government services and a social safety net with one hand tied behind their backs. Nearly every conversation I had with civil society groups touched upon the need for global sanctions relief, with people expressing hope that sanctions would soon be eased to facilitate the flow of money from abroad, enable the delivery of remittances from the diaspora, and streamline licensing processes to allow nongovernmental organizations to operate more effectively and provide much-needed humanitarian aid. In the West, policymakers and humanitarian organizations have begun to reexamine such sanctions, seeing as they could stunt Syria’s recovery.

The Syrian interim authorities’ success is contingent on buy-in from the Syrian people, as international security expert Sana Sekkarie wrote for the Atlantic Council in her recent analysis. Addressing the current economic crisis and guaranteeing that basic needs are met, including access to food, water, electricity, and healthcare, will be critical to political stability. Without fundamental needs and services being met, public trust and stability will remain elusive, further complicating efforts to foster sustainable peace and democratic governance. 

A multifaceted crisis such as the one in Syria demands innovative and swiftly implemented solutions. Among many priorities, it is crucial for the new governing party or leadership to focus on rebuilding trust and legitimacy. And while Syrians are ready to take ownership of their country, this society—plagued by half a century of tyranny—will need to unlearn its fear of the state. Syrians will also need to deliberately work together, for the first time, across minority groups and sects. These are the first of many steps toward building a free, stable, and prosperous Syria that can serve as an inspiration for other countries impacted by conflict across the world.

Diana Rayes is a nonresident fellow for the Syria Project in the Atlantic Council’s Middle East Programs. She is the chairwoman of the Syria Public Health Network.

The post Dispatch from Damascus: The challenges of rebuilding are becoming clearer in Syria appeared first on Atlantic Council.

For minorities, between reassurance and skepticism

From the outset, the new authorities demonstrated a conscious effort to signal a departure from the divisive practices of their predecessors. In Aleppo, HTS contacted prominent Christian leaders and clergy across various denominations to repair strained relations and foster a sense of security. These meetings were not superficial; they included discussions on tangible grievances, such as the injustices faced by Christians in Jisr al-Shughur a year prior. Some of these grievances have since been addressed mainly through accountability and restoring properties to their rightful owners, an unprecedented move that underscores the leadership’s understanding of the need for inclusivity, albeit carefully managed.

Similar gestures were made towards the Druze community in Idlib Governate’s Jabal al-Summaq area, where HTS leadership engaged with representatives to rebuild trust and ensure that their communities were not targeted. Additionally, on December 17, leaders held dialogues with prominent figures from the Druze community in Suwayda and Jabal al-Arab, sending assurances of safety and future inclusion. For the Ismailis of Salamiyah, the transition of power was remarkably smooth, as the town surrendered without violence. This cooperative handover reflects longstanding tensions between the Ismaili community and the Assad regime, which had marginalized them over the years.

However, the situation remains more nuanced with the Alawite community. The new government refrained from delivering targeted reassurances to the Alawites, instead embedding its messages of justice and reconciliation within broader declarations. The new authorities emphasized that no one would face retribution without due process and clear evidence of wrongdoing. The deployment of rebel forces in Latakia and its surrounding mountains occurred without notable violence, with explicit orders to safeguard public property and prevent retaliatory attacks. Such actions suggest an effort to mitigate fears of collective punishment among Alawites—a community burdened with its historical association with the Assad regime.

Still, there are lingering anxieties within minority communities. The Alawites, in particular, remain wary of the new leaders’ promises, balancing a cautious optimism with deep-seated concerns about potential reprisals. In response, some within the community have distanced themselves publicly from Assad, framing the current transition as an opportunity for a fresh start and a shared national future. Whether the new authorities can translate these gestures into meaningful inclusion will depend on their willingness to integrate minority representatives into future governance structures and decision-making processes.

For women, between pragmatism and policy gaps

The evolving role of women in Syria is shaped by societal necessity and practical realities. Syria’s protracted conflict has led to significant demographic shifts: countless men have been killed, displaced, or forced into exile due to military conscription, economic hardship, or combat involvement. As a result, women now bear much responsibility for sustaining households, working in various sectors, and managing day-to-day economic activities.

In urban centers and rural areas alike, women have maintained an active presence in the public sphere. Notably, no widespread attempts have been made to impose restrictive dress codes or curtail women’s mobility, in stark contrast to the fears many harbored when HTS first rose to prominence. Women freely participated in public celebrations across towns and villages, underscoring the relative ease with which they navigated public spaces under the new leadership.

However, women need to achieve meaningful political inclusion. While women are visible in mid-level administrative roles in the transitional government, there has yet to be any effort to appoint them to senior leadership positions or ministries. This mirrors a broader trend in conservative governance structures where women’s participation is often limited to symbolic roles. The new government’s failure to include women in decision-making risks alienating a critical population segment and undermining its claims of inclusivity.

Moving forward, the new leadership must recognize that empowering women is not merely a concession to international pressure but a practical necessity for rebuilding Syria. Women’s inclusion in governance, education, and economic development will be critical for addressing Syria’s demographic and financial challenges. The government can indicate its commitment to inclusivity with concrete steps, such as appointing women to leadership roles, supporting women-led initiatives, and ensuring equal access to education and employment.

Drafting a constitution

Despite the positive gestures made toward minorities and women, Syria’s new government under HTS leader Ahmed al-Shara faces structural and institutional challenges that threaten to undermine these early gains. Effective governance is not simply a matter of security or symbolic inclusivity; it requires building functioning institutions that deliver services, mediate disputes, and foster participation from all segments of society.

The need to integrate the experiences and expertise of Syria’s technocratic and bureaucratic workforce is at the heart of this challenge. The structure of Syria’s public administration going back decades included representation from various sects and backgrounds and significant contributions from women. Often overlooked in political narratives, this workforce remains vital to the country’s reconstruction and future success. The new government’s ability to retain and mobilize these experienced individuals within its evolving institutions will determine the effectiveness of its governance.

However, there are signs of tension between ideological considerations and practical governance. While Shara has shown a degree of pragmatism, particularly in dealing with local communities, the transitional government’s structures remain centralized and hierarchical, with power concentrated in a small leadership circle. This limits opportunities for inclusive decision-making and reinforces perceptions of exclusion among minorities and women.

To foster genuine participation, the new government must decentralize aspects of its governance, empower local councils, and integrate representatives from underrepresented groups. Decentralization has been a demand in many post-conflict contexts, allowing communities to manage their affairs while preserving national cohesion. In Syria, where local dynamics vary significantly across regions, such an approach would not only address the concerns of minorities and women but also strengthen the new authorities’ legitimacy.

The drafting of a new constitution presents both an opportunity and a challenge. On one hand, it offers a chance to codify the principles of inclusivity, justice, and representation essential for Syria’s long-term stability. On the other hand, the process is fraught with risks, particularly in a polarized environment where trust remains fragile. Minority communities and women must sit at the table during this process, ensuring their voices are heard and their rights are protected.

A constitution that explicitly guarantees the rights of minorities and women will strengthen the new government’s domestic legitimacy and address longstanding grievances that have fueled instability. It will provide a legal foundation for Syria’s governance, creating a framework that transcends political factions and ensures continuity in protecting vulnerable communities.

The test ahead

Syria is at a crossroads. The departure of the Assad regime has created a unique opportunity to redefine the relationship between the state and its people. The actions taken by Shara thus far—reaching out to minorities, refraining from imposing restrictive norms on women, and prioritizing internal legitimacy—reflect a pragmatic shift in HTS’s governance approach. However, these actions remain tentative and incomplete.

The true test lies in the new authorities’ ability to institutionalize these early gestures through concrete policies and legal frameworks. A new constitution that guarantees the rights of minorities and women will serve as a foundation for Syria’s future, ensuring that these rights are not contingent on political or ideological changes. Similarly, meaningful political inclusion—by appointing women and minority representatives to leadership roles—will signal a genuine commitment to shared governance.

For the Syrian people, the stakes are clear. After years of conflict and division, there is an opportunity to build a more inclusive and just future that reflects the resilience, diversity, and aspirations of all Syrians. The leaders of the new government face a critical choice: they can either embrace this opportunity and chart a path toward stability and legitimacy or retreat into exclusionary practices that risk perpetuating the very divisions they seek to overcome.

Sinan Hatahet is a nonresident senior fellow for the Syria Project at the Atlantic Council’s Middle East Programs and the vice president for investment and social impact at the Syrian Forum.

The post What will minority and women’s rights look like in the new Syria? appeared first on Atlantic Council.

I was born in Karaj, Tehran, and after many years in Iran, I returned to Afghanistan to work. At that time, Afghan women were beginning to engage with democracy and reclaim their place in public life, but the Taliban attacked this progress with a relentless assault on civilian life. The group destroyed infrastructure; attacked schools, universities, and hospitals; and ultimately seized control of the country before imprisoning women in their homes.

Days before the Taliban entered Kabul, Kandahar had fallen. My mother and siblings fled to my home in Kabul, leaving everything behind as our father’s house in Kandahar was surrounded by Taliban forces, who arrested the men in our family.

On August 15, 2021, I saw Taliban fighters in the streets as I attempted to reach my office. They were on motorcycles and in military vehicles, brandishing white Taliban flags, their faces weary yet triumphant. People were fleeing in terror. Unable to reach my destination, I turned back, a journey that stretched for hours due to the chaos. In the sixth district, Taliban soldiers angrily lowered Afghanistan’s tricolor flag, replacing it with their own.

The sight of people’s panic and the violent, angry faces of the Taliban terrified me. I began to fear that they would notice my uncovered face. At one point, a Taliban soldier slammed the car I was in and demanded to know, “Who is this, and where are you taking her?” The driver, thinking quickly, responded, “She is my daughter, and I’m taking her home.” Later, near the American University, the sounds of gunfire filled the air, and I broke down in tears.

My husband and I were on an evacuation list, but when we attempted to reach the airport with a single bag of clothes, we turned back in fear after witnessing a deadly explosion there. On the way home, I saw the Taliban whipping a woman over her clothing. Her husband pleaded for leniency, but they insulted him too, accusing him of dishonor for allowing his “bad wife” to go out in public. This is how gender apartheid operates under the Taliban—not only imposing strict regulations on women but also systematically turning men in the family into enforcers of the Taliban’s control over women.

The following day, I learned that women were banned from working. I was permitted only to collect my belongings from the office. Drivers, however, had been instructed not to pick up women who were alone or not fully covered in hijab. Waiting hours for a ride, I faced jeers from Taliban fighters, who hurled insults at women to cover their faces.

Humiliated and isolated, I decided to later join other women at the Fawara Aab, the water fountain square, to protest. My mother had taught me to resist, not to stay silent. And with no job or income, resistance through protest was our only choice. Abandoned by the international community, Afghan women were left alone to face the Taliban’s repression and apartheid regime.

When we protested, men on the streets accused us of seeking an excuse to leave Afghanistan, questioning our motives. But our revolution was all we had left. On August 13, 2022, a year after the Taliban takeover, we gathered to protest again. We met at Kabul’s Golbahar Center, but soon, Taliban forces surrounded us, firing shots into the air. They pursued us, firing directly at us as we reached Jamhuriat Hospital. Injured and separated, ten of us took shelter in an underground space. The owner, who initially reassured us, ultimately betrayed us and called the Taliban. When they arrived, the Taliban soldiers beat us with Kalashnikov rifles, accusing us of dishonoring our families. After confiscating our phones, they detained us for three hours before releasing us, though they kept us under surveillance.

On February 9, 2023, the Taliban arrested me again, dragging me from a taxi at a checkpoint and dispersing the crowd by firing shots to prevent there from being any witnesses. They took me to a security facility, where thirty armed men awaited. One of them threw a cup of hot tea at me when I told them I was from Kandahar, and I feared I had gone blind. They forced me to unlock my phone by prying my fingers, then beat me when I asked to see my family.

Around 11:30 pm, they took me to the intelligence office, twisting my arms when I resisted. Two women were brought to escort me, placing a black hood over my head. We reached Dehmazang, where they photographed me like a criminal and led me to a damp, dark cell. I was bleeding heavily, and after I fainted, they took me to the hospital under strict orders to hide my face. There, I whispered to the doctors, “I am Narges Sadat, the girl who protested and was arrested by the Taliban. They can’t silence me.” Some of the doctors even cried but could do little beyond applying ointment to my wounds.

Back in prison, they beat me and denied me sanitary items. I scratched words onto the cell walls with my nails, recounting what had happened. I saw traces left by other protesting girls who had been held there before me.

Each time they whipped me, they declared the reason: “Because you messaged other protesting women, because of your protests, because you posted photos of Ahmad Shah Massoud and General [Abdul] Raziq,” military leaders who resisted the Taliban. Their accusations piled up. When Eid approached, I hoped for release, as others had been pardoned. A prison official called my name, but instead of freedom, he accused me of causing trouble in the prison, calling me a mercenary and servant of foreigners. My nine-year-old son visited me, terrified, asking them to free me. They told me they would release me if I pledged to stop protesting. Desperate to be with my son, I agreed. After taking a heavy “guarantee” from me, they finally let me go.

In total, I was in Taliban custody for eighty days (though their official record falsely stated sixty), including thirty-five in solitary confinement. They tortured me with electric shocks and left cold water beneath my feet at night. I was denied family visits, and each trip to the bathroom involved being hooded and led several floors up in excruciating pain.

When transferred to the general cell, the pain only intensified. There were other women imprisoned with their children in deplorable conditions. Some had severe mental health issues, worsened by confinement. Girls as young as ten and fifteen were jailed because their male relatives had served under Raziq, a commander in the Afghan army who was assassinated by the Taliban in 2018. Other young women faced the threat of stoning, accused of fleeing their homes.

I even witnessed women in the prison who were affiliated with the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) enjoying better conditions than ours. They were granted cell phones, water filters, and a variety of food. They often bullied other inmates, and once, they physically assaulted me.

Reflecting on my traumatic ordeal, I realize that perhaps my time in prison was part of my purpose. I endured to speak out for the women still silenced within those walls. The Taliban prison is a place where calls to prayer mix with women’s screams. We took to the streets not just for ourselves but to demand equality and resist the Taliban’s apartheid regime.

Our resistance is rooted in a long history. We are the daughters of women whose lives were stolen by the Taliban, who taught us to resist through their own stories of suffering. Today, the world’s fleeting support reminds us of Afghan women’s bravery, but we are now abandoned to a terrorist authoritarian regime that decides our fate as the world watches. Yet we will continue to rise, defying the Taliban’s will with renewed strength each day.

Today, we call on countries that claim to champion human rights to recognize gender apartheid as a crime. Our testimonies provide undeniable proof of this regime’s repressive nature. The sexual assaults on women protesters in Taliban prisons, the Taliban’s public announcements of stonings, and decrees from their Supreme Court and Amir al-Momineen establish a foundation for defining gender apartheid in Afghanistan.

To achieve a safer and more just world, gender apartheid must be recognized as a crime, and the Taliban must face accountability in international courts.

Narges Sadat is an advocate and women’s rights activist from Afghanistan. She garnered international attention for her protests against the Taliban’s gender apartheid. She graduated in the fields of literature, administration, and diplomacy.

This article is part of the Inside the Taliban’s Gender Apartheid series, a joint project of the Civic Engagement Project and the Atlantic Council’s Strategic Litigation Project. This article is based on an interview with Sadat by Nayera Kohistani and was translated and edited by Mursal Sayas.

The post A protester’s story from inside a Taliban prison appeared first on Atlantic Council.

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Last month, the G20 Women’s Empowerment Working Group convened for its first-ever ministerial meeting. “It is not enough to talk about opportunities if we do not face the barriers that prevent women from reaching them,” said Brazilian Minister of Women Cida Gonçalves, underscoring that “female empowerment needs to include all women, especially the most marginalized.” This sentiment speaks to a critical truth: The time for action on gender equality is now. As the group prepares to finalize its declaration, it holds the potential to reshape policies and commitments across G20 nations, marking a significant step toward a more equitable future for women and girls worldwide.

The primary objective of the recent meeting was to advance the draft of the ministerial declaration. This document will outline the G20 countries’ commitments to: (1) Promote the empowerment of all women and girls; (2) achieve gender equality; and (3) eliminate all forms of violence against women. The process involved both virtual and in-person meetings in the last few weeks to refine and finalize the declaration.

Paving the way

The journey toward establishing a dedicated working group for women’s empowerment within the G20 has been gradual. It began in 2015 with the launch of Women20, an engagement group focused on gender-inclusive economic growth. This was followed by the creation of the G20 Alliance for the Empowerment and Progression of Women’s Economic Representation (G20 EMPOWER) in 2019. The culmination of these efforts came in 2023, under India’s G20 presidency, with the formation of the Women’s Empowerment Working Group. Leading up to this year’s G20 meetings in Brazil, South Africa has expressed its commitment to this working group when it takes over the G20 presidency next year. This marks the first time that a specific declaration on women’s empowerment will emerge from a dedicated G20 working group, signifying a major leap forward in addressing gender inequality across various dimensions.

Despite women constituting half of the population, their representation in positions of power remains disproportionately low. Globally, as of 2023, women occupy only 25 percent of foreign affairs ministerial positions and 12 percent of defense ministerial roles. Notably, Costa Rica (50 percent) and Chile (58 percent) have achieved gender parity in their cabinet posts, and in the Caribbean all but four countries (Anguilla, Barbados, Guyana, and Trinidad and Tobago) have at least one woman minister. However, women’s participation in the region’s ministerial cabinets during the most recent term of office averages only 28.7 percent, with Brazil at a mere 6.3 percent. This glaring disparity urgently calls for addressing gender inequality within decision-making bodies, and the G20 can be a useful platform to recognize and advance women’s positions of power.

The agenda ahead

To further advance gender equality and women’s empowerment, the G20 Women’s Empowerment Working Group should focus on two key initiatives.

First, the G20 should encourage member countries to adopt feminist foreign policies (FFPs). Chile’s recent implementation of an FFP, which has increased female ambassadorship from 12 percent to 30 percent in just four years, serves as an inspiring model. While FFPs vary between countries due to their self-declared nature, the example set by Chile, Canada, Spain, and others demonstrate their tangible impact and can guide other G20 nations.

Second, enhancing women’s participation within G20 working groups is crucial. This can be achieved by implementing gender parity strategies in engagement groups and leadership roles, such as rotating between male and female chairs in different G20 tracks or adopting temporary gender quotas. Although quotas have been controversial, they can be effective short-term measures to boost women’s representation. A gender-neutral approach, aiming for a fifty-fifty split or a maximum 40 percent for either gender, could be introduced gradually, starting with select working groups at the 2025 G20 meetings in South Africa. This strategy has the potential to create a “snowball effect”, encouraging broader adoption across all G20 working groups and G20 countries.  

However, the G20’s efforts to implement policies promoting women’s empowerment are likely to encounter challenges. Javier Milei, the president of G20 member state Argentina, has voiced strong opposition to gender equality measures. By refusing to sign a widely supported G20 statement on female empowerment, he has created tensions that may lead to a communiqué signed by only nineteen members, excluding Argentina. Despite this, the commitment of the other G20 countries to the declaration on women’s empowerment could still elevate the conversation on gender equality.

The G20 Women’s Empowerment Working Group represents a significant opportunity to drive meaningful changes in gender equality policies across member countries and beyond. With the summit now under way in Brazil, Latin American and Caribbean countries have shown clear examples of what is possible in advancing women’s rights and representation. However, the work doesn’t end with one working group or declaration. G20 countries must commit to ongoing initiatives and policy reforms to truly lead in gender equity. By increasing women’s participation in shaping foreign policy and decision-making processes, the G20 can create more inclusive and effective global governance structures that benefit all.

Maite Gonzalez Latorre is a program assistant at the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center.

The post How the G20 can help close the women’s leadership gap appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Executive summary

Zimbabwe’s Vision 2030 Agenda outlines an ambitious plan to transform the nation into an upper-middle-income country by 2030, aligning with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals and the African Union’s Agenda 2063. The plan focuses on both economic growth and social progress, highlighting the need for a comprehensive development approach. Nations with more open and efficient economic, political, and legal systems typically experience greater prosperity and well-being.

A key component of Vision 2030 is creating an effective business environment that fosters entrepreneurship and attracts foreign direct investment (FDI). Gender equality and women’s empowerment are integral to this vision, as harnessing the full potential of the population can drive economic productivity and innovation. By fostering an environment that attracts FDI and supports entrepreneurship, Zimbabwe aims to create a robust economic foundation for durable prosperity.

Nina Dannaoui is the deputy director at the Atlantic Council’s Freedom and Prosperity Center.

Joseph Lemoine is the senior director at the Atlantic Council’s Freedom and Prosperity Center.

William Mortenson is a young global professional at the Atlantic Council’s Freedom and Prosperity Center.

James Storen is a program assistant at the Atlantic Council’s Freedom and Prosperity Center.

Feb 26, 2024

2024 Atlas: Freedom and prosperity around the world

The contemporary geopolitical landscape is marked by a series of crises—economic downturns, geopolitical tensions, and global pandemics—that have reshaped the role of governments worldwide. This comprehensive volume, featuring insights from twenty leading economists and diplomats, serves as a roadmap for navigating the complexities of contemporary governance. 

Report Jun 25, 2024

The path to prosperity: The 2024 Freedom and Prosperity Indexes

By Ignacio Campomanes, Nina Dannaoui-Johnson, Joseph Lemoine, Dan Negrea

In this “year of election,” freedom continues to decline globally. Political rights, judicial independence, and checks and balances are eroding. Prosperity growth has slowed, particularly in developing countries. The data underscores a strong link between freedom and prosperity, highlighting the need for data-driven policy reforms.

Democratic Transitions Freedom and Prosperity

Issue Brief Apr 15, 2024

How Bangladesh can achieve its vision of prosperity

By Nina Dannaoui-Johnson, Joseph Lemoine, Annie (Yu-Lin) Lee

Bangladesh is forging ahead with its Vision 2041, aiming to transform into a developed and prosperous country by 2041.

Bangladesh Freedom and Prosperity

The Freedom and Prosperity Center aims to increase the prosperity of the poor and marginalized in developing countries and to explore the nature of the relationship between freedom and prosperity in both developing and developed nations.

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My activism began in Jaghuri, Ghazni, where I was born. As a Hazara girl, I faced multifaceted discrimination and deprivation. Because there was no girls’ school in my village, I had to attend a boys’ high school. When my uncle tried to force me into marriage as an adolescent—a common tradition in my region—my mother, who herself had been a child bride, stopped it.

My mother’s resistance awakened my revolutionary spirit. The day that she prevented my forced marriage, I realized that if every woman took a stand, life would change for all women. When I was only a teenager, along with four girlfriends, I organized a group to speak to people in our village about forced marriage and its devastating consequences for women and children. 

I had a measure of privilege because my father supported me, which is not always the case for girls in Afghanistan. He would lament, “I am very sorry that you were born with this talent and genius in a country like Afghanistan, where it is drowned in misogyny.” After high school, I moved from Ghazni to attend Kabul University’s law department. 

As a Hazara, I have always been particularly aware of the oppression and discrimination we have continuously faced. In Kabul, my first civic action was to light candles in memory of the Hazaras who were executed or buried alive in Pul-e-Charkhi prison during the time of Nur Mohammad Taraki’s rule in 1978-79. In Dasht-e-Barchi, a Hazara neighborhood in Kabul that has been the site of many attacks and suicide bombings, my friends and I launched a campaign for girls’ education. Through these efforts, many families allowed their daughters to attend school.

Since then, I’ve participated in protests, from small university demonstrations to larger movements. In 2014, we protested the beheading of an eight-year-old Hazara girl by the Taliban in Zabul. We later organized protests against the beheading of eleven Hazara civilians by the Taliban on the Kabul highway in Bamyan. In 2015, I played a significant role in shaping the Enlightenment Movement, a youth movement formed to protest the inequities in development for Hazara communities. I later lost many friends in that movement after the suicide bombing of a peaceful protest in 2016 that killed at least eighty-five people and injured 413.  

When I was young, I believed men held more power that women simply because of their gender. After becoming financially independent, I realized that power comes from working and receiving an income. “Whoever provides the bread, commands” is a saying that I now deeply understand. And this is exactly why the Taliban stopped women from working—to strip them of power and maintain the apartheid regime.

After university, I established my own law firm, where I prosecuted and imprisoned several Taliban soldiers and the organizers of suicide bombings. One case I pursued was the murder of my father in 2019 by the Taliban for building schools and educating girls in Jaghuri. The defendants were sentenced to thirty years in prison, but I received many threats from the Taliban and other groups for prosecuting such cases.

When provinces began to fall in the summer of 2021 and the Taliban released prisoners from the jails, I sought a safe haven for myself and my family and, upon advice from a neighbor who was a former soldier, burned all my documents except my university diploma. By September 2021, however, I joined the ranks of women protesters in the Hazara region west of Kabul. During our peaceful demonstrations, the Taliban beat and pepper sprayed us. When they blocked the streets, we continued our protests from home and found various ways to raise our voices, such as wearing men’s clothing, organizing theater performances, engaging in social and cultural activities, and painting on walls.

But despite our best efforts, the protesters were eventually arrested one by one. The day of my arrest was dark. It resembled a Hollywood movie scene in which military forces raid a terrorist group, except in this case, the Taliban’s target was merely a group of protesting women whose only weapons are their voices. The road was packed with military vehicles and Taliban soldiers, who pounded on the gates and forced them open by threatening to shoot us. They searched us roughly, took our phones, and interrogated us before sorting us into different groups and taking us to the Ministry of Interior. I was terrified.

The next day before sunrise, three Taliban fighters entered the room in which we were being held, mercilessly stepping on the children sleeping in front of the door. One of the fighters called my name, holding up my phone and asking, “Is this your mobile phone?” I denied it, but began to cry after seeing my father’s photo on the screen. He forced me to unlock it and began to go through my videos. After watching a video of us protesting, the fighters asked me why I wasn’t wearing a hijab and why I was shouting in the street. Then they opened my private photos.

Another Taliban member, whom the other fighters called Moin Sahib (Deputy Sir), asked me in Pashto, “Did you go to the protest yourself, or did someone encourage you?” Fearfully, I answered, “Myself.” He slapped me so hard that every time I saw him afterward, I felt like my heart was going to stop, and I trembled with fear. He began swearing at me. A Pashto-speaking female protester stepped between us and explained to the Taliban member that I didn’t understand Pashto and began translating for me. The Taliban member then opened another video that showed this same Pashto-speaking woman in it and took her away with him.   

During my interrogation, the Taliban fighters told me that the death of Hazaras is permissible because they are “Rafizi,” a pejorative term they use for Shias, and all of us are absolute infidels. They said that killing us would open the doors of heaven for them. They also mentioned that if they weren’t under pressure from their higher-ups, they would have killed us right after we were arrested. In the days that followed, they would come late at night to take us to their interrogation rooms, where they would use violence to try to force us to reveal the whereabouts of the other protesting girls.

I soon began to contemplate suicide as a way out. But another one of the imprisoned protesting girls would try and press me to think of seeing my mother and my sister again, even if this prospect felt like a distant dream. 

After twenty days imprisoned in Taliban jails, I was only released after heavy guarantees and a written commitment to cease activism. My mother later told me that she had fallen ill soon after my imprisonment and had gone to beg the Taliban to release me. This breaking of my mother’s pride was the hardest part of my detention and torture.

After my release from prison, I secretly left Afghanistan. It has taken and continues to take a long time to deal with what happened to me. Today, however, the lawsuits and the growing awareness among Afghanistan’s women about the Taliban’s gender apartheid are beginning to heal the wounds they inflicted on our souls and bodies. I believe that international recognition of the Taliban’s gender apartheid will eventually end its rule and open up pathways to bring its members to trial.

Tamana Rezaei, an activist and law graduate, was a barrister in Afghanistan until the Taliban took over.

This article is part of the Inside the Taliban’s Gender Apartheid series, a joint project of the Civic Engagement Project and the Atlantic Council’s South Asia Center. This article was edited from an interview with Rezaei by Mursal Sayas.

The post ‘The death of Hazaras is permissible.’ What it’s like to protest the Taliban as a minority woman. appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Pokrovsk has long been an important Russian objective. Located on a crucial road connecting eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk province with neighboring Dnipro region, the city serves as a key logistical hub for the Ukrainian military. Russian troops have been steadily moving toward Pokrovsk for some months as Vladimir Putin seeks to consolidate his grip on the surrounding area. If the strategically important city falls, it will undermine Ukraine’s defenses while potentially serving as a gateway for further Russian gains.

Ukraine’s leaders are well aware of the stakes but have so far been unable to stop the Russian offensive. There has been considerable speculation that the recent Ukrainian incursion into Russia’s Kursk region was primarily intended to ease the pressure on Pokrovsk by forcing the Kremlin to redeploy forces. If this was the plan, it has not yet succeeded. Instead, the Russian army appears to be concentrating more troops for the push toward Pokrovsk, and is advancing with increasing speed.

As the world watches the Russian invasion of Ukraine unfold, UkraineAlert delivers the best Atlantic Council expert insight and analysis on Ukraine twice a week directly to your inbox.

With the front lines of the war now less than ten kilometers from the city, Pokrovsk residents find themselves confronted by the same nightmare scenarios and impossible choices experienced by huge numbers of Ukrainians since the onset of Russia’s full-scale invasion two and a half years ago. The mandatory evacuation of families with children has been ordered, while a twenty-hour daily curfew has been imposed. Leaving Pokrovsk means abandoning homes, possessions, family members, and all that is familiar. Staying may well prove deadly.

Prior to the war, Pokrovsk had a population of around sixty thousand. By the final week of August, this figure had dropped to approximately half the prewar total. Thousands continue to leave every day. The roads out of Pokrovsk are jammed with cars loaded up to the roof as families evacuate with whatever they can carry. Local institutions such as hospitals and banks are shutting down and preparing to close. Those who have yet to join the exodus are stockpiling water, groceries, and humanitarian aid, while bracing for the worst.

The process of leaving Pokrovsk can be fraught with danger. Evacuation teams try to keep civilian cars on established routes in a bid to maintain a degree of security, but reports of Russian drone and bombing attacks are growing. The thunder of artillery fire in the distance adds to the sense of urgency and uncertainty.

In the city itself, it is possible to encounter extremes of distress, despair, courage, and compassion at virtually every turn. On Samarska Street, half the houses now stand empty. When I visited, one elderly lady was in the process of locking up her home while a car packed with her worldly belongings waited outside. There were also signs of daily life as remaining residents bicycled past to get water from a nearby pipe or visit the local store. Some of those leaving remained defiant, insisting their departure was just a temporary measure. Others claimed they would stay and placed their hopes in Ukraine’s ability to defend the city.

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Ukrainian and international volunteers are providing vital support for those seeking to evacuate, especially vulnerable groups such as women, children, and the elderly. These volunteers in many ways capture the indomitable spirit of wartime Ukraine and the sense of solidarity that has enabled the country to keep functioning despite the stunning violence and trauma of Russia’s invasion.

Pokrovsk railway station is one of the busiest places in the city, buzzing with activity and emotion as people wait to board evacuation trains. Railway workers wearing body armor guide passengers to different carriages based on their final destinations throughout Ukraine.

Some are preparing to go further and plan cross the border into the EU. One evacuee, who was traveling with her two children, told me she was heading to Germany and did not know what the future would hold. She was leaving Pokrovsk without her mother and grandmother, who insisted on remaining in their family home despite the rapidly approaching danger.

The harrowing and heroic scenes that are currently unfolding in Pokrovsk have already been replayed in countless Ukrainian towns and cities since February 2022. Every time the Russian army advances, ordinary Ukrainians find themselves forced to make life-changing decisions in incredibly stressful circumstances, often while having to rely on the kindness of strangers in order to survive.

This barely imaginable reality has now reached Pokrovsk. As the city prepares for the anticipated Russian onslaught, local residents are displaying the kind of remarkable resilience that has become a symbol of life in wartime Ukraine. Their desperate plight is a reminder that unless Russia is stopped, millions more will face a similar fate.

Maria Avdeeva is a Kharkiv-based Ukrainian security analyst and strategic communication expert.

Further reading

UkraineAlert Aug 20, 2024

Kursk offensive could help free Ukrainians in Russian captivity

By Olivia Yanchik

Ukraine’s invasion of Russia’s Kursk Oblast has resulted in the surrender of unprecedented numbers of Russian soldiers, raising hopes of a large-scale prisoner exchange, writes Olivia Yanchik.

Conflict Defense Policy

UkraineAlert Aug 21, 2024

Invasion? What invasion? Putin is downplaying Ukraine’s Kursk offensive

By Peter Dickinson

Vladimir Putin’s efforts to downplay Ukraine’s invasion of Russia have severely dented his strongman image and make a mockery of the West’s escalation fears, writes Peter Dickinson.

Conflict Defense Policy

UkraineAlert Aug 15, 2024

Ukraine’s invasion of Russia exposes the folly of the West’s escalation fears

By Oleksiy Goncharenko

Ukraine’s invasion of Russia has shown that Putin’s talk of red lines and his nuclear threats are just a bluff to intimidate the West, writes Oleksiy Goncharenko.

Conflict Defense Policy

The views expressed in UkraineAlert are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Atlantic Council, its staff, or its supporters.

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UkraineAlert is a comprehensive online publication that provides regular news and analysis on developments in Ukraine’s politics, economy, civil society, and culture.

The Eurasia Center’s mission is to enhance transatlantic cooperation in promoting stability, democratic values and prosperity in Eurasia, from Eastern Europe and Turkey in the West to the Caucasus, Russia and Central Asia in the East.

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These new decrees come as Taliban rule reaches its three-year mark. After the Taliban seized control of Kabul in August of 2021, Nayra Kohestani took to the streets to demonstrate against rising gender apartheid in her country. For this, the Taliban subjected her and her young children to violence and imprisonment, a story she recounts below.

As a child, I was excited to go to school every morning. At university, I studied pedagogy to fulfill my dream of becoming a teacher. I wanted to give hope to a generation that had only experienced violence and degradation. I taught for twelve years, up until the very day Kabul was taken over by the Taliban.

Even as I watched city after city fall in the summer of 2021, I still went to school as usual on August 15. At 11:00 a.m., my spirit broke when we were told to dismiss our students because the Taliban had arrived in Kabul. My vision went black, and it felt like a hand had entered my body, squeezed my heart, and pulled my lungs and organs out through my throat. Deep despair filled me in a way that no words can describe.   

At that moment, the past twenty years flashed before my eyes, and I was taken back to 1996 when I was a small child and the Taliban first entered Kabul and publicly hanged former President Mohammad Najibullah. My father, a government official, left for work that morning but fled for his hometown of Kapisa, where we later joined him.

The Taliban caught up with us in Kapisa. I remember the Taliban coming to our house, threatening to burn it down. The fighters then imprisoned and tortured my great-grandfather for several months to force a confession and find his sons. They returned and bombed our house, but thankfully the men and boys had already escaped.

Our village resisted the Taliban’s rule throughout the 1990s under Commander Ahmad Shah Massoud. But the Taliban ultimately captured our village and forcibly displaced its residents to Panjshir. Every time we tried to return to our village home, the fighters forced us back to Panjshir. I will never forget the stench of dead bodies that filled the fields and overwhelmed our senses whenever we returned to Kapisa.  

In 2001, after the NATO intervention and the establishment of an interim government, schools once again opened, women returned to their work, public and private universities restarted, and stadiums became venues for sports once again. I was only nine years old at that time and had already missed three years of education. While excited to go back to school, fear still gripped my body. I worried whenever I heard knocking on the door, fearing that Taliban soldiers were coming to take away one of my family members. When I joined the badminton team and would practice at Ghazi Stadium, images of women stoned by the Taliban at that very stadium would haunt me. I would imagine Taliban whips on my mother’s legs until the sounds of children playing jolted me back to reality.

When the Taliban returned to power in 2021, the regime resumed its policy of gender apartheid with an onslaught of decrees affecting education, the right to work, the right to health. We were virtually prohibited from sightseeing or being present in society. And of course, our most private issue—the right to dress—was circumscribed. Taliban soldiers beat women on the streets, showing no mercy to children, young women, or the elderly. This systematic exclusion of women worsens daily as the Taliban comes up with ever more new ways to disappear women from society.

At first, fear consumed me, and I trembled at the mere sight of Taliban soldiers on the street, so I remained in the house for weeks. When Ahmad Massoud, the son of Ahmad Shah Massoud, called for a national uprising, I secretly prepared to take to the streets. But my husband stopped me, refusing to allow me to leave the house for days because he was abiding by the Taliban’s apartheid rules.

On October 11, 2021, I swallowed my fears and stepped out of the house and began to walk. I was whipped so badly by Taliban fighters that day that I fainted from my pain when I finally returned home. As I shivered with fever, my mother took off my clothes to apply ointment on the red welts that covered half my body.   

But the violence I experienced that day ignited a fierce resistance within me. I vowed to fight for my daughter, Raha, and not let the suffering my mother and I experienced befall her too. I knew that the only hope of freedom lay in resistance. So I reached out to the girls posting photos of their protests and joined them. My family didn’t approve, so I remained secretly active.     

That changed on December 16, 2021, when I decided to publicly take to the streets to raise my voice for freedom. My participation quickly made headlines, and the media widely circulated my picture. My family, angry at me, rejected me—leaving me entirely alone.

With nothing left to lose, I joined other women in escalating our protests, reaching out to media and confronting the heavily armed Taliban. We endured beatings, gunfire, pepper spray, and chemical substances. Some women were arrested, tortured, and even killed. Even so, our protests continued to grow.   

In January 2022, after another protest, Taliban fighters followed us. While we managed to escape, the Taliban began finding and arresting a number of our fellow female protesters—one after the other. The rest of us moved continuously from one safe house to another. A month later, dozens of Taliban fighters attacked the safe house we were staying in. Armed with weapons, military rangers, and suicide squads, the Taliban arrested us. Faced with such overwhelming force, we realized then that our voices—our only weapon—were a significant threat to them.

In the dark and terrifying interrogation room, a Taliban soldier placed his Kalashnikov rifle against my temple and screamed at me, “Confess!” I refused and shouted back, although I was scared, and anticipated a gunshot to my temple. We spent five nights being insulted and humiliated. Neither we nor our children—my kids were age seven and three at the time—were given water, food, or medicine. They told us that our punishment would be stoning, but after five days, their behavior changed. They brought water and food to our cells and also provided a doctor and medicine.

I remained in a Taliban prison with my two children for fifteen days, in a room lit day and night and infested with rat droppings and insects. My children’s health deteriorated further each day, but on the sixteenth day, the soldiers told us they had received assurances from our relatives that we would stop protesting. But they confiscated our land and house titles and, I presume, made other threats to our relatives.  

Today, after all this violence and cruelty, my heart is shattered by the world’s indifference to the plight of Afghanistan’s women and their situation under the Taliban. The international community not only failed to hold the Taliban accountable for its cruelty, its two rounds of oppressive rule, and its gender apartheid, but the United Nations even recently hosted Taliban officials in luxury in Doha while the regime brazenly continues to hold Afghanistan’s women hostage.

Nayra Kohestani is a teacher and the founder of Sun’s Girls organization who now lives outside Afghanistan. This article was edited from an interview with Kohestani by Mursal Sayas.

This article is part of the Inside the Taliban’s Gender Apartheid series, a joint project of the Civic Engagement Project and the Atlantic Council’s South Asia Center.

The post The Taliban’s violence ‘ignited a fierce resistance within me.’ A protester’s story. appeared first on Atlantic Council.

The post Azadah Raz Mohammad joins NPR to discuss Taliban codes on men and women’s dress appeared first on Atlantic Council.

The last day I went to the office was August 15. On that day, I was dismissed from my job and told that the Taliban had entered the city. Out on the streets, the city was gripped with terror: people running everywhere, cars stuck in traffic, policemen removing their uniforms, and parents frantically trying to pick their children up from school and rush to their houses. When I finally got home, I found my daughters in despair and the neighbors hoisting a Taliban flag over their gates. Overnight our lives had changed.

It took me three days to venture outside after the Taliban’s military takeover. With a friend, I walked through the Shahr-e Naw neighborhood and posted on social media, encouraging other women to come out, so that the Taliban could not deny our existence. Nearly three weeks later, on September 3, I participated in the first protest at Fawara Aab, or “Water Fountain,” square in Kabul. As I published photos and videos on social networks, I began receiving messages from friends seeking to join. I created a WhatsApp chat group and, after adding those I trusted, we organized another protest the following day. This time, however, the Taliban were prepared and quickly suppressed our rally, beating people and firing tear gas into the air. Most protesters dispersed but some of us continued on to another location, growing along the way to include men and women from the public. We felt so energized we decided to organize more protests.

With no previous experience in organizing protests, I learned quickly that it was a lot of work. We began coordinating through the WhatsApp chat group I had started while also establishing media contacts and trying to get our voices heard inside and outside the country. At first, we were a loose coalition of many different protest groups, at least fifty, but soon we operated under one large umbrella group, united as a movement in our opposition against gender apartheid, tyranny, restrictions, and the exclusion of women.

Taliban members responded to our growing protests with ever more suppression and violence. They knocked us to the ground, punched and kicked us, and destroyed our phones and property. Many of us were detained for days and subjected to threats and insults. Some were imprisoned and tortured for longer. Until I was kidnapped and imprisoned by the Taliban, I participated in thirty-eight protests against its oppressive apartheid regime.

Over time, Taliban intelligence infiltrated our organization, and the regime knew about our protests before they even took place. On September 19, 2023, I received a call alerting me that the Taliban had kidnapped a fellow organizer along with her husband and child, and warning me that I could be next. I fled my home that day, leaving my daughters with my mother for their safety. But when I secretly returned a week later to attend a funeral, I was accosted on my street by a man who shouted, “It’s her.” Within minutes, twelve Taliban military vehicles arrived. The men put a black hood over my head, forced me into a car, and took me to a police station with my hands tightly and painfully bound for hours.

On arrival, they pointed a gun at me and demanded the password for my mobile phone. I resisted at first but relented when they threatened to torture and arrest my children. They threw me into a room where I sat, worried for my fellow female protesters who were unaware that my phone was now in Taliban hands. Half an hour later, the person who arrested me entered the room with my son’s and daughter’s phones. When I saw my nineteen-year-old son’s unlocked phone, I realized that he too had been arrested and I collapsed to the ground.

I was held in solitary confinement in a damp room for nearly two months and routinely interrogated and tortured for a confession. They would show me videos of my son, wearing a prison uniform and growing weaker by the day. I later learned that he was also being held in solitary confinement. Twice during my imprisonment I was hospitalized, once due to severe pain and swelling, the other because I broke down after witnessing the suicide of a young boy who took his life after being tortured.

Still, I was lucky compared to other prisoners, who were subjected to whipping, electric shocks, and forced starvation. They didn’t torture me in these ways. Instead, they inflicted psychological torture, placing my room across from the men’s torture chamber where I lay awake listening to their screams for days. During my interrogation sessions, I was forced to sit upside down with my hands tied to the arms of the chair. At one session, I overheard the Taliban interrogators say, “If she is released, she will talk about this. After all, she is the leader of these movements.” I realized then that they were afraid of my voice, just as all apartheid regimes fear the voices of their citizens.

On the forty-fifth day, I was allowed to see my family for five minutes. They told me they had been searching for me and submitted endless petitions to the Taliban before the regime finally confirmed my detention. This was the first time I was allowed to see my imprisoned son, though only for five minutes.

About eighteen days later, I was returned to the general cells, where other women prisoners recounted their stories and those of other friends, including one who repeatedly tried to escape and fought fiercely every time Taliban soldiers took her for interrogation. She was eventually released after nine months.  

I too was desperate for release and to see my family, but I never showed my despair to the prison guards. Even when they punched and kicked me—or worse, when they called my son “de caper zoi” (son of the infidel), I kept my composure. No one was willing to bail me out of prison because they feared becoming targets as well. Eventually, however, a former Taliban governor agreed to be my guarantor, and I was released into my family’s custody.

Although free, I was confined to my house, the streets of my city closed off to me. Taliban fighters kept a constant watch on me and my home. They also offered me a proposition: Spy for them, and I could live comfortably wherever I wanted in Afghanistan. Betraying my homeland and the freedom of its women was never an option for me.

Ultimately, I was forced to accept exile. Late one evening, I received an email notifying me of my transfer outside the country. I cried through the night, mourning the loss of my home and homeland. When I crossed the border out of Afghanistan, I screamed in anguish. I considered staying behind and secretly working under an assumed identity, but it was not a viable choice for my family.

I am now a stranger in a foreign land, without a home and without an identity. I count the minutes until I can return to Afghanistan and witness the fall of the Taliban. In exile, my greatest hope is that our protests, our sacrifices, our rebellions were not in vain.

Zholia Parsi is a member of the leadership of the “Spontaneous Women’s Protest Movement of Afghanistan” and was imprisoned and tortured by the Taliban for protesting against gender apartheid. This article was edited from an interview with Parsi by Nayera Kohistani and Mursal Sayas.

This article is part of the Inside the Taliban’s Gender Apartheid series, a joint project of the Civic Engagement Project and the Atlantic Council’s South Asia Center.

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An initiative led by the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center in partnership with the US Department of State continues to focus on facilitating greater constructive exchange among multisectoral thought leaders and government leaders as they work to implement commitments made at the ninth Summit of the Americas. This readout was informed by a private, information-gathering roundtable and several one-on-one conversations with leading experts in the digital space.

Executive summary

At the ninth Summit of the Americas, regional leaders agreed on the adoption of a Regional Agenda for Digital Transformation that reaffirmed the need for a dynamic and resilient digital ecosystem that promotes digital inclusion for all peoples. The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated the digital divide globally, but these gaps were shown to be deeper in developing countries, disproportionately affecting women, children, persons with disabilities, and other vulnerable and/or marginalized individuals. Through this agenda, inclusive workforce development remains a key theme as an avenue to help bridge the digital divide and skills gap across the Americas.

As part of the Atlantic Council’s consultative process, thought leaders and practitioners evaluated progress made in the implementation of the Regional Agenda for Digital Transformation agreed on at the Summit of Americas, resulting in three concrete recommendations: (1) leverage regional alliances and intraregional cooperation mechanisms to accelerate implementation of the agenda; (2) strengthen public-private partnerships and multisectoral coordination to ensure adequate financing for tailored capacity-building programs, the expansion of digital infrastructure, and internet access; and (3) prioritize the involvement of local youth groups and civil society organizations, given their on-the-ground knowledge and role as critical indicators of implementation.

Recommendations for advancing digitalization and workforce development in the Americas:

Report

May 31, 2024

PACC 2030 objectives: The road to implementation

By Wazim Mowla, Charlene Aguilera

The Atlantic Council organized a PACC 2030 Working Group and worked closely with governments, the business community, and civil society organizations to support the implementation of PACC 2030’s objectives.

Caribbean Climate Change & Climate Action

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Apr 16, 2024

Advancing health and resilience policies in Latin America and the Caribbean

By Isabel Chiriboga, Martin Cassinelli, Diego Area

During an off-the-record private roundtable, thought leaders and practitioners from across the Americas discussed how to further enhance access to and finance for health services and products in the region.

Coronavirus Latin America

Summit of the Americas

An initiative led by the Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center of the Atlantic Council in partnership with the US Department of State focused on facilitating greater, constructive exchange among multi-sectoral thought leaders and government leaders as they work to implement Summit commitments.

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Colombia Corruption

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Maite Gonzalez Latorre

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Former Director, Strategic Development Partnerships

Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center

Crisis Management Democratic Transitions

The Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center broadens understanding of regional transformations and delivers constructive, results-oriented solutions to inform how the public and private sectors can advance hemispheric prosperity.

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Introduction

I. Addressing the Soviet legacy

II. Pre-war policies

III. The ethnic variable

IV. Wartime policies undermine population growth

V. Conclusion

About the author

Russia’s future will be characterized by a smaller population. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war has virtually guaranteed that for generations to come, Russia’s population will be not only smaller, but also older, more fragile, and less well-educated. It will almost certainly be ethnically less Russian and more religiously diverse. While some might view diversity as a strength, many Russians do not see it this way. In a world with hordes of people on the move to escape war, persecution, poverty, and the increasing impact of climate change, xenophobic political rhetoric sells well.

Putin has spoken frequently about Russia’s demographic problems, beginning in his first months as president. Despite spending trillions of rubles on high-profile “national projects” to remedy the situation, population decline continued. Putin’s choice of timing for military aggression in Ukraine might have reflected an understanding that Russia’s demographic (and economic) situation would not improve in the next two decades. However, the war is turning a growing crisis into a catastrophe.

The demographic consequences from the Russian war against Ukraine, like those from World War II and the health, birth rate and life expectancy impact from Russia’s protracted transition in the 1990s, will echo for generations. Russia’s population will decline for the rest of the twenty-first century, and ethnic Russians will be a smaller proportion of that population. The ethnic and religious groups that embrace the “traditional family values” Putin favors are predominantly non-Russian.

United Nations scenarios project Russia’s population in 2100 to be between 74 million and 112 million compared with the current 146 million. The most recent UN projections are for the world’s population to decline by about 20 percent by 2100. The estimate for Russia is a decline of 25 to 50 percent.

While Russia is hardly unique in facing declining birth rates and an aging population, high adult mortality, and infertility among both men and women, increasingly limited immigration and continuing brain drain make Russia’s situation particularly challenging. Population size is determined by a combination of natural factors—birth rates and life expectancy, along with the emigration-immigration balance. Putin’s war on Ukraine has undermined all the potential sources of population growth.

There have been four important inflection points in demography policy since Putin became president. The first came in 2006, when Putin’s rhetoric about demography finally resulted in specific policies: demography was one of the first four national projects he launched at that time. The second significant change came following Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. The reaction to that aggression in Ukraine, Moldova, and other former Soviet republics narrowed the number of countries providing labor to Russia.

A third key moment was the Crocus City Hall terrorist attack near Moscow in March 2024. Tajiks made up half of the immigrants to Russia in 2023, but that has become politically problematic in the aftermath of the Crocus attack. The most recent policy shifts accompanied the formation of a new government in May 2024. Initial reports promise a long-term approach that perhaps begins to recognize Russia’s new demographic reality. It comes too late, and the measures proposed fail to offer new solutions.

The paper begins with a summary of the demographic problems the Russian Federation inherited from the Soviet Union and its ineffective initial response. The second section reviews the deteriorating situation after 2013. The third section focuses on ways Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine is exacerbating all of these challenges. The conclusion suggests what impact population decline will have on Russia’s future.

Addressing the Soviet legacy

The Soviet Union experienced multiple demographic shocks in the twentieth century. Following Joseph Stalin’s death, recovery appeared possible. Yet by the 1960s, Russia’s high infant mortality and low adult life expectancy were outliers compared with most highly industrialized countries.

The population shock from World War II echoed for decades. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s anti-alcohol campaign in 1986–1987 generated a brief improvement in life expectancy, but this was hardly enough to change the dynamic.

Economic disruptions, beginning with Gorbachev’s perestroika and continuing into the 1990s, resulted in fewer births, higher mortality, and significant emigration. The dissolution of the Soviet Union spurred massive population relocation, as millions of Russians and non-Russians returned to their titular homelands. Every former Soviet republic became more ethnically homogeneous. This trend has continued within the Russian Federation, as some non-Russian republics continue to become less Russian. Russians relocating within the Russian Federation have reduced the population in the Far East.

Russia’s immigration-emigration balance involves several population flows. Russians have moved back to Russia from newly independent former Soviet republics. As Russia’s economy improved, labor migrants, primarily from former Soviet republics, have found formal and informal work in Russia. Prior to the war, the immigrants compensated for the multiple waves of (mostly Russian) people emigrating from Russia.

The breakdown of the Warsaw Pact —and then the Soviet Union itself—disrupted economic linkages and supply chains that had existed for decades. Economic insecurity reduced already-declining birth rates across much of the post-Soviet space. Russia’s total fertility rate (TFR)—the number of births per woman—dropped from just below replacement level in 1988 to 1.3 in 2004. Maintaining a population level requires a TFR of at least 2.1 without positive net immigration; Russia’s high adult mortality rate requires one even higher.

In his initial inaugural address in August 2000, Putin warned that Russia could become “an enfeebled nation” due to population decline. Despite the warnings, little was done. Russia’s TFR increased from 1.25 in 2000 to 1.39 in 2007. This slight improvement reflected better economic conditions due to rising oil prices, and a (temporarily) larger number of women in the 18–35 age cohort.

One reason for persistent difficulty in achieving higher birth rates or TFR numbers has been the legacy of Soviet polices. Lack of access to effective birth control and male resistance to condom use resulted in abortion being the widely used solution for unwanted pregnancies. Murray Feshbach calculated that the Soviet-era abortion rate averaged seven per woman. Far less attention has been devoted to male infertility. Alcohol and substance abuse have resulted in unusually high infertility rates among Russian men.

Low birth rates are only one part of the population problem. Unhealthy diet and lifestyle, binge alcohol consumption, and accidents contribute to the high adult mortality numbers. When Putin was first elected president in 2000, Russian men aged 18–64 were dying at four times the rate of European men. Russian women were perishing at about the same rate as European men.
Until early 2005, Putin’s public position was that Russia could offset its population decline by attracting more Russians living in former Soviet republics to return to Russia, bringing with them needed skills while augmenting the ethnic Russian population. This immigration offset much of the population loss in the 1990s but has increasingly declined since Putin became president. Significantly, non-Russians became the dominant labor migrants.

Data from the Russian state statistics service Goskomstat indicate legal immigration peaked at 1.147 million in 1994 and declined each year thereafter, shrinking to 350,900 in 2000 and 70,000 in 2004.

Despite the declining numbers, the Russian government adopted a highly restrictive law in 2002 limiting legal immigration. When the Security Council discussed immigration again in 2005, Putin called for a more “humane approach,” dropping the racial and religious criteria. Yet he followed this with a “clarification” prioritizing Russian speakers. It is possible that Putin understood the situation but adjusted his rhetoric in accord with public opinion.

Russian media reports of a massive influx of Chinese immigrants in the 1990s were wildly exaggerated. By 2000, as oil prices rose, workers from Central Asia, Ukraine, and Moldova found formal or informal work in Russia. Russia incorporated the populations of Crimea and eastern Ukraine in 2014, and additional territories since 2022, which accounts for official claims of a larger “Russian” population.

Immigrants to Russia have come overwhelmingly from former Soviet republics, which account for 95–96 percent of the total. Just five countries that were part of the Soviet Union (Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan) had population growth between 1989 and 2004. Migrants from two former Soviet republics with declining populations, Ukraine and Moldova, continued to provide labor until 2014. Putin reiterated the importance of demography in his inaugural addresses in 2012, 2018, and 2024, and in many of his annual call-in programs. Several times he has acknowledged the failure to achieve promised increases in births. Yet there appears to be no learning curve regarding policies. Putin’s 2024 address promised more of the same: paying Russians to have larger families, accompanied by invoking the need for more soldiers to defend the motherland.

Pre-war policies

As the price of oil increased in the 2000s, Putin’s government debated how to use the windfall to address persistent demographic challenges. As in many countries, immigration remains politically fraught. Russian nationalist groups adopted “Russia for the Russians” as a campaign slogan. Improving life expectancy is an ideal solution, but it is slow and expensive, depending on adults taking care of their health. Putin’s government opted for pro-natal policies. In his presidential address in 2006, Putin cited demography as “the most serious problem in Russia today.” Rather than listening to advisers familiar with the basket of diverse policies that improved birth rates in France and Sweden—prenatal and postnatal care, parental leave, daycare, preschool programs, housing support, and other incentives—Russia’s government emphasized “maternity capital.”

The initial maternity capital program offered incentives to women for the birth or adoption of a second or additional child. The funds, paid when a child turned three, could be used for housing, the child’s education at an accredited institution, the mother’s pension, or assistance for children with disabilities. Over time, changes have included payment for a first child and improved housing. The annually indexed funding was enough to encourage additional births in rural areas and smaller towns but had little impact in higher-priced urban areas that are home to 70 percent of the population. Moreover, many women who experienced giving birth in a Russian maternity hospital decided once was sufficient.

The pro-natal policy coincided with slightly higher Russian birth rates, raising the TFR from 1.3 when the maternity-capital program was launched in 2007 to nearly 1.8 in 2015. Most demographers, however, attribute the higher numbers to a (temporarily) larger cohort of women in prime child-bearing years, economic growth due to higher oil prices during Putin’s first two terms, and hopes that nationwide protests over the 2011–2012 elections augured real change. After 2012, the reduced number of returning compatriots offset the gains in births.

Despite the augmented maternity-capital program, Russia’s TFR dropped back to 1.5 by 2019, prior to COVID-19 and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Russian official sources continued to report the rate as 1.8. Without immigration, even a TFR of 1.8 would result in Russia’s population decreasing by about 20–25 percent in each generation.

The other endogenous factor in natural population change is life expectancy. Russia is hardly an outlier in experiencing lower birth rates. Most countries outside of Africa are projected to have smaller populations in the coming decades. Yet Russia continues to be exceptional among developed countries in the rate of mortality among adults aged 18–64. Russia’s economic recovery during Putin’s first two terms as President did lead to some improvement. While Russian men died at four times the rate of European men in 1990, by 2022 the rate was merely double the European rate.

The modest improvements during Putin’s first two terms were due to the economic recovery, greater stability, and efforts to improve healthcare. Yet the major focus of the healthcare program was not the badly needed primary and preventive care. Instead, most of the funds were used to purchase expensive new equipment, creating opportunities for graft.

The improvements in life expectancy began to reverse by 2019. Russia’s COVID-19 response was deeply flawed, resulting in the highest per-capita death rate among industrialized countries, though official statistics have consistently concealed the impact.

Economic benefits from people living longer are double edged. The impact depends on individuals’ capacity to work and the related dependency ratio for the population. Societies need enough able-bodied workers to support the young, the old, and the disabled.

Russia’s demographic issues involve quality as well as quantity. Even before Putin opted to invade Ukraine, Russia was experiencing another significant brain drain. Just before the war, Valerii Fal’kov, Russia’s Minister of Science and Higher Education, told Putin that the number of scientists in Russia was declining. Outside of atomic energy and the defense industry, Russia’s best specialists preferred to work in the US, Europe, and “even China.” Nikolai Dolgushkin, Academy of Sciences Chief Scientific Secretary, reported that emigration by scientists had increased from 14,000 in 2012 to 70,000 in 2021. Russia was the only developed nation where the number of scientific personnel was shrinking.

The challenges have become more serious, as the war on Ukraine has resulted in as many as half a million young men killed or wounded, women choosing to forego having children, women being sent to fight in Ukraine, and more than one million mostly young and highly educated people choosing to leave Russia.

Replacing them has been increasingly undermined by shortsighted government policies. In a country with a history of claiming to be multinational while viewing Russians as the system-forming ethnicity, recent government policies are creating additional difficulties. One of the great ironies of the situation Putin has created is that, in addition to poor rural villagers, the demographic groups best matching his August 2022 decree advocating “preservation and strengthening traditional Russian spiritual-moral values” are Russia’s non-Russian and non-Russian Orthodox populations.

The ethnic variable

Russia’s birth rates vary across regions and ethnic and religious populations. The rates in major urban centers resemble those of Central Europe, with later marriages, widespread use of birth control, and a large number of single-child families. Rural regions and small towns tend to retain more traditional values around child-rearing. People in these venues marry and begin having children earlier and are far more likely to have two or more children. Yet 70 percent of Russians live in the urban centers. The citizens most likely to have large families live in villages, small towns, and Russia’s non-Russian regions and Republics. In 2023, the non-Russian share of the population was about 30%.

Putin-era policies have persistently undermined the principles of federalism enshrined in Russia’s 1993 constitution. Some non-Russians believe the assault on their special status stems, in part, from Russians fearing their higher birth rates.

Significant differences in birth rates among ethnic and religious groups within Russia pose serious policy challenges. Some groups have been more resistant to the “demographic transition” than others. The predominantly non-Russian and Muslim republics of the North Caucasus are experiencing the “demographic transition” more slowly than most Russian regions. The Chechens in particular have responded to their deportation to Central Asia during World War II with a strong pro-natal ethos.

Comparative studies find relationships between high birth rates and traditional religious beliefs in multiple places. Some accounts emphasize higher birth rates among Muslims, despite wide variation across communities. Religious conservatives in many faiths record higher birth rates: evangelical Christians, Mormons, Hindus, Orthodox Jews, and others. Some groups have historically been known for large families. In Russia, some non-Russian ethnic groups have higher birth rates than Russians. The birth rates in the largely Muslim North Caucasus have been a particular concern for Moscow. Despite birth rates among many ethnic populations declining, births in many non-Russian communities continue to remain higher than those of ethnic Russians.

Several analysts call attention to a phenomenon of ethnic groups that feel threatened responding with high fertility rates. Russia’s “punished peoples”—those accused of sympathizing with the Germans during World War II and deported from their homelands—have received particular attention. Marat Ilyasov, a scholar from Chechnya who now teaches in the US, makes a strong case for the Chechens, one of the groups that managed to return to their ancestral territory, striving for high birth rates to guarantee the nation’s survival. They have the highest birth rates in the country.

Chechens are hardly the only ethnic group in the North Caucasus with birth rates higher than the Russian average. Some official sources intentionally downplay the numbers of Chechens and other non-Russian groups in an attempt to emphasize “Russianness” and downplay the significance of non-Russian populations.

Some Russian demographers suggest that non-Russians are increasingly experiencing the “demographic revolution,” but at a slower pace. While this is plausible, complaints about changing definitions and undercounting in recent Russian censuses provide ample grounds for skepticism regarding the official numbers.

Even the official data show that birth rates continue to be higher among many of the non-Russian groups in Russia. Many leaders of non-Russian peoples claim that these populations are being sent to fight in Ukraine in far larger numbers than ethnic Russians. Russian officials try to emphasize that it is the rural population that provides most of the soldiers, due to the high wages the military offers.

Data show that individuals from ethnic republics in Russia’s far east and south have a far higher chance of being mobilized for combat. While proving intent is complicated, the numbers are shocking. Men living in Buryatia have a 50- to 100-percent greater chance of being sent to fight in Ukraine than a resident of Moscow or St. Petersburg.

It is too early to gauge whether the high numbers of deaths and injuries will stimulate a response by some groups to try increasing birth rates. It does appear that the war is resulting in a more serious decline in births among ethnic Russians in urban centers than in both Russian and non-Russian rural communities. Russia’s non-ethnic-Russian citizens increasingly perceive their populations as being singled out as cannon fodder in Ukraine.

Immigrants have also been pressed into military service, causing a precipitous drop in immigration.

Wartime policies undermine population growth

Russia’s natural population growth has been curtailed by mobilization, casualties, emigration, and widespread reluctance to have children. Illegally annexing Crimea added 2.4 million people to Russia’s population, but significantly reduced immigration from Ukraine and Moldova. After 2014, labor migration to Russia was limited to five countries in Central Asia. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine stalled, the Kremlin has consistently needed more troops, forcing increasing numbers of these workers into military service.

Offering high salaries has attracted mercenaries from Cuba, Syria and elsewhere, but devious tactics have discouraged many labor migrants. In 2023, half of Russia’s labor migrants came from Tajikistan. The Crocus City Hall terror attack in March 2024, which Russian law enforcement alleges was carried out by Tajiks, is curtailing this pipeline. Tajiks have been rounded up for deportation and subjected to physical violence. Efforts to develop new sources of labor migration from Southeast Asia have been undermined by Russia continuing to send labor migrants to Ukraine.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine also provoked another large exodus of Russians from Russia. Some families had their bags packed and were ready to leave when Russian troops crossed the border in February 2022. Mobilization in September 2022 caused an additional exodus, primarily by young men. Many information technology (IT) specialists left, believing they could continue to work while abroad.

Emigration by hundreds of thousands of young men, and an unknown number of young women, is reducing the already small cohort of Russians in prime reproductive years. Hundreds of thousands of men being sent to serve in Ukraine further limits reproductive potential. Russian women have increasingly opted to avoid pregnancy in the face of economic difficulties and growing uncertainty. In the first half of 2023, a record number of Russians applied for passports for travel abroad “just in case” (na vsyaki sluchi).

The regime has responded with efforts to prevent abortion and limit birth control. This comes at a time when abortions are less frequent. Some Russian women are choosing sterilization instead. This represents an ironic shift from the Soviet-era legacy of many women being unable to have children due to multiple abortions. Births in 2023 reflected the lowest fertility rate in the past two or three centuries.

The declining value of the ruble and raids on immigrant communities to conscript workers to fight in Ukraine have reduced the number of Central Asians seeking work in Russia. The number willing to become paid mercenaries is limited.

Russia’s leadership apparently did not anticipate the need to recruit additional soldiers for a protracted war in 2022. Doing so now represents a serious challenge. Data in 2015 indicated that Russians were pleased that Crimea was under Russian control. However, fewer than 20 percent of Russians surveyed thought their government should spend large sums to rebuild occupied areas of Ukraine, especially the Donbas region. Fewer than 10 percent said it was worth risking Russian lives to keep these territories.

The Russian government’s polling consistently reports approval for the war as high as 70–80 percent. Some Western analysts accept these numbers, and some have commissioned their own polling that confirms strong support for the war. Others are dubious, reporting data similar to those of 2015, when respondents were asked about financing reconstruction or the need to suffer casualties.

One indication that Russia’s leadership understands the problem of sending Russians to fight in Ukraine is an increasingly desperate and shortsighted attempt to find alternatives to mobilizing more Russians. After the February 2022 invasion provoked a large exodus of Russians of all ages, the “partial” mobilization conducted in September 2022 resulted in tens of thousands more, primarily young men, leaving the country. No one has precise data, and many of these Russian citizens have moved on from their initial refuge. If seven hundred thousand Russians now registered as living in Dubai is any indication, the émigrés may number far more than one million.

The people mobilized are overwhelmingly from low-income rural and non-Russian regions. Stories have emerged about recruits needing to provide their own equipment, including bandages in case of injury. Some received less than a week of training before being sent into combat. These conditions confirm the belief that the authorities view them as expendable cannon fodder. The result is widespread efforts to evade serving.

In an attempt to reduce the need for mobilization, other tactics were developed. Yevgeny Prigozhin, founder of the paramilitary Wagner Group, toured Russian prisons to offer convicts the opportunity to serve six months in Ukraine in return for presidential pardons. Tens of thousands took him up on the offer and died at the front. Survivors have returned to Russia, with some resuming their criminal activity, including rape and murder.

Prigozhin perished when his plane was shot down a few months after he staged an aborted march to Moscow to convince Putin to fire military commanders the Wagner leader deemed incompetent. But his program lives on, and recent reports indicate it is being expanded to include female prisoners.

Ironically, while the convicts who survive their six-month contracts have been allowed to return home, Russians who have been fighting for two years or more are still on active duty. Their families are furious. One of the few significant protest groups left in Russia, “the Council of Wives and Mothers,” that has protested the length of time their husbands and sons have been forced to serve, was declared a foreign agent in July 2023 in an effort by Putin to stifle public awareness of the treatment of soldiers and overall casualties in the war.

Despite major recruitment efforts, Russia is not experiencing a major influx of new immigrants or returning compatriots. The full-scale war has further limited the already diminishing prospects of inducing a large share of the 30 million Russians living outside of Russia to return home. In 2006, Putin signed a decree establishing a program to encourage Russians to return, and some eight hundred thousand did so between 2006 and 2018. The number of both applications and returns declined in 2020 due to COVID-19. The numbers recovered slightly in 2021 but declined after the start of the full-scale war in 2022. In 2023 the number applying to return was the lowest in a decade. The number who did return dropped below the 2020 COVID-19 level:

Legislation designed to prohibit Russians—especially mobile IT workers—from working while abroad has provoked sharp battles between security services and Russian companies that depend on these employees in a tight labor market.

Treatment of Central Asian and other foreign labor migrants has increasingly shifted to forced labor and sometimes outright slavery. Central Asians working in Russia have been rounded up and sent to join the war on Ukraine. A study of the Uzbek community reports that many Uzbeks have been arrested for minor or contrived offenses and sentenced to terms of fifteen, twenty, or even twenty-five years. Once in prison, they are offered the Wagner option of “volunteering” to fight in Ukraine.

Predatory practices have extended beyond Russia’s usual sources of migrant workers. Individuals from Nepal, Syria, and India have been recruited to work in factories or as guards at various venues in Russia. After they arrive, their passports are confiscated and they are sent to fight in Ukraine. As during World War II, punishment squads are deployed to prevent soldiers from retreating. These predatory tactics differ from the treatment of Cuban and African mercenaries who are attracted by the money.

In addition to money, another inducement to attract foreign fighters is the offer of Russian citizenship. If these commitments are honored, the result will be to add more non-Russians to the country’s population. The disastrous long-term impact of the predatory recruitment policies is clear. As information (and bodies) reach families, word spreads. Russian programs to increase labor recruitment in Southeast Asia are being undermined as word of these tactics spreads.

Conclusion

Why would a leader who has proclaimed demography to be one of the most serious threats to a nation’s future launch an unprovoked war against a neighboring country that was a significant source of labor before 2014? We may never be able to answer this. We can conclude that Putin has turned a daunting crisis into a cataclysm.

Putin’s policies cannot solve these demographic problems. He has been reiterating the importance of Russia’s dire demographic situation for a quarter-century. Manipulating demographic data, adding people in occupied Ukrainian regions to Russia’s population, and omitting war casualties from the census do not generate sustainable population growth. These tactics cannot meet the needs of employers who report serious labor shortages in nearly every sector of the economy. Russia’s defense industry is operating “three shifts” by requiring workers to work sixty to seventy hours per week. The sustainability of these measures and the impact on quality raise significant questions. Financial incentives are undermined when workers are compelled to make “voluntary” contributions to fund the war effort.

In 2022–2023, the most serious labor shortages were reported in agriculture and construction, sectors that rely heavily on Central Asian migrants. Now Russia’s government is endeavoring to attract labor from India, Pakistan, and North Korea to replace the war casualties and émigrés. Firms involved in production, retail, logistics, and e-commerce face labor shortages. While manufacturers continue to prefer Russian workers, one company told journalists that bringing workers from India required paying salaries at the same level as those for Russian staff, plus the cost of transporting and registering the workers. Yet the company was looking for a contractor to arrange providing five hundred workers from India. The reasoning was that workers who lack Russian language are less likely to be recruited by competitors, while foreign workers who know Russian are more mobile.

A Russian entrepreneur noted that labor brokers in Kazakhstan smuggle thousands of workers from Bangladesh into that country in containers each year. They are now offering their services to Russian employers, suggesting that the same tactics can be used to bring workers from India. Others point out that labor from India remains crucial in several Middle Eastern countries where wages are higher, making Russia the option for the least skilled and least desirable migrants.

Sources of labor globally are increasing due to population growth in developing countries that face serious impacts from climate change. Demographers project that the major growth in global population during the rest of the twenty-first century will be in Africa. Yet the six African countries with the largest populations also appear on most lists of the places likely to face the greatest threats from climate change. As in Latin America, this will result in “green migration.” These are not traditional sources of labor for Russia, and the regime may choose to rely on these countries for mercenaries.

Putin’s government has not evinced visible concern that Russia’s population might be cut in half by century’s end. Unless Russia’s leaders can develop and finance a more effective set of policies, the only solutions to population decline will be a combination of incorporating non-Russian territory and/or immigration from Asia and Africa.

If Putin truly believed that demography is an existential problem for Russia, he might have calculated how many Ukrainians lived or worked in Russia before annexing Crimea and launching an invasion.

Putin’s regime is both seeking and discouraging repatriation by compatriots. On February 1, 2024, Russian media reported new legislation allowing the government to seize property belonging to Russians outside the country who criticize the war on Ukraine. Multiple instances have been reported of Russian diplomats and security personnel demanding that other countries detain and repatriate Russians who speak freely. Threats to seize their property in Russia are a logical extension of policies threatening family members still living in Russia.

At the same time, Russia’s policy does encourage compatriots to return, even as other citizens continue to depart.

One possible solution to the problems compounding Russia’s labor shortage would be to decentralize policy, allowing Russian regions to make their own decisions about attracting foreign labor. The resulting competition could go a long way toward improving conditions for foreign workers. Regional development was the prime mover in China’s massive urbanization and industrialization after 1978. While this involved horizontal mobility within the country, the model would resemble the significant influx of immigrants that, at least thus far, has kept the US population at well above replacement level. As Russia’s population continues to decline, immigrants will be increasingly vital to economic recovery.

Invading Ukraine while facing a catastrophic demographic challenge appears to have been a massive folly for the Kremlin. Hubris based on an astonishing intelligence failure might account for the miscalculation. Another possible explanation is that Putin understood that Russia’s economic and demographic challenges mean the country would not be in a more favorable condition any time in the coming decades.

Every corner of Russia’s economy is experiencing personnel shortages, while war casualties continue to shrink the able-bodied population. Russians and their leaders must learn to value diversity, or Russia will have an increasingly smaller and older population. Either way, there will be fewer ethnic Russians.

Harley Balzer retired in July 2016 after 33 years in the Department of Government, School of Foreign Service, and associated faculty member of the History Department at Georgetown University. He was founding director of the Center for Eurasian, Russian, and East European Studies from 1987-2001. Prior to Georgetown he taught at Grinnell College and Boston University, and held post-doctoral fellowships at Harvard’s Russian Research Center and the MIT Program in Science, Technology and Society. In 1982-83 he was a congressional fellow in the office of Congressman Lee Hamilton, where he helped secure passage of the Soviet-East-European Research and Training Act (Title VIII).

In 1992-93 Balzer served as executive director and chairman of the board of the International Science Foundation, George Soros’s largest program to aid the former Soviet Union. From 1998 to 2009, he was a member of the Governing Council of the Basic Research and Higher Education (BRHE) Program, funded by the MacArthur Foundation, Carnegie Corporation, and Russian Ministry of Education. BRHE established 20 Research and Education Centers at Russian Universities, and was significantly expanded by the Russian government using their own resources.

His publications have focused on Russian and Soviet history, Russian politics, Russian education, science and technology, and comparative work on Russia and China.

The Eurasia Center’s mission is to promote policies that strengthen stability, democratic values, and prosperity in Eurasia, from Eastern Europe in the West to the Caucasus, Russia, and Central Asia in the East.

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Algerian Olympic boxer Imane Khelif made international headlines on August 1, when she knocked out Italian boxer Angela Carini just forty-six seconds into their match. After two forceful strikes to the head, Carini quit and fell to her knees in tears before walking away, refusing to shake Khelif’s hand. At one point, Carini could be heard on camera telling her coach, “It’s not right, it’s not right,” before exclaiming to the media that she had never been hit this hard in her career. Shortly after this, the hashtag #IStandWithAngelaCarini started to trend on social media.

Prominent public figures, like former US President Donald Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, accused Khelif of being a transgender athlete and promised to keep “men out of women’s sports.” Others have called on the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to ban her from competing in future matches, noting that she was disqualified by the International Boxing Association (IBA) from the Women’s World Championships in New Delhi last year. The IBA said recently the disqualification was for failing to meet eligibility criteria.

Some have erroneously claimed that the disqualification was because Khelif was biologically a male, despite the fact that Khelif was born female. The IBA stated that, ahead of the world championships in 2023, Khelif underwent a test (the nature of which is confidential, but the IBA stated it was not a testosterone examination). The IBA president later told Russian news agency Tass that her disqualification was because “it was proven they have XY chromosomes.” (There is no evidence that Khelif has XY chromosomes.) IOC spokesman Mark Adams told reporters that the committee could not confirm the IBA test results and that “this is not a transgender issue.” (The two organizations no longer work together.)

Although Carini has since apologized for not shaking her opponent’s hand and said she felt badly that an online debate had transpired as a result, it wasn’t enough to stop the personal attacks on Khelif’s gender identity.

Several media outlets have speculated that Khelif could have differences in sex development (DSD), a group of rare medical conditions, but there is no verification that she has DSD or any medical condition related to sex traits. Khelif is not transgender and does not identify as intersex, contrary to what many have claimed about her on social media. In the face of criticism after her disqualification last year, Khelif responded, “To say that I have qualities and abilities that do not qualify me to compete with women is illogical. I did not create myself. This is God’s creation.”  

Middle East and North African (MENA) social media users were quick to stand behind Khelif, using the English and Arabic hashtags #IstandWithImaneKhelif and #إيمان_خليف (#Iman_Khelif) and calling her “brave” for standing her ground. The themes of discourse found online, mainly in Arabic, highlighted colonial-linked narratives about the “West” attempting to steal this win from an Arab athlete by fabricating lies about her gender identity. This also comes at a time when transgender rights in the West remain a highly contentious topic, especially in the lead-up to the US presidential election in November. 

Some Algerian fans, in particular, have described the West’s reaction to Khelif’s win as “anti-Arab,” maintaining that Western notions of Arab womanhood remain entrenched in a profoundly Eurocentric and racist understanding. On X, Algerian cartoonist Nime posted a drawing of Khelif with her boxing shorts pulled down to reveal her pink undergarments to affirm her identity. Meanwhile, Algeria’s official football X account posted a picture of Carini at the press conference with the caption “cry more,” which has now gone viral with 59 million engagements.

Many Algerians have highlighted the hypocritical nature of the accusations, noting that other Olympic female athletes, like US rugby player Ilona Maher, have been praised for taking a stand against body negativity and supporting women of “all the different body types,” while Khelif was harassed online for hers. Maher told her fans stories about how she was shamed for her masculine body type in a now-viral TikTok post with the caption, “All body types can be Olympians.” Yet, that same understanding was not extended to Khelif. Unfortunately, as the Associated Press noted, “Female athletes of color have historically faced disproportionate scrutiny and discrimination when it comes to sex testing and false accusations that they are male or transgender.” 

Shortly after Khelif defeated Carini, far-right Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni posted a picture with Carini on X, stating, “I know you won’t give up, Angela, and I know that one day you will earn with effort and sweat what you deserve in a finally fair competition.” Other conservative public figures, like X’s Elon Musk, reposted videos of Khelif’s match and commentary warning US voters that “Kamala Harris supports this” in a bid to link the incident to domestic right-wing narratives about sexual identity amid a critical election cycle. Author J. K. Rowling, who has made transphobic comments in the past, also posted a picture of the match on X with the caption, “Could any picture sum up our new men’s rights movement better? The smirk of a male who’s knows he’s protected by a misogynist sporting establishment.” This strain of Western discourse portrays a bigoted understanding of womanhood, one rooted in anti-LGBTQI sentiments. 

The contrast between both sides of the discourse highlights gaps in the social understanding of womanhood and sexuality. By denying Khelif’s womanhood and leveraging her win to disseminate miseducated narratives that fuel anti-LGBTQI sentiments, critics are essentializing the definition of gender and perpetuating stigmas. 

This dangerous narrative, coupled with a rise in anti-Arab sentiments amid the ten-month Gaza war, has brewed the perfect storm for right-wing figures to launch baseless attacks on Khelif’s gender identity.

Analyzing the sentiments behind these narratives can paint a picture of how divisive gender and sexuality discourse can be, especially amid a global election cycle. With the backdrop of race and nationality, these sentiments can be used to sustain a limited understanding of gender and LGBTQI identities. There is no “one box fits all” definition of these themes. Instead, using a nuanced approach to these complex issues could help shed light on the many unique experiences of womanhood. Like all Olympians, Khelif has dreamed of this moment since she was a young girl, growing up in an impoverished neighborhood where she and her family used to sell bread and plastic to afford her boxing lessons. Having beat Carini, Khelif won the quarterfinals against Hungarian boxer Anna Luca Hamori and is set to advance to the semifinals on August 6. With thirty-seven victories and nine defeats in her career, Khelif has earned her spot at the Olympics. Barring Khelif’s participation would only let misguided ideologies concerning gender identity win. 

Yaseen Rashed is the assistant director of media and communications at the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center & Middle East Programs.

The post Imane Khelif is a woman, contrary to what the internet says appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Female political representation is important. According to 2023 data, only fifty-nine of the 193 member states of the United Nations had a woman head of state or government in their history. Against this backdrop, four countries in the Caribbean have had or currently have women leaders: Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, and Barbados. But representation still lags behind, with an average of 22 percent of ministerial portfolios and cabinet positions in the English-speaking Caribbean held by women. And according to World Bank data, only four Caribbean countries—Dominica, Guyana, St. Kitts and Nevis, and Grenada—have 30 percent or more seats in national parliaments held by women.

At the same time, greater and more effective female political representation must go hand in hand with bringing gender equity perspectives into all aspects policymaking in ways that improve the lives of citizens. In the Caribbean, women and girls face significant vulnerabilities, and gender mainstreaming is needed to address them, in particular gender-based violence.

The Caribbean has one of the highest rates of gender-based violence in the world. According to UN Women data, 46 percent of women in the Caribbean have experienced at least one form of violence in their lifetime. Jamaica, for example, has the second-highest femicide rate in the world, while 55 percent of Guyanese women have experienced at least one form of violence, including intimate partner violence or nonpartner sexual abuse. And data on gender-based violence is often underreported.

To tackle gender-based violence through gender mainstreaming in policymaking, governments in the Caribbean should work closely with civil society organizations that focus on gender and gender-based violence. They should also work with victims of gender-based violence to understand the bottlenecks of the system and its inadequate responses. With this deeper understanding, governments can map out specific areas to improve support for women victims of gender-based violence.

Governments should also include chief gender officers in key government institutions, particularly within the judicial system and the police. Chief gender officers can help ensure appropriate support, accountability, and sustainability of policies for victims of gender-based violence. These officers should be appropriately trained to bring a gender-sensitive perspective to decision-making processes, and their authority and dedicated office to these issues can help to overcome institutional inertia.

In the legal sphere, these officers should revise and help update legislation through a gender lens, as a mechanism to avoid the perpetuation of laws and norms that might have pervasive negative consequences for women and girls. Within the police, chief gender officers can be trained to welcome and support victims of gender-based violence, helping them as victims instead of discriminating against them. Focus groups commissioned by the Atlantic Council in Jamaica and Guyana, for example, found a lack of trust that institutions, such as the police, can support women victims of gender-based violence. One Jamaican woman explained, “But sometimes you go to the police and the police take your statement and look at you and be like if you wear that then you don’t think the man is going to see you.”

Ensuring that women victims of gender-based violence feel heard and supported could lead to more accurate data on this issue, as underreporting is a significant challenge. This, in turn, could help governments gain a better understanding of gender-based violence and the policies and programs that can help solve it.  

Valentina Sader is a deputy director at the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center, where she leads the Center’s work on Brazil, gender equality and diversity, and manages the Center’s Advisory Council.

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Kharlan’s Olympic victory has additional significance for Ukraine as she almost missed out on participating in Paris altogether due to her principled stand over the Russian invasion of her homeland. During the 2023 World Fencing Championship, Kharlan refused to shake hands with a Russian opponent in protest over the war, offering instead to tap blades. The Russian declined this offer and staged a protest of her own, leading to Kharlan’s disqualification and making it virtually impossible for her to take part in the 2024 Olympic Games.

The incident sparked a heated debate over the role of politics in sport and the continued participation of Russian athletes in international events at a time when Russia is conducting Europe’s largest military invasion since World War II. Following a considerable outcry, Kharlan was reinstated and received the personal backing of International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach, himself a former fencer. Meanwhile, Kharlan’s gesture made her a hero to millions of Ukrainians.

As the world watches the Russian invasion of Ukraine unfold, UkraineAlert delivers the best Atlantic Council expert insight and analysis on Ukraine twice a week directly to your inbox.

The controversy over Kharlan’s refusal to shake hands with her Russian opponent has been mirrored elsewhere in the sporting arena, highlighting the complex moral issues facing Ukrainian athletes as they compete internationally while their country is fighting for national survival. Ukrainian tennis star Elina Svitolina in particular has attracted headlines for her decision to avoid handshakes with Russian and Belarusian players.

Some critics have accused Ukrainians of politicizing sport, and have argued against holding individual Russians accountable for crimes committed by the Kremlin. Meanwhile, supporters of Ukrainian protest efforts have noted the Kremlin’s frequent use of sport as a propaganda tool, and have also pointed to the often close links between some Russian athletes and the Putin regime.

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Drones, defense, and diplomacy: Negotiations and the battlefield in Ukraine

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For Ukraine’s Olympic team, participation in this year’s Summer Games is an opportunity to provide their war weary compatriots back home with something to cheer, while also reminding the world of Russia’s ongoing invasion. Since the start of the full-scale invasion in February 2022, many of Ukraine’s Olympic athletes have had to train in exceptionally difficult conditions. Some have been forced to relocate from areas that have fallen under Russian occupation, while all have grown used to the daily trauma of the war and the regular disruption caused by Russian air raids.

Ahead of the Paris Olympics, Olga Kharlan was widely seen as one of Ukraine’s best medal hopes. Born in Mykolaiv, she has been fencing since the age of ten. Prior to the 2024 Olympics, she had already amassed four Olympic medals in a glittering career that has also seen her win six world titles. The thirty-three-year-old Ukrainian star demonstrated her mental strength during the third place playoff in Paris, overcoming South Korea’s Choi Sebin in a dramatic comeback win.

Thanks to her new bronze medal, Kharlan now shares top spot among Ukraine’s leading Olympians with a total of five medals. She claimed her first medal at the Beijing Olympics in 2008 before securing further honors in 2012 and 2016. However, the Ukrainian star says her success in the French capital stands out. “This medal is totally different,” commented Kharlan in Paris this week. “It’s special because it’s for my country. This is a message to all the world that Ukraine will never give up.”

Mark Temnycky is a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center.

Further reading

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The views expressed in UkraineAlert are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Atlantic Council, its staff, or its supporters.

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The post Paris Olympics: Ukrainian dedicates medal to athletes killed by Russia appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Public Event Thu, July 25, 2024 • 8:30 am ET

Shaping the global economy: From food security to digital transformation

Shaping the global economy conference will develop a blueprint for the G20 to address the range of challenges facing its member states from global economic governance and digital transformation to food security and hunger. 

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“We’ve lost all the progress that we’ve made in the past fifteen years” on lowering global hunger levels, World Food Programme (WFP) Executive Director Cindy McCain warned on Thursday.

McCain spoke at an Atlantic Council event hosted on the sidelines of the Group of Twenty (G20) meeting of finance ministers and central bank governors in Rio de Janeiro. She pointed out that one in eleven people globally faced hunger last year.

On Wednesday, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva announced that Brazil—which holds the G20 presidency—will later this year launch the Global Alliance Against Hunger and Poverty to bring countries together in sharing knowledge and resources.

“We have the capability as a planet to feed everybody on the planet—we grow enough food,” McCain said, “but we don’t” due to funding and other coordination issues.

With those challenges, the Global Alliance is “a great opportunity for all of us . . . to get together, exchange ideas, brainstorm” and to “develop science and technology” tools to help, McCain said.

Below are more highlights from the conversation, moderated by Valentina Sader, deputy director at the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center.

Food security

• Food security is a “national security issue,” and “it should be labeled as one,” McCain argued, pointing out how access to food has shaped broader security crises in Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen.
• Yet, food security “gets kicked down” the list of priorities every time “something else happens in the world,” McCain warned.
• She said that the WFP and United Nations agencies, because they provide critical aid, are “on the front lines” of crises and the “first in and last out.”
• The WFP previously got most of its grain from Ukraine. But it has had to diversify its sources in the wake of the agricultural disruptions caused by Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. WFP is also working with other countries to help them mitigate the effects of the conflict on global food supplies.
• In the global hunger crisis, “women and children are taking the brunt,” McCain said. “You’ve never seen more of an example of it than in Gaza.”
• She added that equity and gender inclusion are important to factor into food security efforts because “a woman will feed her family,” and while doing so, “she will make sure everybody else eats” before she does.
• Moreover, with women making up around half of smallholder farmers, McCain argued that it is important to make sure that these women have the tools, expertise, seeds, and access to water that they need to farm effectively. “If a woman farms and can feed her family, she will wind up feeding the community,” McCain said.

Farm to negotiating table

• McCain noted that G20 countries include not only the world’s leading economies but also some of the planet’s largest agricultural producers. That, she said, empowers these countries to work together to address the full spectrum of food-security challenges, from poverty to improvements in agriculture.
• She added that the G20 is an optimal forum for raising the urgency around hunger because of how it brings together both governments and civil society organizations from countries that represent 85 percent of the world’s gross domestic product and over 60 percent of its population. “So the voice is huge,” she said, adding that “governments simply cannot do it all. We need everybody in on this.”
• She urged global stakeholders to “continue to elevate the conversation” about the urgency of food security—and advised countries “most affected” by food insecurity to keep conveying the plight they face. “The problem is [that] around the world, people don’t understand what’s going on” or believe that hunger and malnutrition are only problems in Africa rather than globally, she said. “It’s all about. . . making sure that people understand.”

Katherine Walla is the associate director of editorial at the Atlantic Council. 

Watch the full event

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“Bringing women on board is not only a women’s rights issue. It brings benefits to the whole of society and to our collective security,” Icelandic Foreign Minister Thórdís Kolbrún Reykfjörd Gylfadóttir said on the first day of the summit. “It’s not about waiting for the time when you can afford focusing on women, peace, and security, or gender equality for that matter, or empowering women,” she added. “You become stronger because you focus on those points, not when you afford them.”

WPS commitments at the Washington summit

The show of support for advancing the WPS agenda during the summit was not just rhetorical. It included concrete commitments, such as adopting a new NATO policy on WPS that is “fit for purpose” for the twenty-first century security environment. Several allies also committed to fund more than ten thousand uniforms and body armor sets for Ukrainian female servicemembers defending their country against Russia’s full-scale invasion.

If the Alliance is looking for something that increasingly earns bipartisan support in the United States, then it should look to the importance of women’s inclusion in national security strategies. In 2017, then President Donald Trump signed the first national law that took steps to institutionalize a United Nations mandate to make the security sector more inclusive of female leadership and more responsive to the needs of women and girls, including freedom from conflict-related sexual violence. In 1994, then Senator Joe Biden was an original cosponsor of the Violence Against Women Act that year, and the Biden-Harris administration continues to make important reforms to the military code of justice on sexual assault in the military.

One of the highlights of the Washington summit was the announcement that as of 2024, twenty-three allied nations have met the commitment to spend 2 percent of annual gross domestic product on defense spending, a change that is applauded by both sides of the aisle in the United States. What is less known is how those fiscal commitments relate to national aspirations for a more inclusive force. According to the most recently published NATO Committee on Gender Perspectives report, released in 2020, twenty-seven members of the Alliance, including the United States, have national action plans on WPS. NATO’s newest members, Sweden and Finland, also have national action plans on WPS. Furthermore, twenty-five NATO nations reported an increase in female participation in the armed forces in the years before 2020. On average, 13 percent of allied forces were comprised of women that year.

In the Washington Summit Declaration, allies committed to integrate an ambitious WPS and human security agenda across all of NATO’s core tasks. NATO had previously committed to women’s meaningful participation in the security sector. But the new policy recognizes the conditions that make women’s leadership possible, including their full, equal, safe, and meaningful participation in decision making in national institutions.

The declaration also referred to the human security trends shaping today’s conflicts, including disregard for international humanitarian law and the protection of civilians, cultural property protection, and forced displacement that fuels human trafficking and irregular migration. These human security trends disproportionately affect women and girls, who make up more than half of the 117 million people forcibly displaced worldwide, according to the United Nations. In Washington, the Alliance also renewed its commitment to international law and the fundamental norms of armed conflict, which distinguishes between military targets and civilians.

Lessons from Ukraine

Although NATO did not welcome Ukraine into the Alliance at the summit, Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said in his closing press statement that it is a matter of when, not if, Ukraine will become a member. This followed NATO commitments at the summit to establishing a new NATO-Ukraine Joint Analysis, Training, and Education Center and NATO Security Assistance Training for Ukraine to increase Kyiv’s interoperability with the Alliance.

For the last decade, and especially since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, Ukraine has shown that the conduct of war involves more than military strategy. Providing security has become a whole-of-society effort, involving women in uniform and civilians providing support to the front lines. The evolving nature of conflict can blur the distinction between civilian and military action and change societal norms on what roles are appropriate for men and women. These dynamics are important for understanding the human domain, which is adaptive to evolving threats. Supporting female soldiers and addressing civilian harm caused by the war should be an integral part of NATO plans to train for the future operational environment and to secure peace in Ukraine.

The NATO Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary General for WPS, which has responsibility for a broader umbrella of cross-cutting human security policies, can continue working toward integrating lessons from the human domain in military training. While NATO continues to identify military lessons from the war in Ukraine, these lessons should also include concrete steps to protect civilians from air missile attacks, mitigate the use of sexual violence in conflict, and protect children against forced deportations to Russia. NATO can emphasize the lessons allies have learned about how to protect civilians in other conflicts, such as in Iraq and Libya, as it establishes new security cooperation training centers.

The war in Ukraine is a test case for whether the Alliance can help partner nations achieve stability and whether its actions are inclusive of the whole-of-society approach that has characterized the mobilization of the Ukrainian population. While volunteerism, patriotism, and the inclusion of women have sustained Ukraine’s war effort, the need to protect the civilian population from attack remains paramount.

Sarah Dawn Petrin is a nonresident senior fellow at the Transatlantic Security Initiative in the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. She previously advised the US Army Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute on integrating women, peace, and security and human security in US military operations.

The post The Women, Peace, and Security agenda made important strides at NATO’s Washington summit appeared first on Atlantic Council.

On Thursday, April 25, the Atlantic Council’s WIn Fellowship hosted a panel discussion on the vital role Arab women ambassadors play in shaping the field of diplomacy, both in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, and globally.

The conversation was moderated by Lynn Monzer, Deputy Director of the Atlantic Council’s WIn Fellowship and featured H.E. Sheikha Al-Zain Al-Sabah, Ambassador of the State of Kuwait to the United States of America; H.E. Hanene Tajouri Bessassi, Ambassador of the Republic of Tunisia to the United States of America; and H.E. Amal Mudallali, former Ambassador to the Permanent Mission of Lebanon to the United Nations (UN).  

Deciding on diplomacy

H.E. Sheikha Al-Zain Al-Sabah initiated the conversation by sharing insights from her background in journalism, where she encountered diverse mindsets through storytelling. This experience highlighted her natural diplomatic skills, as navigating complex systems and creating sustainable solutions in business mirrored key aspects of diplomacy. These experiences and insights logically paved the way for her career in diplomacy.

Similarly, H.E. Hanene Tajouri Bessassi transitioned from an initial aspiration to become a physician to recognizing the diplomatic field as another form of healing. In her view, diplomacy involves listening to those in distress, diagnosing societal issues, and crafting viable solutions, thus paralleling the healing processes in medicine.

Like Al-Sabah, H.E. Amal Mudallali started in journalism, with ambitions centered on reporting at the UN. After achieving this, she ventured deeper into politics, eventually serving under two Lebanese prime ministers and later as the Ambassador of Lebanon to the UN. She emphasized the critical role of male allies in politics, where men predominantly hold power but greatly benefit from women’s collaborative and problem-solving skills.

In addition to winding career paths, all three diplomats agreed on the importance of a robust support system for success in diplomacy. Bessassi thanked her parents and husband specifically for the strength, independence, and commitment necessary to work in the diplomatic field. Echoing the sentiment on support systems, Mudallali highlighted her grandmother’s empowering role during her upbringing. She also stressed the crucial need for political backing, citing the potential difficulties and injustices faced without such support. Al-Sabah, similarly, underscored the significance of a nurturing ecosystem for achieving success. For her, the focus is on contributing back to this ecosystem and the broader community, often through mentoring other women, providing support, advice, and honest guidance on their professional journeys.

Navigating the field’s challenges

Bessassi then turned to the challenges facing women in diplomacy. She noted that despite Tunisia’s rich history of influential women leaders, gender parity remains elusive. This disparity is underscored by prevailing gender stereotypes that still hinder women’s effectiveness in all fields, including diplomacy. Bessassi argued against the perception that empathy—a trait often associated with women—is a weakness. Instead, she illustrated how empathy enhances diplomatic efforts by fostering consensus and compromise, bringing more people into the fold while working toward peace and cooperation.

The underrepresentation of women in global diplomacy was further addressed by Al-Sabah, who pointed out that women make up only 21 percent of ambassadors worldwide. She emphasized the importance of improving representation and noted that the participation of women on the panel, along with other women ambassadors in the United States from Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Mauritania, represents significant progress in altering public perceptions about women in diplomacy.

Mudallali echoed these concerns with specific examples from the United Nations, where women’s representation has been backsliding; the number of women UN representatives decreased from 52 in 2020 to 46 today. She linked this trend to a global phenomenon such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as countries have become more brazen in rejecting previously held norms such as equal gender representation. She also noted the decrease in women’s participation in peace negotiations. In 2020, women represented 23 percent of negotiators in active peace processes, dropping to 16 percent in 2023. Based on analysis of real-world peace processes, agreements between negotiators are much more likely to be reached when women have a strong influence on the negotiations.

Al-Sabah added that 2023 saw a 50 percent increase in war-induced violence against women, reinforcing the necessity for women’s voices in peace negotiations. This backslide in gender representation, Mudallali argued, demands urgent attention and action in line with UN Security Council Resolution 1325, which focuses on women, peace, and security.

Bessassi acknowledged these recent challenges nut also emphasized the power of collective effort among women ambassadors, which has the potential to catalyze global change. Mudallali shared this sentiment,expressing her feeling of responsibility to do everything possible to elevate women, believing that these challenges require structured, codified solutions. Al-Sabah concluded by underscoring the importance of integrating advocacy into diplomacy to empower women effectively. In Kuwait, for instance, the government established the Department of Human Rights within the country’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs in part to address women’s empowerment. Internationally, too, organizations with similar aims must work together to implement Resolution 1325 to ensure countries adhere to international principles of women’s empowerment. For young women in the MENA region and beyond, seeing women in these roles not only offers a glimpse of what is possible but also instills hope and inspiration.

The future of diplomacy

Building on the theme of hope, Al-Sabah discussed a significant shift toward civic diplomacy following Israel’s invasion of Gaza, with women taking on an increased role in this space. She highlighted the courageous efforts of journalists like Shireen Abu Akleh, Plestia Alaqad, and Hind Khoudary who have used their personal cameras and cellphones to broadcast their voices are around the world. Al-Sabah stressed the urgent need for greater protection of journalists in Gaza and around the world, who face harassment and life-threatening dangers in their line of work.

Continuing the conversation, Bessassi emphasized the increasing importance of multilateralism now more than ever in addressing global challenges. She called for consistency in the international community’s approach, as the international community’s engagement on issues like the war in Gaza must avoid “double standards” to effectively address challenges in diplomacy.

Mudallali echoed the sentiments of her colleagues, concluding the panel with a call for strong advocacy for peace. She pointed out that recent global tensions have shifted the focus from collaboration to competition. By supporting women in diplomatic roles, Mudallali argued, societies will not only lift but also enhance their prospects for achieving lasting peace.

The way forward

Over a century since the first appointment of a women ambassador in 1920, women remain severely underrepresented in the predominantly male diplomacy sector. As of 2023, women account for only 20.54 percent of ambassadors worldwide, a decrease from 23 percent in 2020. The disparity is even more pronounced in the MENA region, where women make up just 10 percent of ambassadors, the lowest regional rate globally, highlighting a significant challenge for women in MENA diplomacy.

Despite these daunting numbers in MENA, there have been some encouraging signs of progress. The United Arab Emirates, for instance, has increased its proportion of women ambassadors by 5.5 percent between 2018 and 2023, reaching 12.5 percent. Additionally, a recent Arab Barometer report has shown a marked decrease throughout the MENA region over the past decade in the belief that men are better political leaders than women, suggesting growing acceptance of women in political and diplomatic roles.

However, effectively capitalizing on these openings requires systematic and sustained support. Algeria serves as a cautionary tale where a 2011 gender quota led to increased opposition to women in political leadership due to the absence of systemic improvements or societal readiness for such changes. Conversely, Tunisia witnessed an increase in openness toward women political leadership after the implementation of a similar quota and was further bolstered by President Kais Saied’s appointment of Najla Bouden Romdhane as the first female prime minister in the MENA region. These moves demonstrate that political backing and continued support of women is a crucial component to increasing women’s representation at both the political and diplomatic levels.

In addition to national efforts, international initiatives are crucial. UN Security Council Resolution 1325, which calls for women’s equal participation in preventing violent conflicts, is particularly significant. Supporting this resolution could significantly legitimize women’s roles in conflict mediation. This is supported by data showing that peace negotiations involving women are 35 percent more likely to last for at least fifteen years. Therefore, in the midst of shifting attitudes, a global drive for greater women participation in diplomacy, and the myriad conflicts necessitating peace negotiations, reform toward gender parity in diplomacy is as pressing and timely as ever for the MENA region.

Charles Johnson is a Young Global professional in the Atlantic Council’s Middle East programs

Jun 14, 2023

The WIn Fellowship 2023-2024 cohort

Building on the success of its inaugural cohort, the Women Innovators Fellowship (WIn) is expanding to Bahrain and the UAE, in addition to Saudi Arabia, as it continues to empower more women entrepreneurs from the Middle East. The program is thrilled to announce this year’s eighty-six recipients of its 2023 WIn Fellowship. The participants will receive a year-long program of executive education, mentoring, and networking opportunities in collaboration with Georgetown McDonough School of Business and with the support of the United States embassies in the three target countries and PepsiCo.

May 3, 2024

2024 WIn Fellowship Roadshow

WIn Fellows participate in a fully sponsored trip to the United States for leadership training at Georgetown and meetings with US business and government leaders.

Feb 24, 2023

2023 WIn Fellowship Roadshow

The WIn Fellowship roadshow is led by the Atlantic Council’s empowerME Initiative in cooperation with Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business with support from US Embassy Riyadh, UPS, and PepsiCo. The WIn Fellowship Roadshow participants, chosen from a highly competitive cohort of more than thirty applicants, receive a fully sponsored trip to the United States for leadership training at Georgetown and meetings with US business and government leaders.

Event Recap Jul 31, 2023

Empowering the future: The rising women workforce in Saudi Arabia’s private sector

By Lynn Monzer, Nibras Basitkey

Event recap on the empowering future of the workplace in Saudi Arabia and its impact on the private sector.

Economy & Business Future of Work

Event Recap Jul 24, 2023

Bridging the gender gap in venture capital

By Lynn Monzer, Nibras Basitkey

Event recap on the significance of venture funding for women entrepreneurs in the UAE.

Economy & Business Middle East

Event Recap Jul 18, 2023

An overview of gender parity in Bahrain: Progress, challenges, and the path forward

By Lynn Monzer, Nibras Basitkey

A recap of the First Workshop in Bahrain

Economy & Business Inclusive Growth

empowerME

empowerME at the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East is shaping solutions to empower entrepreneurs, women, and youth and building coalitions of public and private partnerships to drive regional economic integration, prosperity, and job creation.

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Despite initial promises of moderation and a pledge to the United Nations (UN) when the group seized power in 2021, the Taliban has swiftly restored oppressive policies reminiscent of its previous rule in the late 1990s.

In less than three years, the Taliban has issued more than fifty edicts and directives imposing strict measures to bar women from participation in public and political life. These measures include restricting women’s access to education, employment, freedom of speech, freedom of movement, access to public spaces, health care, and access to justice.

A UN experts report said the situation may amount to “gender apartheid,” with the Taliban “governing by systemic discrimination with the intention to subject women and girls to total domination.” 

Violations of international law

As reported by the UN Human Rights Council, the Taliban significantly restricts women’s participation in society and denies them avenues for seeking justice and redress. Women who speak out against these restrictions or advocate for their rights face severe consequences, including harassment, violence, imprisonment, and death. The Taliban also targets women activists, professionals, and both men and women who are supporters of women’s rights, viewing them as threats to their authority. The situation has deteriorated further in the past few months, as evidenced by recent extrajudicial arrests and forced disappearances. There has also been an alarming increase in gender-related killings (femicide).

The Taliban’s gender apartheid policies deliberately violate international legal frameworks to which Afghanistan is still bound, perpetuating a cycle of gender-based discrimination and brutality. International law on the protection of women’s rights is unequivocal. It emphasizes the fundamental responsibility of governing authorities to promote and safeguard the rights of women in all aspects of their lives.

The International Bill of Human Rights—which is comprised of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights—guarantees the right to equality and nondiscrimination. The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women explicitly prohibits gender-based discrimination, obligating state parties to ensure gender equality in all spheres of life. The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) criminalizes gender persecution as a crime against humanity under article 7. 

The ICC’s 2022 Policy on the Crime of Gender Persecution broadens the scope of targeted individuals beyond direct members of a particular group to include that group’s sympathizers and affiliates. This inclusive stance is particularly relevant for Afghanistan. In schools that ban girls, staff—including male teachers—who teach girls can also be targeted. Similarly, journalists are targeted and face persecution for their coverage of violations of women’s basic human rights. Such incidents, which fall under the ICC’s purview, highlight the interconnectedness of gender-related issues and the diverse ways individuals can be affected by gender-based persecution.

The Taliban’s capital and corporal punishments target women more often than men. Despite Afghanistan’s ratification of the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, the Taliban persists in brutally treating and punishing women. Taliban punishments, ranging from public floggings to executions, demonstrate a deliberate effort to instill fear and maintain control over women’s lives, flagrantly violating the Convention against Torture.

When the Taliban shields perpetrators from accountability, including insulating its own system, it further perpetuates a cycle of violence. Under the current regime, documentation of human rights abuses has become nearly impossible. The Taliban’s restrictions on international and local human rights organizations and media, including censorship and intimidation tactics, have severely hindered their ability to document and report these violations. The absence of comprehensive reporting on human rights abuses under the Taliban not only obscures the true extent of the violations but also allows perpetrators to act with impunity.

The broader international significance

The ongoing violations perpetrated by the Taliban in Afghanistan, particularly on women, have sparked diplomatic condemnation from the international community. However, this condemnation exposes a deeper issue: the weakening consensus among members of the international community on how to effectively respond to such crises. One of the primary risks associated with this trend is the normalization of the extremists. Engaging with the Taliban and normalizing relations without meaningful concessions on human rights encourages the Taliban and other repressive regimes, signaling that they can flout international norms with impunity.

This impunity gravely undermines more than two decades’ worth of efforts to achieve justice, reconciliation, and sustainable peace in Afghanistan. The Taliban has not only refused to acknowledge its past atrocities but also enjoys impunity for its current actions.

The continued impunity not only denies justice to women survivors but also sends a dangerous message that violence against women can be tolerated and even condoned, with far-reaching implications. The denial of education and participation in public life hinders the development and empowerment of women and girls, perpetuating cycles of poverty, inequality, and marginalization. It also undermines fundamental principles of justice and human rights, eroding trust in the ability of international institutions to provide justice and accountability. This lack of accountability also enables the Taliban to spread extremist ideologies, creating a nurturing environment for conflict and terrorism, with dire implications for regional stability.

What the international community can do

Considering the dire situation in Afghanistan, the UN should take a lead role in establishing robust accountability mechanisms. This may entail creating an independent investigative body to monitor and document human rights abuses and violations of international law.

The UN should also change its approach to the Taliban. Instead of engaging with the regime without conditions, the UN should work with regional and global partners and directly with the Afghan people, including civil society, to develop a unified strategy that prioritizes women, human rights, and security, rather than legitimizing a regime that promotes oppression and instability. Taliban leaders’ rigid ideology means dialogue with them is futile. Moreover, targeted sanctions and travel bans on Taliban leaders should be imposed. The UN can leverage its authority and resources to coordinate efforts among member states and ensure a unified approach to the crisis within the organization.

At the same time, the international community can use diplomatic engagement to exert pressure on the Taliban to respect international human rights standards. Diplomatic recognition, aid, and other forms of cooperation should be conditioned on tangible improvements in human rights and accountability.

Human rights organizations outside Afghanistan play a crucial role in amplifying the voices of Afghan women and advocating for their rights. These organizations should mobilize support for Afghan civil society groups and grassroots organizations, particularly those championing human rights and women’s rights. By collaborating with local activists and providing resources, these organizations can help promote accountability and protect vulnerable populations—particularly women.

Samira Abrar is human rights activist currently working in the field of immigration law in the United States.

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The region has an urgent need to prepare for the scope of climate change. Many of the region’s countries rely on tourism to drive economic growth, with ten of the world’s twenty most tourism-dependent economies residing in the Caribbean. When hurricanes roll through the region, damaging infrastructure and halting flights, the tourism industry halts as well, diminishing economic prospects. Most Caribbean countries face the brunt of the Atlantic hurricane season, which is producing stronger and more frequent tropical storms. At the same time, most of the region’s populous cities are coastal, making sea level rise a threat to homes and the day-to-day functions of society. Further, changing precipitation patterns and higher average temperatures result in agricultural degradation and more acidic oceans, decreasing crop yields in rural areas and limiting fishery supplies.

While the entire region faces daunting consequences from climate change and related natural disasters, women and girls face disproportionate effects across four areas.

First, women and girls are “especially vulnerable to sexual violence and coercion” in the wake of a natural disaster, according to the United Nations Population Fund. This risk includes and extends beyond domestic violence, which is known to spike in crisis situations, such as during the COVID-19 pandemic in Trinidad and Tobago. Disproportionate risks mount, the World Bank notes, “in the face of uprooted housing and traditional support structures, disrupted access to services, and both structural and social obstacles to accessing food, relief, supplies, and latrines.” A lack of privacy and security in shelters is problematic, especially for young and teenage girls.

Second, women are responsible for a greater share of caregiving for families and households. After Hurricane María knocked out the power grid in Puerto Rico and made potable water scarce, it was women who bore a greater burden in doing the cooking, laundry, and cleaning to keep households going. Moreover, across multiple climate change events, when schools close, women with school-age children are often unable to return to work or attend school themselves.

Third, Caribbean women tend to work in the informal economy, including small-scale businesses and the hospitality sector, both of which are adversely affected by tropical storms. Storms can damage crops and roads, making it difficult to get produce to markets, while also leaving restaurants, shops, and hotels closed for days, affecting incomes.

Finally, women often have unequal access to finance, capital, and other assets, which can affect their resilience after a disaster. In addition, as governments finance the reconstruction of damaged infrastructure after natural disasters and fortify existing structures, there are fewer resources devoted to the education and health sectors—both of which are integral to providing care to and lifting family responsibility burdens from women.

Caribbean governments and regional partners must factor in the disproportionate challenges facing women and girls at the earliest stages of climate resilience and adaptation policymaking. Policy designs should incorporate government funding or subsidies dedicated to women-owned businesses adversely affected by climate change. Historically, Caribbean women face barriers to accessing finance and capital to start or invest in their businesses. Limited track records in operating a business relative to men and frequent climate events increase the risk profiles for women-owned firms. Here, governments can work with regional institutions like the Caribbean Development Bank to level the playing field for women-owned firms by providing grants to businesses in climate-affected sectors, like hospitality and agricultural work.

Further, resources can and should be dedicated to women-owned firms that are physically affected by climate events and to create shelters where at-risk women and girls can stay after natural disasters to limit spaces where gender-based violence can occur. This should include shelters that can care for children and allow working parents to return to their jobs to offset the disproportionate costs borne by women resulting from family responsibilities.

Involving women in policy designs also includes making them part of the decision-making process. Only women and girls can provide first-hand information to contextualize policies and streamline resources that address the unique challenges they face due to climate change. One way to do this is to incorporate perspectives from gender-focused civil society organizations.

Civil society organizations are uniquely intertwined with the realities of each country at national and subnational levels, allowing them to understand the day-to-day challenges facing women and girls across different communities. Governments can work with civil society organizations to ensure that policies are not blanket approaches but are bottom-up in nature, so that each community of women and girls receive the resources and attention they require. Regular consultation with these groups, particularly in the advent of hurricane season, during rainy seasons, and in the lead-up to drier months can provide real-time insights into the types of government resources that should be devoted to women and girls.

Given that the Caribbean is a heterogeneous region, with different climate events affecting different countries, it is essential for policy design and decision making to be country-specific as well as gender inclusive to best serve local populations. Climate change does not have to result in increasing gender inequity in the Caribbean—as long as the voices and interests of women and girls are incorporated in policy design and resource allocation in regional planning to combat climate change.

Wazim Mowla is the associate director and fellow for the Caribbean Initiative at the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center. 

This article is part of the Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center’s partnership with the UN Women Multi-Country Office–Caribbean.

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On April 23, Forward Defense nonresident senior fellow Marc Polymeropoulos wrote a book review for The Cipher Brief of Hala Gorani’s “But You Don’t Look Arab and Other Tales of Unbelonging.”

The review covers the story of Emmy Award-winning international journalist Hala Gorani, from her time as a globe-trotting correspondent and anchor with her own lifelong search for identity as the daughter of Syrian immigrants.

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Marc Polymeropoulos

Nonresident Senior Fellow

Forward Defense Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security

Afghanistan Europe & Eurasia

Forward Defense, housed within the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, generates ideas and connects stakeholders in the defense ecosystem to promote an enduring military advantage for the United States, its allies, and partners. Our work identifies the defense strategies, capabilities, and resources the United States needs to deter and, if necessary, prevail in future conflict.

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According to recent studies, violence against women in Mexico has surged, with more than 70 percent of Mexico’s 50.5 million women and girls over the age of fifteen experiencing some form of violence. This brutal reality is heightened by the fact that many crimes in Mexico often go unreported, hindering governmental efforts to address the disproportionate impact of criminal violence on women in rural states such as Veracruz, Oaxaca, and Chiapas. It is a serious problem in Mexico, and it is also a concern for its northern neighbor. It’s in the United States’ best interest to take a closer look at the increased effect of organized crime on women in Mexico and the growing migration pressures it is generating.

It is no secret that Mexico stands as one of the most violent countries for women. For years, Mexico has struggled with inadequate resources and institutions to safeguard victims and prosecute offenders.

Even urban areas such as Mexico City, which have more access to resources and investment than rural areas, have struggled to create a holistic security agenda that can ensure women’s safety. However, between February 2020 and 2024, the incidence of femicide in the capital decreased by 20 percent, according to the Secretariat of Citizen Security in Mexico City. Although this value does not encompass the full dimension of the violence women face in Mexico, the decrease may be a result of certain components of the city’s security agenda. This agenda includes implementing gender-sensitive training for military and police personnel, bolstering female representation in law enforcement, improving access to mental-health and victim-support services, and streamlining abuse reporting mechanisms through preventative policing measures.  

The most severe violence against women predominantly occurs in remote Mexican states characterized by pervasive poverty and the presence of criminal organizations. States such as Oaxaca, Veracruz, and Chiapas, plagued by poverty and host to multiple cartels, pose significant threats to women’s safety. These states are notorious for their danger to women, even though they do not always report the highest number of femicides or other cases of gender-based violence given the fear of victims to come forward and lower law-enforcement presence. A 2021 United Nations Development Programme study in Mexico indicates that in areas controlled by drug cartels, violence against women intensifies, with relatives often refraining from reporting crimes out of fear of retribution. Such violence becomes a tool of intimidation and a display of dominance for these criminal groups, perpetuating a cycle of violence. These mostly rural states serve as hubs for organized crime due to weak state presence and proximity to key transit routes. As a result, the convergence of poverty, crime, and violence has prompted mass emigration to urban centers and the United States, particularly among vulnerable populations.

To address this dire situation, it is important for the administration that takes office later this year to pay closer attention to violence against women in these states. To start with, reliable data is needed. In Mexico, an estimated 93 percent of crimes go unreported. In 2023, 2,580 women were murdered but only 830 were categorized as femicides. Strengthening transparent and trustworthy institutions that collect accurate data in these areas is crucial to fostering an environment where victims feel safe to come forward.

Security plans that have shown some success in urban areas are often difficult to apply as a whole in more rural areas, due to the lack of infrastructure and resources. However, there are certain transferable steps that can help improve women’s safety. For instance, recruiting more and better female police officers to ensure greater representation in police forces can make women feel safer when coming forward about their experiences. Failure to address these urgent needs perpetuates inequality and undermines Mexico’s potential as an economic powerhouse.

Furthermore, the increase in gender-based violence in Veracruz, Oaxaca, and Chiapas is greatly impacting migration dynamics, particularly toward those migrating to the United States. A 2021 report from the International Organization for Migration sheds light on the reasons behind this migration trend, revealing that 11 percent of respondents left Mexico due to gender violence. Moreover, 7 percent of those women interviewed mentioned encounters between criminal groups as a main reason for migrating. This migration pattern shows the immense need for addressing the root causes of gender-based violence in rural Mexican states, as it directly influences migration flows and exacerbates the ongoing migration crisis at the US-Mexico border.

The United States can help address gender-based violence in rural Mexican areas. For example, the US State Department’s Safe from the Start ReVisioned program is dedicated to eradicating all forms and threats of gender-based violence that women and girls encounter. Given adequate resources and attention, such collaborative efforts between the US and Mexican authorities can bolster capacities to prevent and respond to violence effectively. Other potential initiatives, such as skills transfer, training in conflict resolution, and trauma-informed care programs, can empower local communities to address violence comprehensively. By implementing innovative strategies and comprehensive support services, the incoming Mexican administration, along with its US counterpart, can make important progress in addressing the root causes of gender-based violence while cracking down on organized crime and undocumented migration.

As Mexico prepares for this year’s historic election, there is a unique opportunity to prioritize the issue of gender-based violence and enact meaningful change. Now more than ever, it is imperative for political leaders to recognize the urgency of this issue and commit to implementing policies and programs that prioritize the safety and empowerment of women, particularly in rural Mexican states.

Charlene Aguilera is a program assistant in the Caribbean Initiative at the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center.

Isabel Chiriboga is an assistant director at the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center.

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A major obstacle is that the Caribbean’s development model does not yet utilize the full extent of its human capital. Too often, women are not part of the Caribbean’s current development equation, with gender disparities limiting economic opportunities for women and thus holding back economic growth across the region. As Caribbean countries navigate the global financial landscape, governments should look at how increasing economic empowerment opportunities for women can be a new development tool for the region.

Caribbean countries face a host of economic challenges. The region houses small market and import-dependent economies that rely on tourism to drive economic growth. Strong tropical storms, global inflation, and supply chain constraints all have adverse effects on Caribbean economies. Often, as countries import goods and services at high prices, the cost is passed down to the consumer. At the same time, the region has a relatively small population compared to its neighbors in Latin America. This means that capacity is a barrier to economic growth. Simply put, there are not enough people in the region, and by extension, not enough technical expertise and businesses to carry out needed functions that stimulate growth and drive innovation.

But the Caribbean’s small populations are even smaller given that fewer women than men are in the workforce. In many Caribbean countries, female participation in the labor force is around 60 percent, and in some nations it’s closer to 40 percent, according to the World Bank. Compare this with male labor force participation, which often approaches or surpasses 80 percent. The gap is further amplified when taking into account the region’s human capital constraints. While the gap for Caribbean countries is smaller than their neighbors in Latin America, the estimated 20 percent difference has an outsized effect on the region’s economic potential. Tens of thousands of new workers in countries with populations below a million can significantly boost economic prospects. Further, since the Caribbean experiences above-average brain drain and many countries such as Guyana, Jamaica, and Barbados have trouble filling skills gaps, it begs the question: What would development in the Caribbean look like if every bit of the population’s potential was realized?

For more women to participate in the workforce, the root causes need to be addressed. First, despite high educational attainment for women—relative to men—this does not always translate into job opportunities. A new Atlantic Council report looks at educational attainment, measured as a percentage of adults who have completed at least primary education. In Belize, Guyana, Jamaica, and Saint Lucia, educational attainment ranges from just under 80 percent to about 86 percent for women, whereas for men it hovers between 74 percent and 81 percent. Yet workforce participation for women remains lower than for men. Second, when women do enter the workforce, there is a significant wage gap. In Jamaica, women earn about 83 percent of their male counterparts and 88 percent in Barbados. Finally, women are often expected to be home and child caretakers—a responsibility that is unpaid but places an inequitable burden on them relative to men. Unpaid work is a significant barrier to entry for women in the workforce, as offloading these responsibilities comes with expenses that can be covered only by women of a higher income bracket.

Fortunately, Caribbean countries have partners—such as outside nations and international institutions—that can support work on gender equality and economic empowerment. To be sure, Caribbean countries have made progress in gender equality, such as facilitating increases in political participation for women. But the structural barriers facing gender equity are partially a result of the region’s economic makeup, and they require more than just national attention to overcome.

Here, Caribbean countries and their partners should consider undertaking two policy initiatives. First, the focus should be on making it easier for women to enter the workforce while also making the workforce more equitable for them. Women aiming to start new businesses need access to finance mechanisms that are tailored to the realities they face. Many women in the Caribbean do not have a credit history, making it difficult for them to take out loans. If they can access loans, they are usually at high interest rates, meaning that businesses that take longer to return profits can put women-owned enterprises in severe debt. To address these issues, development banks should work with governments to create grant-to-loan mechanisms for women-owned start-ups. Metrics and monitoring mechanisms can be put in place where businesses that return medium-to-high profits over a certain period have their grants turned to low-interest loans. But Caribbean governments cannot afford these mechanisms if they themselves cannot access financing, meaning that a pool of resources from, for example, the World Bank and the Canadian government should help subsidize these costs. 

Second, at a regional level, Caribbean governments should work with partners to create an incubator program for women in the workforce. Success in business, particularly in the private sector, takes more than capital. Time and professional networks are important but are hard to come by for women taking most of the household and childcare burden. An incubator program can help women be part of an active peer-to-peer network that understands their realities. Such a program can help provide access to resources and institutions that ease many of the challenges women face. Many countries have existing women’s chambers or networks, but a region-wide effort would allow for members to share best practices and potentially, resources.

With Caribbean countries facing economic headwinds, governments need the active participation of all their citizens. Women and girls should be the first and immediate resource utilized. But doing so requires ensuring that their participation does not come at an adverse socioeconomic cost. Providing them the same opportunities as men and amplifying their empowerment can be the key to a new development tool in the Caribbean.

Wazim Mowla is the associate director & fellow of the Caribbean Initiative at the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center.

This article is part of the Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center’s partnership with the UN Women Multi-Country Office–Caribbean.

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That was the main takeaway from the latest group of Women Leaders in Energy and Climate Fellows to go on their study tour to Washington, DC, an experience offered as part of their fellowship program. For this tour, the 2023 fellows met with government officials and civil society groups to discuss women’s participation to drive progress toward a cleaner and more efficient energy system. Below are our fellows’ takeaways from the trip—supported by the Royal Bank of Canada—touching upon how leaders should prioritize a more sustainable and inclusive environment for women in the energy sector to not only accelerate the adoption of cleaner technologies but also foster social equity and economic empowerment. 

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Maitha Al Shimmari

2023 Women Leader in Energy and Climate Fellow

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Jeanette Gitobu

2023 Women Leader in Energy and Climate Fellow

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Georgette Udo

2023 Women Leader in Energy and Climate Fellow

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Lin Yuan

2023 Women Leader in Energy and Climate Fellow

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The Women Leaders in Energy and Climate study tour in Washington, DC, was a transformative, inspirational, and thought-provoking experience. Throughout the week, we had the opportunity to engage in direct and open conversations with esteemed leaders from Iceland, Sweden, the UAE, and the United States who shared invaluable insights into global energy dynamics and climate challenges from their perspectives. 

The conversations underscored the critical role women play in shaping the energy transition. From navigating policy landscapes to driving innovation, it is evident that our voices are indispensable in addressing climate change. Each discussion emphasized the urgency and importance of cross-sector collective collaboration to combat ongoing geopolitical tensions and the global energy crisis. 

This experience has reaffirmed my commitment to advocating for sustainable solutions in the energy and climate sector. I am inspired to leverage my newfound knowledge and network to drive meaningful change in the upcoming years. The strong connections made with my fellows in the program and lessons learned will undoubtedly shape my approach as a woman leader in energy and climate. 

Maitha Al Shimmari is a 2023 Women Leader in Energy and Climate Fellow currently studying at the University of Oxford to obtain a DrPhil (PhD) in engineering science.

My week in Washington, DC, illuminated the pivotal role women play in the global energy transition. The welcome dinner and icebreaker fostered a collaborative spirit, setting the tone for shared insights.

Interactions with industry experts underscored the resonant theme that “energy security equals national security.” The ongoing conflict in Ukraine and Russia spotlighted the vulnerability of our energy systems, emphasizing the need for resilience in the face of geopolitical challenges.

The alumnae roundtable reinforced the idea that the energy sector’s success hinges on the full participation of women. Data-backed insights affirmed that diversity is not just a buzzword but a catalyst for better performance and innovative problem-solving.

As I reflect, the call for mentorship, networking, and capacity-building programs for women in the energy sector resounds. Collaboration across sectors emerges as the linchpin for maximizing results and ensuring accountability. 

Moving forward, I see my role not merely as an individual participant but as part of a collective force advocating for a more secure and sustainable energy future. This journey has affirmed the urgency of our mission, emphasizing that our actions today are intrinsically linked to the broader fabric of national security and global resilience. In this collaborative pursuit, energy security becomes synonymous with national security.

Jeanette Gitobu is a 2023 Women Leader in Energy and Climate Fellow who currently serves as the director of the Women in Wind Global Leadership Program and policy advisor on Africa at the Global Wind Energy Council.

The Women Leaders in Energy and Climate Fellowship has fostered career growth through trainings and coaching, bringing together a cohort of women passionate about championing change and soaring in their careers. At the midpoint of the fellowship, the cohort takes a study tour to garner experience and learn from key stakeholders in this field. This year we had the opportunity of having the tour in Washington DC.  

This tour reinforced the role energy plays in economies of the world, the role of women in contributing to energy transition, and the interrelationship between the government, the private sector, and education. I had the opportunity to learn about cross-sectoral pathways to net zero, meeting with high-level officials from Iceland, the United States, Sweden, and the UAE, distinguished alumni, and executives. The conversations revealed unique perspectives from these leaders, and I left inspired to continue leaving my mark as a woman in the energy sector. 

Georgette Udo is a 2023 Women Leaders in Energy and Climate Fellow and the CEO of the Renewable Energy for the African Girl Initiative.

The three-day study tour in Washington, DC, convened this year’s cohort of Women Leaders in Energy and Climate Fellows, and created a space for sharing diverse perspectives on the clean energy transition.

It was undeniable from the conversations with many global climate policy leaders that the shift to a low-carbon economy is creating a window for more inclusive and sustainable growth for both the Global North and South.

Through dialogues with leaders from the US Department of State, the Department of Energy, the International Trade Administration, and the Development Finance Corporation, we heard the importance of energy transition as a key driver of growth for the US economy and a central principle to the US diplomatic agenda. The push to expand the domestic low-carbon transportation and renewable energy manufacturing industries will create numerous opportunities for cross-sectoral and cross-border collaboration to ensure the resiliency of a worldwide green industrial supply chain. The flow of investments in the process could create a catalytic effect to elevate the economic, social, and environmental standards for development for many communities, particularly those in emerging markets.

The conversation with the Icelandic Ambassador Bergdís Ellertsdóttir and her team provides a hopeful beacon of what this development opportunity could look like. By embracing geothermal, hydropower, and the fledgling climate technology industry, Iceland has attracted significant foreign investments from Europe and the United States, and at the same time championed gender-inclusive development that led to the growth of women-led climate startups and women’s participation in the clean energy workforce.

While we recognized in our discussion there are limitations to the replicability of Iceland’s development model, one can imagine the potential for a more sustainable and inclusive future that will be unleashed through the wave of government policies and market-based incentives from the United States. and beyond. It is therefore crucial for public and private sector partners to collaboratively create the enabling conditions for investments, scale capital mobilization, and set the common standards for impact and safeguards to maximize the potential socioeconomic benefits brought by the global energy transition.  

Lin Yuan is a 2023 Women Leaders in Energy and Climate Fellow and an associate director at Pollination.

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Women Leaders in Climate and Energy Fellowship

The Atlantic Council Global Energy Center’s Women Leaders in Energy and Climate Fellowship is a one-year fellowship program for early to mid-career rising women leaders in the energy and climate field with an interest in policy.

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The Global Energy Center develops and promotes pragmatic and nonpartisan policy solutions designed to advance global energy security, enhance economic opportunity, and accelerate pathways to net-zero emissions.

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Yet, the international community, defined loosely as the collection of United Nations (UN) member states, finds itself unable to emerge as a powerful and unified voice for the women of Afghanistan despite its stated commitments to gender equality. For years, international conventions and declarations have served as inspirations of hope and offered guidelines and principles aimed at safeguarding the rights of women worldwide. Now the people who wrote and advocated for these international standards must translate them into concrete actions to address the world’s most severe women’s rights crisis. These efforts should include codifying gender apartheid as a crime against humanity and prosecuting Afghanistan at the International Criminal Court. Moreover, any international engagement with the Taliban regime must prioritize ensuring its compliance with international law in its treatment of women.

International legal frameworks

Despite critical reports by prominent international organizations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the UN special rapporteur on the human rights situation in Afghanistan, the standing of women and girls in the country continues to deteriorate rapidly. Women inside Afghanistan have bravely taken to the streets, and their counterparts outside the country have advocated for them in numerous international meetings, conferences, and private roundtable discussions. But these demands and protests have so far failed to garner a robust response from existing international legal mechanisms, obligations, or conventions.  

Bridging the gap

The fundamental human rights that the women of Afghanistan are demanding are clearly defined in the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and elsewhere. These pivotal frameworks mandate governments and international institutions to actively address women’s needs and provide robust protection against any violations, especially in the complex landscapes of conflict and post-conflict situations.

UN Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325 on Women, Peace, and Security, while nonbinding, expands upon binding conventions by clarifying women’s rights standards, even in states experiencing conflict or those not party to conventions such as CEDAW. The resolution extends its reach beyond governments and states to all parties participating in conflicts.

While UNSCR 1325 does not have direct legal enforcement mechanisms, it carries significant political weight. The resolution “calls upon all parties to armed conflict to respect fully international law applicable to the rights and protection of women and girls” under the relevant conventions and to “bear in mind the relevant provisions of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.” The resolution further calls upon all parties to armed conflicts to “take special measures to protect women and girls from gender-based violence, particularly rape and other forms of sexual abuse, and all other forms of violence in situations of armed conflict.” The resolution has promoted actions at the national, regional, and international levels. Civil society organizations, international actors, and UN bodies regularly monitor and assess progress on the implementation of the resolution and call for greater accountability mechanisms to ensure that commitments are translated into action.

As a United Nations member, Afghanistan ratified CEDAW in 2003 and adopted UNSCR 1325 in 2015, affirming its commitment to international legal obligations and the promotion of the rule of law. The Islamic Republic of Afghanistan successfully submitted its periodic reports to the CEDAW committee and its status reports on the implementation of the national action plan on UNSCR 1325. Under the Taliban’s rule, Afghanistan has disregarded such established international mechanisms and is no longer abiding by any of these international obligations. 

The group’s continued enforcement of oppressive policies and the lack of international accountability has reduced international standards aimed at protecting women’s rights to nothing more than empty rhetoric. Consequently, Afghan women and girls turn to the international community for robust advocacy and support, urging for their voices to be heard and for the use of all available international mechanisms on their behalf.

To date, the international community has failed to deliver. Countries with feminist foreign policies have sought to exert pressure on the Taliban regime and demand the protection of Afghan women’s rights through soft diplomatic meetings and statements. The recent statement issued by the foreign ministers of the Feminist Foreign Policy Network regarding the plight of women in Afghanistan, for example, employed significantly stronger language than their previous statements since August 2021, as they called on the international community to redouble its efforts to leverage all available legal instruments to end the systematic and egregious violations of international law against women. This call has not yet led to meaningful action.

The way forward

To effectively protect and promote women’s rights, it is imperative that members of the international community first agree to refrain from any form of engagement with the Taliban that contradicts their commitments and obligations under international law. This requires a coherent and unified approach, as well as proactive accountability measurements, to avoid contradictory behavior that would undermine the objectives of promoting women’s rights and ending violence against women in Afghanistan. Nevertheless, expecting an illegitimate group such as the Taliban to adhere to international frameworks concerning women’s rights is unlikely to yield significant results.

But the international community, in collaboration with civil society organizations, nongovernmental organizations, and human rights groups, can take proactive measures toward ensuring accountability. One significant step would be to codify gender apartheid as a crime against humanity. By leveraging the instruments provided by binding conventions such as CEDAW, the international community could establish legal frameworks that explicitly recognize and condemn systematic gender-based discrimination and persecution. Over the past three years, there has been significant documentation of gender-based persecution in Afghanistan, including last month’s report from the UN special rapporteur on the human rights situation in Afghanistan. The next step would be for state parties to CEDAW to pursue a case against Afghanistan at the International Court of Justice, either individually or through joint initiatives.

The CEDAW committee should support the re-establishment of Afghanistan’s CEDAW steering committee, technical committee, and drafting committee, both within the country and among Afghan communities in exile. While the current authorities of Afghanistan refuse to provide periodic reports, the committees of experts should be tasked with providing shadow reports.

Moreover, it is imperative for the International Criminal Court to collaborate closely with relevant states and international organizations such as UN bodies, as well as civil society organizations and other stakeholders, to garner support for its investigation into the Taliban’s treatment of women, particularly regarding crimes against humanity such as gender persecution.

The United Nations must adhere to fundamental principle before considering any form of “structured engagement” with the Taliban—a form of cooperation recommended in the independent report by UN Special Coordinator Feridun Sinirlioğlu. The UN should first prioritize the implementation of UNSCR 1325 and other relevant resolutions, ensuring that the rights and needs of women are fully integrated into its strategies and initiatives, including by facilitating direct discussions between women and the Taliban.  

UN Women, in close collaboration with relevant states, must prioritize the revitalization of the focal points in Afghanistan’s UNSCR 1325 national action plan, which was established in 2017. These focal points, people who represented the relevant ministries and civil society organizations before the Taliban takeover, play a pivotal role in guaranteeing the participation of Afghan women in all dialogues. New focal points could be established under the auspices of the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, UN Women, or even the European Union delegation in Afghanistan. The international community must prioritize Afghanistan as a paramount concern in its policy agenda and cease engaging in actions and diplomatic meetings that inadvertently bolster the Taliban’s sense of superiority and embolden similar fundamentalist groups worldwide. The future of Afghan women and the international commitment to gender equality hangs in the balance.

Parwana Paikan is the minister counsellor of the embassy of Afghanistan in France and co-founder of Conseil des Femmes Franco-Afghan. She previously served as deputy director general of human rights and women’s international affairs at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Afghanistan.

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Public Event Wed, February 14, 2024 • 1:00 pm ET

Justice and accountability in the MENA region: The importance of women’s stories

A panel discussion about the crucial role women and their testimonies play in the pursuit of justice in accountability in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).

Human Rights International Norms

On Wednesday, February 14, the Atlantic Council’s Strategic Litigation Project hosted a hybrid panel event about the crucial role women and their testimonies play in pursuit of justice and accountability in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).

The panel discussion featured Dalal Mawad, award-winning Lebanese journalist and author of All She Lost: The Explosion in Lebanon, the Collapse of a Nation and the Women who Survive; Mai El-Sadany, executive director of the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy; and Haydee Dijkstal, an international human rights lawyer and nonresident senior fellow with the Strategic Litigation Project.

Moderator Patricia Karam, a nonresident senior fellow at Arab Center Washington DC, set the tone for the panel with her opening remarks, which outlined the political, economic, and social challenges women still face in MENA despite some discrete attempts at reform. Karam highlighted the heightened violence against women during periods of instability, pointing to current situations in Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria. She also noted the insecurity that women face under authoritarian regimes generally, highlighting the Islamic Republic of Iran’s violent crackdowns on protests following the death of Mahsa Jina Amini.

Elevating voices and confronting injustice

Dalal Mawad began the panel discussion by explaining her two primary motivations for writing All She Lost. First, she wanted to provide a space for women to tell unique histories from their own perspectives. So often in the Middle East, women lack a safe space to share their experiences, but, Mawad explained, that once they find this space, women become powerful storytellers. Second, she wanted to challenge the culture of impunity in Lebanon. After the Beirut blast, Mawad realized that generations of Lebanese women, having lived through decades of economic crises and war, had never been given the opportunity to process and come to terms with their experiences by documenting their stories.

Mawad elaborated on this system of injustice, explaining how Lebanon’s legal system compounds trauma for women victims of tragedies like the Beirut blast. She shared stories from interviews that she had conducted for the book, including one about a woman who is still struggling to gain custody for her two children after her husband died in the blast due to the court’s mandate for a male custodian.

Holding institutions accountable

Mai El-Sadany delved into possible responses to gender-based violence. She began by explaining the multifaceted nature of these abuses, occurring across the region both online and offline, in conflict and in peacetime, at the hands of both individuals and state actors. Each of these dynamics pose unique challenges for activists, and ideally states, to address. El-Sadany also expressed some hope, citing the widespread reaction to a spate of femicides in Egypt, which prompted many women to organize and propose new solutions. This action demonstrated the important efforts by feminist organizations in MENA to tackle gender-based crimes, moving their ideas toward the mainstream and recruiting men to act as allies.

Haydee Dijkstal then discussed the role of journalists in accountability, explaining that the media can contribute to systems of justice in two major ways. First, journalists cover events as they unfold, often bearing witness to and documenting crimes in the process. This evidence is vital for investigators, who can only begin collecting evidence after a crime has already occurred, making the task of establishing an accurate narrative difficult without the help of journalists. Second, reporting helps to keep the justice system accountable. The media can demand answers from governments and courts and serve as a bullwork against corrupt officials and institutions.

The truth as a legal remedy

Reparations are a crucial form of redress for victims, but, Dijkstal explained, the challenge in obtaining them is the legal process’ order of operations. At the International Criminal Court (ICC), for example, several avenues exist for reparations, but these options are only available after convictions and the establishment of the scope of harm and affected victims. Even reaching this point is difficult, as charges against perpetrators often take years to bring, sometimes long after the alleged crimes were committed. Dijkstal suggested reframing the notion of reparations to fulfill a broader range of victims’ needs, including their right to the truth. This form of reparations could come earlier in the legal process through fact-finding efforts.

Karam connected this need for truth to the context of the Lebanese Civil War. She said that Lebanese society has dealt with the conflict through a collective amnesia, contributing to the current culture of impunity among political elites in the country. Mawad added that the truce at the level of warlords and politicians has provided amnesty for the war’s perpetrators. Likewise, no official narrative exists for the blast. The initial investigation has stalled because corrupt officials blocked the investigating judge at every step. The lack of government fact-finding efforts elevates the importance of an independent media.

The intersection of conflict and gender

El-Sadany then spoke about the position of women during times of conflict. Abuses against women in conflict zones fall largely into two categories: gender-based and compounded harms. Gender-based or sexual crimes often occur in order to specifically harm women, as is the case with the reported increase in sexual violence in the civil war in Sudan. Compounded harms arise as the result of simply being a woman in the context of conflict. This dynamic is currently at play in Gaza, where women have difficulty finding sanitary pads and are experiencing disproportionate harm during pregnancy. These conflicts make headlines, but all too often, women’s experiences do not. El-Sadany underscored the importance of women journalists and advocates to change this reality.

Dijkstal applied this understanding to refugees and stateless persons. Conflict, statelessness or refugee status can amplify women’s hardships. Refugee women are more likely to face education deprivation, poverty, and lower access to work. Dijkstal explained that protection mechanisms exist at the international level, but they need to be reinforced by state signatories. Many states in the region are party to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, for example, but these laws lack practical tools for enforcement. Dijkstal prescribed international pressure to incentivize states to bring their domestic policies in line with international human rights standards.

The path forward

Mawad noted that United Nations fact-finding missions can be a powerful tool in uncovering the truth and securing justice for women, but also noted that this process can be complicated by abstention of countries in calling for these investigations. This was the case for example when the United States failed to sign a joint letter calling for a fact-finding mission into the Beirut blast. If the United States put its weight behind such measures and lobbied allied countries to do the same, an investigation would come more swiftly.

Where possible, El-Sadany recommended pursuing legal battles domestically, highlighting the reemergence of universal jurisdiction cases as a promising development since under domestic universal jurisdiction frameworks, human rights abuses can be heard in national courts regardless of the crime’s location.

Dijkstal pointed to the international legal system as a possible bright spot in tackling gender-based offenses. Most notably, the ICC’s Office of the Prosecutor recently released a report detailing its policy on gender-based crimes. The Office urged addressing gendered aspects to international abuses at earlier stages in prosecution to ensure a higher success rate and speedier process to convict perpetrators.

In conclusion, all three panelists emphasized the need for strengthened local approaches. Women’s and victims’ groups in the MENA region are already tackling these issues directly. The international community can aid in these grassroots initiatives through providing vital monetary, legal, and journalistic support. Enhancing civil society plays a critical role in constructing social and political attitudes that can have the greatest long-term effect on women’s experiences.

Charles Johnson is a Young Global Professional with the Middle East Programs at the Atlantic Council. 

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Online Event Thu, March 7, 2024 • 2:00 pm ET

Courage to seek justice: Addressing the unjust political imprisonment of women

The Atlantic Council and the Department of State’s Secretary’s Office of Global Women’s Issues co-host a discussion with the 2024 International Women of Courage award recipients.

Belarus Eastern Europe Europe & Eurasia Political Reform

The unjust imprisonment of women affects far more than those detained and their families, warned Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the US representative to the United Nations.

“It’s devastating for entire communities,” she explained. “It hollows out civil society. It creates a culture: a culture of fear. It squashes hopes for a democratic future.”

Thomas-Greenfield spoke at an event last week cohosted by the Atlantic Council and the US Secretary of State’s Office of Global Women’s Issues designed to amplify the voices of women who have survived unjust imprisonment or other human-rights abuses.

“We all must do more to familiarize ourselves with the stories and with the facts regarding political prisoners, including women political prisoners,” said Geeta Rao Gupta, ambassador-at-large at the Office of Global Women’s Issues. “We must help give voice to those who remain unjustly behind bars and those whose voices are stifled.”

The event, moderated by Atlantic Council Executive Vice President Jenna Ben-Yehuda, gathered three recipients of the US State Department’s 2024 International Women of Courage Award to share their experiences and highlight the need for international support. Below are their stories.

Martha Beatriz Roque Cabello: Why it is now “very difficult” for prisoners

• Roque, a Cuban political dissident and human-rights activist, talked about her experiences working with political prisoners and their families. “I cannot even distinguish which is worse, being imprisoned or being a relative of a prisoner,” she said.
• Speaking from Cuba—having been blocked from traveling to the United States by the Cuban government since 2018—she added that the economic crisis there, which has led to severe shortages of food and other supplies, has made the situation “very difficult” for prisoners.
• Roque herself has spent decades protesting against the Cuban government and was imprisoned twice. She now provides support to political prisoners. “I believe that being with them, even in thought, is something that will help them,” she said.

Fariba Balouch: “Pay attention” to minority groups and hold Iran’s regime responsible

• Balouch, a London-based Iranian human-rights activist, recounted how—when she lived in Iran’s Sistan and Baluchestan Province—she had escaped an abusive marriage. She said she was “afraid to speak up about that” at the time, but then realized that, as women, “we have to raise that awareness.”
• Balouch said that she felt it was her “duty” and “responsibility” to speak up for women in Sistan and Baluchestan Province; she also said that she had to make a “difficult choice” between being a mother and lifting the voices of marginalized people around her. “I decided to go with the people’s voice,” she said.
• Balouch explained that in Iran, being a woman political prisoner comes with a lot of harassment. But “if you’re representing an ethnic minority,” she said, “that even doubles your problems and challenges.” As for being an activist: “That would make it even triple.”
• She added that even once Baloch women leave Iran, they—and their families—continue to face similar threats and other pressures. She explained that she has received threats and that her son and her brother are currently imprisoned in Iran—her son was detained after having traveled to visit Balouch in the United Kingdom.
• Balouch called upon the international community to support women activists and their families and to “pay attention” to minority communities “so the Islamic Republic of Iran knows that it has a responsibility” to ensure that no Baloch is killed in prison.

Volha Harbunova: This is a “global crisis”

• Volha Harbunova, a Belarusian human rights defender, recounted how she fled Belarus after being released from prison and was later appointed the representative for social issues in the Belarusian United Transitional Cabinet, the government-in-exile led by Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya. She called upon Belarusians who have fled and live outside of the country to keep up communication with people inside the country who face repression. The Lukashenka regime “doesn’t want [us] to have that communication,” she said. “They want to isolate us. They want to stop that solidarity.”
• Harbunova argued that violence against women is a “global crisis,” which she said has recently been made clear by the rape and killing of a Belarusian refugee in Poland.
• Harbunova recalled having faced psychological torture and violence after being imprisoned by the Lukashenka regime. She also noted that political prisoners are restricted from accessing medical care, food, and hygienic products—and that they are not allowed to communicate with family or their attorneys. LGBTQI+ people in prison, she added, often face more severe sexual violence. “The issue of political prisoners is a humanitarian issue; it’s a matter of life and death,” Harbunova said. “We really need help in securing the release of those prisoners.”

Katherine Walla is an associate director on the editorial team at the Atlantic Council. 

Watch the full event

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The divergences caused by fragility, conflict, and violence (FCV) situations are particularly stark, as the incidence of conflict events has increased 40 percent since 2020, to the highest number of events since World War II. Half of the world’s poor live in FCV-affected countries and that number is expected to rise to 60 percent by 2030, in part as the duration of conflicts extends—to now an average of twenty years. In addition to the death, destruction, and disruptions they cause, conflict and fragility are disincentives to investment and further undermine economic growth. One-fifth of International Monetary Fund member countries are considered fragile and conflict-affected situations (FCS) and twenty of the most climate-vulnerable economies are also on the World Bank’s FCS list.

According to the most recent Women, Peace, and Security Index: “In 2022, approximately six hundred million women—15 percent of women in the world—lived within fifty kilometers of armed conflict, more than double the levels in the 1990s.” These numbers don’t lie, but they also don’t necessarily tell the whole truth. And the truth is that women and girls are disproportionately impacted by fragility and conflict economically, socially, and politically. The impacts are well-documented. The data show, for example, that women and girls are more likely to see their educations disrupted, are more vulnerable to gender-based violence, and are more likely to be displaced or become refugees.

Women often face much greater economic hardships than men in conflict-affected areas, as well. Notably, six out of ten of the World Bank’s FCS countries are in the lower quartile on the “Economic Participation and Opportunity” subindex on the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index, indicating wider gender gaps and more challenges facing women in conflict contexts. Similarly, a majority of FCV countries can be found in the bottom of the latest Women Business and the Law rankings released on March 4. These impacts also further undermine economies: The World Bank estimates that gender-based violence costs some countries up to 3.7 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), and a 1 percent increase in violence against women lowers economic activity by 9 percent.

The roles women hold during conflict and reconstruction

But there can be opportunities for women’s economic empowerment in conflict and reconstruction, as well. Women are experiencing these outcomes despite the important role they play in economies during conflict, in post-conflict reconstruction, and in efforts to sustain peace.

Most of today’s FCV economies are characterized by low female labor force participation. For example, in 2022, the United Nations estimated that closing gender gaps in women’s labor force participation in Yemen would increase the country’s GDP by 27 percent. War has historically created windows of opportunity for women to fulfill workforce shortages—including in male-dominated fields—since men make up a majority of combatants. War—often coupled with crippling inflation—makes finding paid work more acceptable and, importantly, this openness tends to continue as income generation changes women’s economic value and power in society. In the United States, for example, women took to manufacturing and government administration for the war industry and beyond during World War II, with nineteen million women entering the US workforce during this period. Today, women continue to join or rejoin the workforce—including in the informal sector—at higher rates amid conflict and take on more culturally nontraditional jobs. For instance, Ukrainian women have joined the mining workforce, filling the gaps left by conscription after Russia’s invasion.

Like most economies worldwide, micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises dominate the market landscape of fragile and conflict-torn countries.

Even though these smaller businesses face more start-up and operational constraints, they provide a key pathway for women’s economic participation during conflict and on the road to recovery. A study in Syria estimated that the proportion of female entrepreneurs increased from a low base of 4.4 percent in 2009 to 22.4 percent by 2017. This includes women-owned and -led businesses engaging in supply chains; including in the logistics, information, and communication technology, infrastructure, and public works sectors, all of which are critical to reconstruction.

And as women workers and their businesses earn more, especially in the formal economy, they can mitigate the otherwise dampening domestic resource mobilization associated with reduced economic activity, investment, and government administration during conflict or destabilization. Women’s greater participation in the economy during conflict and reconstruction can also increase consumption and income utilization (including from cash transfers or other social protection mechanisms) as women recirculate their earnings with spending on their families.

How to wield prosperity and peace dividends with and for women

Gender inclusion cannot be an afterthought. Policymakers must address the immediate economic security and income needs of women during conflict, while empowering them to contribute to and benefit from recovery, reconstruction, and growth. This means providing context-specific, targeted social protections and addressing the issues that undermine women’s economic participation. It requires mitigating and responding to gender-based violence, as well as improving accessibility and affordability of child and elder care. It also means supporting women entrepreneurs and women-led small businesses, closing education or skill gaps, and addressing social and cultural norms that limit career choices or workforce participation with conflict or fragility-sensitive knowledge, design, and delivery mechanisms.

Depending on the type, level, and stage of FCV, as well as the economic landscape, certain FCV-specific interventions can also make a difference in women’s economic empowerment. These include, for example, enabling women’s earning, employment, and entrepreneurship by expanding opportunities in gig and home-based economies and increasing safe and reliable transportation to and from work or school. Policymakers should also take steps to improve access to education and training with attention to language, as well as the demand for and portability of skills and certifications. In addition to addressing persistent systemic and policy hurdles, women business owners and entrepreneurs need targeted support with more risk financing, knowhow, and market entry and development.

This includes leveraging sizable development and humanitarian assistance and procurement. The United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS), for example, bought over $1.8 billion worth of goods and services in 2022 from suppliers worldwide, with 56 percent local spending. Aligned with system-wide UN gender-responsive procurement initiatives, UNOPS is piloting and beginning to scale programs to train and prepare women business owners to successfully bid and execute their tenders. These women can then use the investment, experience, and credibility gained from working with UNOPS to obtain other public and private sector contracts and optimize supply chain opportunities.

Increasing digital inclusion can be transformative for women’s financial inclusion and economic participation, as well; including by training women for information and communication technology jobs in the digital economy, like the World Bank-Rockefeller Foundation’s Click-On Kaduna project in Nigeria. Policymakers should prioritize increasing women’s access to and utilization of digital tools and platforms, including digital money and financial services, as well as remote learning and government technology. Digital mechanisms can also serve as useful aspects of larger initiatives that empower women’s participation and leadership, which is critical for conflict mitigation and durable peacebuilding. 

The evidence that expanding economic opportunities for women is intertwined with building inclusive and sustainable growth, as well as peace and social progress, is only accruing with time, experience, and data. On this International Women’s Day, aptly themed “Invest in Women: Accelerate Progress,” it is incumbent upon all leaders, investors, and policymakers to heed this call. Public and private sector actors would do well to invest and enable increased women’s economic participation to catalyze prosperity and peace.

Nicole Goldin is a nonresident senior fellow at the GeoEconomics Center.

The post Investing in women accelerates prosperity and peace appeared first on Atlantic Council.

For the past two and half years, the Taliban has systematically subjugated women, girls, and other people in Afghanistan, depriving them of their most fundamental rights and eviscerating their autonomy. The Taliban has issued more than 150 decrees, with more than eighty of them directly aimed at women, surpassing the number of decrees issued for all other sectors. Through these decrees, the Taliban has banned women’s rights to education, work, freedom of assembly, and speech. The regime has also severely restricted women’s access to justice and health care—as enforced by forceful and violent mechanisms, such as the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, among others. In response, women have protested on the streets of Kabul and other major cities in Afghanistan, demanding their rights by risking their lives. The Taliban’s response has been violent, with civil resistance by women against these decrees met with beatings, lashings, the use of pepper spray, arbitrary arrests, torture, and even death. In recent weeks, the Taliban has arbitrarily detained and tortured women simply for not following the Taliban’s dress code, predominantly in Hazara and Tajik areas.

The situation continues to unfold with the Taliban regime consolidating its power and institutionalizing a system of governance that systematically dehumanizes, oppresses, and subjugates women, girls, and LGBTQI+ persons, as well as ethnic and religious minorities. There are no innocent bystanders in their dystopian project. Everyone is caught in the vortex.

There’s a term for the situation unfolding in Afghanistan: gender apartheid. On February 22, the United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Afghanistan, Richard Bennett, presented his most recent report to the Human Rights Council. He explained that since the Taliban’s takeover, human rights have continued to worsen in the country. The report describes the situation as unparalleled and frames the Taliban’s systematic and widespread discrimination against women and girls as “gender apartheid.” Other UN experts and international rights groups have come to similar conclusions. Last month, for example, the UN Working Group on discrimination against women and girls specifically called for codification of the crime of gender apartheid in the Draft Crimes Against Humanity Convention before the UN, in direct response to the situation in Afghanistan. Six UN member states have also referenced the potential inclusion of the crime of gender apartheid in that convention. The draft convention will next be discussed before the UN in April.

The struggle against gender apartheid is not new for the women of Afghanistan, given the Taliban’s first period in power in the 1990s. Then, too, women referred to and denounced the Taliban’s institutionalized gender-based discrimination and systematic oppression of women as “gender apartheid.” Nevertheless, the term gender apartheid has remained unenumerated as a crime under international law, leaving a legal gap for accountability. This raises a question: Would women, girls, and others in Afghanistan have to struggle against dehumanization by the Taliban today had gender apartheid been codified and criminalized in the 1990s? 

The End Gender Apartheid Campaign believes that male superiority and the dominance over women, girls, and LGBTQI+ persons form the core of the Taliban’s ideological system of governance. Such systematic oppression and subjugation are both ideologically and pragmatically existential for the Taliban’s regime. 

Dismantling the Taliban’s institutionalized regime of systematic gender-based subjugation requires new legal and diplomatic tools. A standalone crime of gender apartheid would provide the appropriate legal mechanism to hold the Taliban accountable. The crime of apartheid is distinct due to its animating context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination, and the perpetrator’s intent to maintain that regime. The proposed crime of gender apartheid would complement and reinforce the existing crime against humanity of gender persecution. Gender persecution comprises the intentional and severe deprivation of fundamental rights contrary to international law, with such targeting based on gender. It would also cover a distinct scope of acts and intent that further captures the nature of the crimes committed in situations like Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. 

As International Women’s Day and Women’s History Month acknowledge the significance of women’s rights achievements throughout history, the situation in Afghanistan stands out as a setback for gender justice and gender equality everywhere, undermining hard-fought battles over generations. The international community should stand with the women of Afghanistan in solidarity and demand accountability for the atrocities committed by the Taliban. Gender apartheid must be included as a standalone crime against humanity in the Draft Crimes Against Humanity Convention, including in advance of the UN Sixth Committee (Legal)’s resumed session next month.

Azadah Raz Mohammad is a legal advisor for the Strategic Litigation Project at the Atlantic Council and a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne.

Metra Mehran is the gender and policy advisor for the Strategic Litigation Project at the Atlantic Council.

The post This International Women’s Day, hold the Taliban to account for gender apartheid appeared first on Atlantic Council.

By Sahar Halaimzai, Metra Mehran, and Marika Theros

To protect these women from the significant risks associated with speaking out against the Taliban, we’ve taken several precautions: Their names have been changed, and, in some instances, their stories have been merged. We have also not used their real voices. Instead, the audio stories you will hear were recorded by women and girls who have been evacuated from Afghanistan since 2021. These women’s stories of endurance and resistance reveal the stark realities of life under a legal system that curtails freedom, stifles potential, and erodes dignity, yet they also illuminate the unyielding spirit and strength of each woman and girl. Their voices are a reminder of the interconnected struggles of all people globally in the pursuit of dignity, rights, and equality.

Afghan women did not have a real seat at the table in the United States’ “peace” deal with the Taliban. They are now demanding the world’s help in dismantling systems of oppression and rebuilding a society where equality and human rights are realities for all.

This initiative is a joint project of the Civic Engagement Project and the Atlantic Council’s Strategic Litigation Project.

The onslaught of decrees

In 2020, after nearly twenty years of war, the United States signed an agreement with the Taliban to unilaterally withdraw US forces from Afghanistan. The so-called peace process did not substantially include or account for Afghan women, whose concerns about the escalating, targeted violence against them and pushback against the myth of a reformed “Taliban 2.0” were largely ignored. By August 2021, Taliban soldiers were on the doorstep of Kabul; by August 15, they had taken over the city, signaling the collapse of the Afghan republic.

Ten days later, the Taliban issued its first directive, instructing women and girls in Kabul to remain indoors, justifying it on the grounds that Taliban soldiers were not trained to respect women and therefore could not guarantee their safety outside. The rise of the Taliban regime has not only marked a significant political upheaval and one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world today, but it has also ushered in a rapid regression for women’s rights in Afghanistan. Despite initial pledges of moderation, the Taliban has aggressively dismantled two decades of progress made by Afghan women and girls.

The group has done this by issuing around eighty decrees that directly target women and girls, demonstrating the systematic, institutionalized, and punitively enforced nature of gender apartheid in Afghanistan. In some instances, these decrees are punitive, particularly in places where women are resisting the Taliban. With about 60 percent of Afghanistan’s population under the age of thirty, the vast majority of Afghans are encountering the Taliban’s oppressive rule for the first time. “The shapes and sounds of girls and women evaporated from our streets with every new decree,” observes Malalai.

Some foreign officials distort or diminish the severity of gender apartheid in Afghanistan by framing it as a reflection of cultural or religious norms, reinforcing Taliban propaganda. However, international law unequivocally rejects the use of culture or tradition as justifications for infringing upon fundamental human rights. Moreover, Afghan and world Islamic scholars have condemned many Taliban decrees against women as un-Islamic. And prior to the Taliban takeover, women were making major strides in gender equality across every sphere of life—economic, cultural, social, and political—indicating that these decrees are not a reflection of culture so much as a mechanism of control.

These concerns are particularly acute for women from ethnic, religious, or linguistic minorities, such as the Hazara, Tajik, Hindu, and other communities. Women from these groups face compounded vulnerabilities due to their distinct identities and increased visibility, making them even more susceptible to targeted violence in Afghanistan’s current climate. This double burden borne by minority women under these decrees is a harsh reality that often goes unnoticed.

The Taliban’s movement restrictions have effectively trapped women within their homes and within Afghanistan’s borders. Prohibiting international travel without a mahram quashes any possibility of seeking refuge or opportunities abroad, leaving female activists and those in peril with no escape. The Taliban’s movement restrictions have created an environment where female-headed households face disproportionate hardships, because they cannot travel without a male guardian to sites for aid distribution. Their struggle for basic rights and survival under these oppressive decrees requires urgent international attention and support.

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A vicious cycle of oppression

The significant increase in the systematic oppression of women and girls has touched every aspect of daily life, as reported by international organizations. This includes bans on their employment with United Nations (UN) offices and non-governmental organizations. The implications of these decrees are extensive and complex, beyond immediate issues such as access to health care or economic opportunity.

In the long term, the systematic denial of basic human rights, particularly the lack of educational access for girls, exacerbates disparities in wealth, health, and education. These challenges create a cycle of disadvantages with profound ripple effects that will take generations to rectify.

The result is a severe mental health crisis among Afghan women and girls. Afghanistan has now become one of the few countries globally where suicide rates for women surpass those of men, an alarming indicator of the extreme psychological impact of the Taliban’s oppressive policies. Observations from UN representatives and human rights advocates corroborate this connection. Increasingly, UN officials and international expert assessments declare the treatment of women by the Taliban as tantamount to gender apartheid. As UN Secretary-General António Guterres said last year, “in Afghanistan, unprecedented, systematic attacks on women’s and girls’ rights and the flouting of international obligations are creating gender-based apartheid.” 

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The Taliban’s mechanisms of enforcement

Through coercion, the establishment of new institutions dedicated to policing women, and the repurposing of existing security infrastructures, the Taliban has enforced its decrees with efficiency. On their very first day in power, Taliban officials closed the Ministry of Women’s Affairs and reinstated the Ministry of Vice and Virtue, deploying Taliban soldiers to strictly enforce their decrees. Women have been arbitrarily detained, subjected to torture, and released only under conditions that their families enforce strict compliance with Taliban rules at home. The number of cases of women detained and released is not public, nor are the suicides of women after their release reported adequately.

Furthermore, the Taliban has repurposed the security infrastructure established by previous Afghan governments, turning it into a tool for the systematic oppression of women and girls. This infrastructure, once meant for public security, now perpetrates enforced disappearances, arbitrary detentions, torture, and even executions. Any organized resistance is crushed through raids, violence, arbitrary arrests, and torture, showcasing the Taliban’s unwavering dedication to maintaining their regime of gender-based restrictions.

This enforcement strategy also extends to punishing male family members for the perceived transgressions of their female relatives, compelling men to ensure the women in their families obey the Taliban’s decrees. This policy both directly subjugates women but also coerces men into participating in this oppressive system.

The Taliban has also dismantled nearly all mechanisms for legal recourse previously available to women. The Attorney General’s Office has been transformed into the General Directorate for Monitoring and Follow-up of Decrees and Directives, granting Taliban leaders unchecked authority to enforce their will without due process. By abolishing foundational legal structures, including the constitution, human rights commission, penal code, special courts, and units dedicated to combating violence against women and children, the Taliban has obliterated any legal protection for Afghan women.

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Accountability under international law

The international community should utilize its extensive network of international laws, treaties, commitments, and partnerships to find ways to counter the Taliban’s actions in Afghanistan and hold the regime accountable for crimes against humanity.

This requires a multi-pronged strategy and mutually reinforcing actions that can enable women of Afghanistan to seek justice and protection. Individuals and advocacy groups can undertake impact litigation or another nation could file a case against Afghanistan under existing legal frameworks such as the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women or the UN Convention on the Political Rights of Women. The International Criminal Court (ICC) has been examining the situation in Afghanistan following the release of its Policy on the Crime of Gender Persecution in late 2022. To date, however, the ICC prosecutor has not filed any charges against Taliban members, nor have there been any state-initiated proceedings at the International Court of Justice.

While current legal frameworks on gender persecution and discrimination provide some pathways to justice, they do not capture the full extent of the crimes perpetrated against the women and girls of Afghanistan. The Taliban is committing inhumane acts involving arbitrary arrests, imprisonment, and torture in the unique animating context of an institutionalized regime of systematic gender-based oppression and domination for the purpose of entrenching power and maintaining the regime. Therefore, Afghan women, in solidarity with international human rights organizations, gender and legal experts, and activists, have been demanding that it must be called out for what it is: gender apartheid.

Today, there is a movement to expand the definition of apartheid to include gender apartheid in both international and national laws. In March 2023, dozens of women’s rights defenders launched the End Gender Apartheid Campaign. In October 2023, the Atlantic Council’s Strategic Litigation Project, with the Global Justice Center, issued a joint letter and legal brief urging UN member states specifically to codify the crime of gender apartheid in the draft crimes against humanity treaty presently under consideration by the UN General Assembly’s Sixth Committee (Legal). Codification of gender apartheid in the potential crimes against humanity treaty would open up pathways to accountability not only for individual perpetrators but also for third-party states and institutions. It would also foster international solidarity, highlighting the severity of the situation in Afghanistan and leveraging the accompanying stigma to criminalize Taliban actions.

By combining existing legal frameworks related to gender persecution and discrimination with activism for recognizing the crime of gender apartheid, the international community can formulate a coordinated and complementary response. This approach employs a range of international and domestic legal tools and recognizes that these pathways are not mutually exclusive but rather mutually reinforcing, working together to tackle the ongoing plight of women and girls in Afghanistan squarely, effectively, and holistically.

For a comprehensive list of all Taliban decrees, visit the US Institute of Peace’s Tracking the Taliban’s (Mis)Treatment of Women.

Stories of resistance

Sahar’s story

Sahar, an employee at a government institution in a northern province of Afghanistan, found her world transformed with the collapse of the republic and Taliban takeover. Today, more than 65 percent of women feel physically unsafe and 90 percent of women report high mental distress, according to UN Women. Sahar, like many, navigates the repercussions of a complete erosion of women’s rights with little or no support. Driven to improve the collective resilience of Afghan women facing adversity, she initiated psychotherapy programs in her province. These programs, tailored for women and girls, offer a sanctuary where they can share their experiences and find support.“ In the darkest hours, we find our true strength,” Sahar says “My hope is that every Afghan woman remembers her worth and the power she holds. We are the backbone of this nation.”

Aisha’s story

Despite the dire circumstances enveloping the region, women in a northern province of Afghanistan recently launched more than ten workshops focusing on sewing and carpet weaving, helping women earn an income and come together in solidarity. Moreover, several women in the group have started language and mathematics classes linked to religious schools, catering to girls beyond the seventh grade. However, as Aisha reflects on the way in which women in her community have come together, she cannot help but acknowledge the broader, alarming context. Around 20 percent of households in Afghanistan are headed by women. With the majority of job opportunities now inaccessible to women, the ramifications for Afghanistan’s fragile economy and the Afghan people are severe. Today, close to nine million Afghans are facing acute hunger. The Taliban-imposed restrictions on freedom of movement for women have exacerbated the crisis, as many vulnerable women and families are trapped and cut off from life-saving support.“ In the face of these adversities, it’s remarkable to witness the surge of determination among our women,” Aisha says. “The recent rise of workshops represents so much more than just skill-building; it’s an act of hope, a way for countless women and girls to find meaning and sustain their families. And the most incredible part? Every single one of these workshops is a testament to women’s resilience, as they are all led by women themselves.”

Hanifa’s story

New Atlanticist Mar 7, 2024

Twice under the Taliban: The repeated nightmare of my generation

By Horia Mosadiq

The deepening human rights crisis under the Taliban underscores the dire need for global attention on the plight of Afghanistan’s women.

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By Azadah Raz Mohammad

Codifying gender apartheid as a crime against humanity is an important step toward holding the Taliban accountable.

Afghanistan Human Rights

Inside the Taliban’s gender apartheid Mar 21, 2024

Afghan women’s rights are not a lost cause. Here’s what the international community can do.

By Parwana Paikan

The United Nations must prioritize Afghan women’s rights in its policy agenda and avoid forms of engagement that could embolden the Taliban.

Afghanistan Human Rights

Inside the Taliban’s gender apartheid Apr 30, 2024

Don’t look away: The Taliban’s mistreatment of women has global ramifications

By Samira Abrar

The Taliban’s impunity for its violations of international human rights law poses grave risks to women’s rights worldwide.

Afghanistan Human Rights

Back to top

Since the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan on August 15, 2021, the landscape of rights for women and girls has deteriorated drastically. For Afghan women like me who are in their forties and fifties, this dehumanizing discrimination is not a surprise. The Taliban’s use of ideological and systematic discrimination has remained consistent over the decades. It is aimed at erasing women from public life, restricting freedom of expression, dismantling democracy, and banning cultural rights, including music, sports, and the practice of religions other than their own extremist interpretation of Islam. The Taliban’s return to power is forcing Afghan women to relive the same nightmare that they experienced in the 1990s when the group first came to power. It is devastating that our daughters are now going through the same trauma that their mothers did two decades ago, even though we fought with our flesh and blood to bring about relative change during the period of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.

What is frustrating is that there are many diplomats, both regionally and globally, who are willing to give the Taliban the benefit of the doubt and are pursuing more unprincipled engagement with them. Too often, I have heard policymakers talk about a “moderate” or even “like-minded” Taliban, clinging on to the misguided idea that the Taliban have changed. This narrative emerged during the US-led peace process. However, the past two-and-a-half years of Taliban control over Afghanistan have proven it to be wrong.

In reality, the so-called “changed Taliban,” has been imposing an extreme form of gender discrimination since August 2021. Upon seizing power, the group almost completely removed women from government positions and replaced the former Ministry of Women’s Affairs (MoWA) with their feared morality police—the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice.

Subsequently, the Taliban issued around a hundred decrees against women and girls, including banning girls from schools beyond grade six and universities; and employment at nongovernment organizations (NGOs), United Nations (UN) bodies, and even humanitarian agencies. They have shuttered women’s beauty salons and forbidden women from going to parks or gyms, while imposing strict dress codes on them and severely restricting their freedom of movement and access to life-saving necessities such as health care and aid. Those who dare break these rules risk arbitrary detention, imprisonment, and torture.

There are also unwritten rules that are just as nefarious. For example, the Taliban has instituted a mass expulsion of women from government ministries and replaced them with men, mostly members of the Taliban. Meanwhile, NGOs that still operate have largely been forced to replace female directors and other senior staff with males. Consequently, many women-led NGOs are struggling, forced to choose between shutting down or replacing their female staff and board members with men. The Taliban’s Ministry of Economy also largely refuses to approve any NGO programs that are designed to benefit women and girls.

It is true that even under the previous internationally backed government, between 2001 and 2021, violence against women was endemic and widespread. The difference, however, was the existence of legal frameworks and institutions that could offer some measure of protection and accountability. The justice system, although flawed, was showing signs of progress, while instruments such as the Elimination of Violence Against Women Law, Family Response Units, the Prosecutor’s Office, and other protective mechanisms made a genuine difference. These mechanisms prosecuted perpetrators, provided safe houses, and gave other protections.

Since the Taliban took power, it has dismantled the entire legal framework, including the constitution, and institutions such as the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, the MoWA, and Gender Units from various government bodies that were mandated to monitor, document, and refer cases of violence against women. Today, women victims of violence and injustices have nowhere to go; they are now left to fend for themselves.

On February 20, UN experts and others labeled Taliban policies as tantamount to gender apartheid, which they asked to be recognized as a crime against humanity.

On a daily basis, I speak with women and girls from across Afghanistan who find it harder and harder to see any light at the end of the tunnel. A female lawyer, who was granted anonymity given the dangers facing women who speak out, recently told me: “It is a state of hopelessness. The ones who can afford, they flee, and the ones who cannot, they stay and suffer. It feels like a slow and painful death.”

In less than three years, the Taliban has reduced millions of women and girls to a subhuman status, depriving them of bodily autonomy and their most basic rights. This is what we mean when we talk about “gender apartheid.”

Despite this, women and girls in Afghanistan have refused to remain silent. Hundreds of brave women from across the country have protested against the Taliban’s policies. These peaceful protests have been met with live ammunition, water cannons, and beatings. Scores of women protesters have also been arrested, detained, tortured, and sexually abused in the custody of the Taliban.

Outside of Afghanistan, those of us in the diaspora continue to contribute to our country. Human rights defenders and activists are documenting violations and engaging with international policymakers to raise awareness about the situation inside Afghanistan and the systematic persecution of women. In Germany, human rights defender Tamana Paryani embarked on a hunger strike to demand that the international community recognize gender apartheid in Afghanistan. Other international human rights lawyers and gender experts have been making the legal case to the United Nations and its member states, either individually or through initiatives such as the End Gender Apartheid Campaign.

The push for recognition of gender apartheid in international law, which is finally gaining real momentum, represents a significant act of international solidarity with women of Afghanistan. Simultaneously, this demand sends a clear signal that the world does not accept the Taliban’s attempts to erase women from public life in the name of religion and culture. Most importantly, the recognition of gender apartheid as a crime against humanity would provide a practical tool for those of us working to ensure international accountability for the Taliban’s crimes, while also strengthening international law by making it evolve in a manner that bolsters rights for everyone.

The deepening human rights crisis in Afghanistan underscores the dire need for global attention on the plight of the country’s women. A journalist I recently spoke to, also granted anonymity because of the dangers of speaking out, captured the situation in painful detail: “In Afghanistan, there is only darkness and hopelessness now—nothing else,” she told me.

The world must wake up to these atrocities and make it clear, once and for all, that crimes committed against people because of their gender identities will never be tolerated.

Horia Mosadiq is a human rights defender and journalist from Afghanistan with over thirty years of work experience and activism. Mosadiq was a reporter when the Taliban first came to power in 1996.

The post Twice under the Taliban: The repeated nightmare of my generation appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Summary

The Caribbean is one of the most vulnerable regions globally. It harbors economies that are open-faced and import-dependent, making it susceptible to the ravages of climate change, fluctuating commodity prices, and inflationary pressures. While governments and financial institutions grapple with these perpetual stresses, it is the Caribbean citizens, particularly women and girls, who bear the heaviest burden.

Nestled in this uniquely vulnerable region, women and girls face a multitude of challenges, demanding comprehensive support from both governments and financial institutions to enhance their resilience and opportunities throughout society. Their integration across various sectors, including government, business, and local organizations, emphasizes that addressing gender challenges cannot occur in isolation.

The global issues looming over the Caribbean magnify the specific hurdles confronting women and girls. From gender-based violence (GBV) and economic barriers to limited political influence and the disproportionate impacts of climate change, the challenges intertwine, creating a crisis of gender inequality and inequity across the Caribbean.

This publication compiles findings from a yearlong consultative effort, revealing that the challenges faced by women and girls are rooted in societal perceptions of their roles and restricted access to tools and resources. To overcome these barriers, a fundamental reshaping of social norms, alongside political and financial institutions, is imperative. Moreover, integrating women and girls into the development model aligns with the region’s broader ambitions of achieving UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), unlocking untapped human capital and fostering long-term prosperity.

In collaboration with the UN Women Caribbean Multi-Country Office, the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center and its Caribbean Initiative embarked on a year-long partnership. This initiative aimed to address GBV, economic empowerment challenges, limited political influence, and the disproportionate effects of climate change facing women and girls in the Caribbean. The extensive consultative process involved roundtable discussions, capacity-building sessions, and one-on-one consultations, shedding light on the preconceptions held by both men and women toward women and girls in Jamaica and Guyana during 2023. The partnership has honed in on social norms as a focal point, recognizing their impact on perceptions and discussions about the challenges faced by women and girls.

About the authors

Wazim Mowla is the associate director and fellow of the Caribbean Initiative at the Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center. He leads the development and execution of the initiative’s programming, including the Financial Inclusion Task Force, the US-Caribbean Consultative Group, the PACC 2030 Working Group, and the Caribbean Energy Working Group. Since joining the Council, Mowla has co-authored major publications on the strategic importance of sending US COVID-19 vaccines to the Caribbean, strategies to address financial de-risking, and how the United States can advance new policies to support climate and energy resilience. As part of his work on the Caribbean, Mowla was called to provide Congressional testimony to the US House Financial Services Committee on financial de-risking.

Valentina Sader is a deputy director at the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center, where she leads the Center’s work on Brazil, gender equality and diversity, and manages the Center’s Advisory Council. During her time at the Council, Valentina has managed the launch of the Center’s Advisory Council, a high-level group of former policy makers, business leaders, and influencers from the United States and the region. She has co-authored publications on the US-Brazil strategic partnership and coordinated events with high-level policymakers, business leaders, and civil society members in both Brazil and the US. She also provides English- and Portuguese-language commentary on political and economic issues in Brazil to major media outlets, such as Al Jazeera and BBC Brasil.

The Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center broadens understanding of regional transformations and delivers constructive, results-oriented solutions to inform how the public and private sectors can advance hemispheric prosperity.

Learn more

The post Not without her: A roadmap for gender equality and Caribbean prosperity appeared first on Atlantic Council.

On February 21st, the Atlantic Council’s WIn Fellowship, in collaboration with United States Embassy to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and ADGM, held a workshop exploring how women entrepreneurs in the UAE can integrate innovations in artificial intelligence (AI) to their small and medium enterprises (SMEs).  

The panel, which was moderated by Sarah Saddouk, Director of Innovation at Entrepreneur Middle East IMPACT, featured three successful executives with backgrounds in finance, healthcare, and tech; all have harnessed cutting-edge AI and digital advances to drive their companies forward. Speakers included Abir Habbal, Chief Data and AI Officer at Accenture Middle East; Amnah Ajmal, Executive Vice President for market development for EEMEA at Mastercard; and Salim Chemlal, Director of Product at AI71. Tanya Cole, Senior Commercial Officer at the United States Embassy to the UAE, provided the opening remarks. 

Tanya Cole opened the event with welcome remarks, noting that partnerships like the WIn Fellowship encourage innovation and sustainable growth and undergird the rich commercial exchange between the United States and UAE. She observed that one of AI’s principal benefits for SMEs is enhancing operational efficiency, allowing small teams to allocate time and resources to higher-level work like business strategy. Cole acknowledged initiatives by the United States government to promote greater global representation of women in tech but noted that stronger efforts were needed to promote gender equality in the AI sector. She concluded by encouraging the audience to continue breaking down barriers to women in STEM fields and ensuring that women continue to steer and benefit from the growth of AI. 

The panelists leveraged their experience working with AI to cover several areas of concern for entrepreneurs, such as risk, regulation, scalability, and equity. They identified key trends in its uses across the private sector and provided guidance for SMEs hoping to improve their workflow with AI. The speakers also emphasized the need for women to shape the future of the field. 

Main Takeaways

Amnah Ajmal pushed back on skepticism that recent advances in AI are overestimated, asserting that the increasing accessibility and efficiency of computing power make the technology commercially viable. She highlighted the relevant challenge posed by AI adoption in the private sector: the burden of unlearning and relearning technologies as they evolve and integrate into new fields. Ajmal spotlighted two trends in AI usage she observed among SMEs: risk management centered on combatting scams and fraud, and personalized marketing communications. She stated that the critical edge provided by AI is best understood in terms of scalability and speed, freeing up human capital for other tasks.  

Abir Habbal explained that by keeping abreast of AI advances and integration, actors can actively shape the future of policy and governance around the technology. She distinguished between “narrow AI” capable of single tasks versus “generative AI” capable of multiple tasks at once. The latter is expected to be heavily disruptive; research conducted by her firm indicated that most professions can expect 40 percent of their working hours to be affected by AI. Habbal added that financial services have particularly high potential for AI automation, but opportunities exist in every sector. 

Salim Chemlal mentioned that AI innovation should be propelled forward alongside regulation, rather than waiting for regulation before research continues, as experts have proposed. However, he also advocated for stronger international coordination to ensure AI safety, with a special emphasis on adaptability given the many variables in the field. Amnah Ajmal also offered her thoughts on regulation, proposing that businesses should gather industry stakeholders and experts, define the problem they wish to solve, and build the regulation themselves rather than waiting for a regulator to act. She added that regulators perform a service to society and governments will often embrace the suggested frameworks. Ajmal concluded by noting that traditional financial institutions have failed to uplift SMEs and women entrepreneurs, with all-women teams receiving a maximum of 2.7 percent of global VC funding. 

Abir Habbal turned to the risks of AI and how regulation can help mitigate them. She explained that risks in the field include both structural issues, such as systemic biases and inaccurate results, as well as intentional misuses. With fast-evolving technologies such as AI, regulation may stifle innovation, creating a need for “sandboxes” for advanced testing. The industry’s appetite for regulation stems from a desire to effectively govern AI to manage these risks— and fear of financial and reputational harm if they are not mitigated. Salim Chemlal added that different societies should have their own AI systems, arguing that AI deployed outside of the context it was trained in (such as Western products now used in the Middle East) lack context to adequately serve their current users.  

Amnah Ajmal emphasized that women must challenge the status quo in the AI field. She suggested that women are sometimes apprehensive about engaging deeply with new technologies, and she consequently urges other women in the field to be confident in their abilities. AI is trained on old data, which inherently introduces biases against women. Ajmal gave the example of office thermostats, which when adopted in the 1960s were calibrated for men; women, who radiate 35 percent less body heat, are now often left—literally—in the cold. Women should feel empowered to confidently steer the future of AI to prevent further inequity. Abir Habbal highlighted the coalescence of different skillsets in the AI field, which requires expertise in data science, engineering, business, and design. AI democratization is also on the rise, allowing users from outside the field to access and experiment with AI tools. Ajmal urged novices to utilize publicly available tools to experiment and learn more about AI.  

The Way Forward

There has never been a better time for entrepreneurs in the Emirates to integrate AI into their businesses, owing to the UAE’s growing role as a global hub for AI and the country’s booming SME sector. AI adoption will remain a powerful force in the national economy in the near future, with some forecasts expecting close to 14 percent of Emirati GDP to stem from AI by 2030. Meanwhile, government initiatives continue to promote the growth of small and medium enterprises, with a set target of 1 million SMEs in the country by 2030.  

AI has huge transformational power across sectors, particularly in facilitating speed and scalability. Technology may best serve entrepreneurs by freeing up human input otherwise spent on labor-intensive tasks, such as customer service or targeted marketing. However, adopters should ensure that they have defined a problem that AI can solve, as not all facets of business require automation. The risks inherent to AI, such as biases, malfunctions, and privacy concerns should also be evaluated when considering integration.  

Large scale adoption of AI could worsen global gaps in digital skills between men and women, creating an imperative for women to steer the future of the technology in their country and abroad. Currently only 25 percent of AI specialists and 14 percent of cloud computing specialists are women, demonstrating that much work remains to be done to create a more inclusive field. However, the democratization of AI and the UAE’s SME boom represent an opportunity for women entrepreneurs to both capitalize on the business potential of AI and gain expertise that could positively shape the field. Since AI reflects the input and biases of its maker, better systems will require both diverse architects and inclusive design principles. Women at the helm of successful AI-augmented enterprises will be well positioned to advocate for these changes, resulting in a more equitable future for all.  

Explore the WIn Fellowship

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WIn Fellowship 2023-2024 KSA

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WIn Fellowship 2023-2024 UAE

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WIn Fellowship 2023-2024 Bahrain

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MENASource Sep 20, 2021

‘Investing in women is just good business’: Ways to increase funding for women-led ventures in the Middle East

By Stefanie Hausheer Ali

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Middle East The Gulf

Sponsors & in-country partner

empowerME

empowerME at the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East is shaping solutions to empower entrepreneurs, women, and youth and building coalitions of public and private partnerships to drive regional economic integration, prosperity, and job creation.

Explore the initiative

The post Integrating AI innovations into the SME industry in the UAE  appeared first on Atlantic Council.

On November 28th, the Atlantic Council’s empowerME Initiative, held a workshop titled “Women in finance: Building a more sustainable and inclusive finance system.” The panel focused on the contributions and impact of women in developing sustainable finance in the UAE.

The conversation was moderated by Abeer Abu Omar, government and economics reporter for Bloomberg. The panel included Shaikha Nasser Al Nowais, corporate vice president of owner relationship management at Rotana Hotel Management Corporation; Patricia Gomes, managing director and regional head of commercial banking for MENAT at HSBC; Linda Fitz-Alan, registrar and chief executive at Abu Dhabi Global Market Courts; and Thereshini Peter, chief financial officer for the GCC at Visa Inc.

Drawing upon their experiences as women working in finance, the panelists focused on the challenges to promoting greater representation in the sector as well as potential remedies. They identified common obstacles that hinder women from advancing in their careers, and suggested policy changes to promote inclusion and empowerment in the workplace. The speakers’ contributions provided an attainable vision for a more diverse and equitable financial sector.

The U.S. Ambassador to the UAE, Martina Strong, inaugurated the event with a reminder that economically empowered women invest in their families, communities, and businesses, leading to a more stable and prosperous future. She highlighted the growing visibility of women in leadership roles in regional start-ups and acknowledged the WIn Fellows in the audience for their accomplishments and future potential. The ambassador also expressed her enthusiasm for the climate-tech field, noting that many regional start-ups in the sector are run by women. She concluded her remarks by emphasizing the long-standing partnership between the United States and the United Arab Emirates.

Main Takeaways

Shaikha Nasser Al Nowais highlighted sustainability as a crucial element of the hospitality industry and a foundational principle of her company. She provided three examples of Rotana’s commitment: a new facility powered exclusively by solar power, sourcing foodstuffs from local farms, and a hotel designed with consideration for the natural landscape surrounding it.

Linda Fitz-Alan shared her perspective as a lawyer working in finance and emphasized that systems of power responsible for upholding the rule of law have a duty to model diversity and inclusion, especially regarding gender. Abeer Abu Omar concurred and cited a recent UAE law mandating that every listed company in the country appoint at least one woman to its board of directors. Thereshini Peter began by stating that without diversity and inclusion, a company can’t drive innovation, resilience, thought leadership, or economies of scale. She also discussed the programs and policies at Visa aimed at empowering its female staff, such as addressing the wage gap and facilitating the return of women to the office after taking a career break.

Omar noted that despite the UAE’s high gender equality ranking by the World Economic Forum, women still occupy less than 10 percent of board positions in the country. Al Nowais pointed to Rotana’s efforts to identify and attract talent by emphasizing work/life balance and providing ample opportunities for professional growth. She also underscored the importance of enabling women to advance within the company, highlighting the need for better long-term retention of female staff. Fitz-Alan highlighted other strategies such as expanding the range of roles available to women and finding mentorship and advocacy to support them. Sheaffirmed that women would seize opportunities when they are presented.

Gomes asserted that organizations often lack the discipline and conviction to implement known solutions to the problem. She pointed to policies at Bloomberg, such as requiring at least one woman as a source for an article and forbidding all-male media panels, as examples of conviction. Gomes stressed to the need for gender-diverse interview boards, sponsorship of female employees beyond mere mentorship, and encouraging women to apply for roles that they may feel unqualified for. She concluded by questioning why the consequences for a salesperson failing to meet their target are not the same for leaders failing to meet their gender diversity targets. Peter agreed with the other panelists, drawing a comparison to the dismantling of apartheid in South Africa. In order to enact major reform in a society or organization, deliberate action must be paired with accountability measures to ensure follow-through.

Al Nowais spoke on efforts to recruit a new generation of women to the workforce and addressed the initial challenges encountered in the recruitment of talent from universities. She highlighted the success of NAFIS, a government program offering salary support to Emiratis aiming to work in the private sector, thereby making corporate work more attractive and competitive.

Fitz-Alan addressedthe role of technology in addressing the challenge of visibility. She believesthatdigitization can help women overcome obstacles which have traditionally limited their visibility in the workplace. Technologies such as video chatting enable connectivity and global outreach for women to showcase their capabilities. Fitz-Alan pointed to the challenge of creating a highly diverse panel of mediators at her firm. Seeking the right candidates required an international search for more women, who often were not actively promoting themselves but were nevertheless making substantial contributions in their field.

Gomes agreed with Fitz-Alan’s view of technology as a positive force for gender diversity. She highlighted its transformative potential in reshaping the landscape for women’s participation and ensuring a level playing field. Technology offers flexibility, allowing individuals to work at their own pace, which Gomes sees as a great equalizer benefiting both women and men. She points to how Zoom equalizes opportunities in meetings by providing the same space and voice for everyone.

Moreover, Gomes noted the role technology plays in addressing financial literacy. She mentioned the ‘Noor’ app launched in HSBC’s wealth business, designed to provide financial education to females. Gomes considers this initiative imperative, especially considering the increasing financial decision-making role of women in the UAE across generations.

Peter outlined three key obstacles faced by small and micro-businesses. First, adopting new technology can present significant challenges, particularly in terms of quickly accessing new platforms. The solution lies in SMEs digitalizing as rapidly as possible to keep pace. Second, there is a need for financial inclusion and training for entrepreneurs, especially in an era of heighted cybersecurity. Lastly, green financing is essential, considering many entrepreneurs invest personal savings in their businesses.

The UAE’s Gender Balance Council reported a 70 percent female majority among university graduates, urging the financial sector to capitalize on this talent pool. Al Nowais emphasized the importance of early exposure to industry-specific knowledge through a relevant curriculum. She advocated for increased awareness and guidance from the outset of education. Fitz-Alan suggested widening opportunities across various sectors and holding organizations accountable for creating and publicizing career opportunities.

Gomes acknowledged the robust talent pipeline created by the 70 percent graduation rate and suggested a focus on graduate programs. Using HSBC as an example, she emphasized the global opportunities available and stressed the significance of execution in career development. Peter agreed with the emphasis on execution but stressed the need for flexibility. She claimed allowing graduates to explore different roles within the finance industry would help them discover their preferences, emphasizing the importance of adapting traditional approaches to foster career exploration

The Way Forward

The World Economic Forum’s 2023 Global Gender Gap Report ranked the UAE as the second-most gender-equal nation in the MENA region, topping the region in financial inclusion, women’s share of Parliament seats, and equal legal status. Government-led initiatives and policies, such as the mandate for at least one woman on publicly listed companies’ board of directors, have sought to transfer these gains into the workforce as well. However, a significant gender gap remains in the country’s private sector. Women comprised only about 18 percent of the total labor force, sidelining a considerable pool of untapped talent. In spite of the board of directors mandate, women still hold just 8.9 percent of board positions.

Realizing a more sustainable and inclusive financial sector in the UAE requires stronger measures by businesses to promote gender parity. These efforts must start with better recruitment practices to attract top talent, whether through proactive exposure to students and recent graduates or by leveraging government initiatives to ensure competitive pay. Equally as important is retaining women within companies and giving them the time, space, and support to grow into leaders. To that end, employers must recognize the need for better work/life balance for female employees, as well as offering substantial opportunities for coaching and mentorship. Companies must also take steps to protect women returning from maternity leave and eliminate the ‘motherhood penalty.’

Breaking through the glass ceiling will also require women in leadership to extend a hand to help others up behind them. Increasing female representation up to the C-suite level ensures that challenges faced by women in the workplace are addressed at a systemic level. Enacting policies such as an insuring female representation on interview panels is an excellent start, as is encouraging women to apply to positions from which they may discount themselves.

Explore the WIn Fellowship

Jun 14, 2023

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Feb 24, 2023

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Event Recap Jul 18, 2023

An overview of gender parity in Bahrain: Progress, challenges, and the path forward

By Lynn Monzer, Nibras Basitkey

A recap of the First Workshop in Bahrain

Economy & Business Inclusive Growth

Sponsors & in-country partner

empowerME

empowerME at the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East is shaping solutions to empower entrepreneurs, women, and youth and building coalitions of public and private partnerships to drive regional economic integration, prosperity, and job creation.

Explore the initiative

The post Driving change: women shaping an inclusive financial future in UAE appeared first on Atlantic Council.

On February 7th, the Atlantic Council’s WIn Fellowship, in collaboration with Bahrain FinTech Bay, held a workshop exploring the best strategies for Bahraini women entrepreneurs to navigate business scalability across the region while attracting investors.  

The panel, which was moderated by Ameera Mohamed, Senior Associate at Bahrain FinTech Bay, featured three successful executives with expertise in scaling businesses and navigating the venture capital landscape: Nawaf Mohamed Alkoheji, Chief Executive Officer at Tenmou; Omar Rifai, Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer at GrubTech; and Chef Roaya Saleh, President and Founder of Villa Mamas Restaurant Group. To kick off the discussion, Lynn Monzer, Deputy Director of the WIn Fellowship, provided the opening remarks, while Nour Dabboussi, Assistant Director of the WIn Fellowship, concluded the event with some closing remarks. 

Drawing upon their experiences as both founders and investors, the panelists highlighted the best practices for entering a new marketplace, including conducting market research, proactively considering early operations, and preserving a company’s vision and goals while making the shift. Key to the discussion were lessons learned from the panelists’ experiences with scaling projects, wherein opportunities arose as often as challenges. 

Lynn Monzer opened the event by noting the sixteen-fold increase in start-up investment in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region since 2015, with $4 billion raised in 2023. The growth that was further augmented by a 30 percent increase in exits through mergers and acquisitions from 2022. This trend underscores the resiliency of the region and its ability to navigate complex economic and political challenges, all while laying a foundation for future entrepreneurs. Monzer concluded by highlighting the importance of scalability in reaching new markets and generating innovation while retaining a business’ core values and mission. 

Main Takeaways 

Chef Roaya Saleh discussed the importance of retaining her business’ distinct identity outside of Bahrain and preserving Bahraini culture as purveyor of local cuisine. She emphasized a shared set of values and common mission among all employees within her restaurants. On expanding beyond the GCC, Saleh recalled overcoming challenges by staying focused on the core vision of the business and learning from inevitable mistakes. Nawaf Mohamed Alkoheji then spoke on his career as an angel investor and listed some of the green flags that his company seeks in prospective partners, such as business models incorporating new technologies. Investors spend much of their due diligence evaluating founders, seeking individuals who can deliver on the visions they propose. Alkoheji also advised entrepreneurs to be mindful of the characteristics of their new markets, as businesses must fit their markets to be successful. 

Alkoheji then emphasized the importance of consolidating control over a home market before launching into another. Roaya Saleh concurred with her colleague, adding that entrepreneurs must also have an exit strategy in mind in case things don’t go as planned. From his experience as an investor, Omar Rifai recounted that a common mistake made by successful founders was expanding too quickly, and advised new entrepreneurs not fall into the same trap. There is a learning curve inherent to scaling, and companies must be ready to adapt to new challenges when they first make the leap.  

As for the challenges and opportunities that come with scaling up, Roaya Saleh recalled the predatory behavior of some investors who have tried to convince founders to expand prematurely. She attributed her success to her ethos and principles as much as good financial breaks. Omar Rifai identified niches in the food and beverage value chain where entrepreneurs have yet to integrate digital infrastructure, illustrating a decision point for companies hoping to scale up; businesses can choose to either capture more of their value chain, or increase their competitive edge through adopting tech innovations. Thus, challenges faced at the entrance of new markets can rapidly become opportunities if entrepreneurs think creatively.  

On policy prescriptions for driving more investment to Bahraini companies, Nawaf Mohamed Alkoheji suggested that the government should incentivize successful Bahrainis to reinvest their capital in other local firms. Attracting more investors to a market is a positive development for all start-ups therein.  

The panelists then delved more into their experiences landing in new markets. Roaya Saleh shared her experience expanding Villa Mamas into Europe. Omar Rifai recounted that GrubTech’s entry into Egypt was initially a failure, as local restaurants did not purchase the company’s software. However, the company still gained from lessons learned in market research and by hiring some forty employees for global administrative operations. Both cases revealed some of the challenges entrepreneurs face when entering new marketplaces, but through these examples, Rifai emphasized the need for entrepreneurs to conduct smart research on new markets, both remotely and by spending time on the ground there.  

Nawaf Mohamed Alkoheji discussed attributes that make Bahrain an attractive market. For example, encouraging foreign entrepreneurs to grow their start-up in the Kingdom is feasible thanks to the cheaper costs of launching there. Roaya Saleh and Ameera Mohamed also highlighted the close nature and welcoming spirit of the country’s start up ecosystem. Saleh also noted a benefit of the tight community in that allows for rapid customer feedback, allowing brands to forge close relationships with customers. 

The Way Forward 

Bahraini support for SMEs continues to deliver remarkable results, with the sector growing 14 percent last year; 39 percent of these enterprises are now woman-owned. The boom is fueled in part by entrepreneurship initiatives launched by the government’s Economic Development Board, such as Fintech hubs and seed fuel programs. The Kingdom is also continuing to position itself as a regional leader in start-up launches, the number of which has grown at a compound annual growth rate of 46.2 percent over the past three years.  

With foreign capital inflows continuing to surge and ever-greater numbers of new businesses entering the country’s markets, the time is right for Bahraini entrepreneurs to consider scaling beyond the Kingdom. Making the leap is made easier by learning from others who came before, and successful founders and investors have much of the same advice to pass along to companies wishing to expand. They stress the importance of picking the right moment to scale up, as overstretching a business too early can doom the whole enterprise. Researching the characteristics of a new market and investing carefully can similarly mitigate risk. Challenges in new markets can be turned into opportunities, so long as founders can strike a balance between adapting their business and retaining their vision. 

It is critical that the Kingdom continues to nourish its startup ecosystem through attracting foreign investment and founders, as well as through facilitating spaces where new entrepreneurs can synergize and learn from one another. 

Explore the WIn Fellowship

Jun 14, 2023

WIn Fellowship 2023-2024 KSA

Meet our 2023-2024 WIn fellows from Saudi Arabia: a group of dynamic women entrepreneurs poised to expand their leadership and executive skills. They are on a mission to scale their startups to new heights, setting new benchmarks for success.

Jun 14, 2023

WIn Fellowship 2023-2024 UAE

Meet our 2023-2024 WIn fellows from United Arab Emirates: a group of dynamic women entrepreneurs poised to expand their leadership and executive skills. They are on a mission to scale their startups to new heights, setting new benchmarks for success.

Jun 14, 2023

WIn Fellowship 2023-2024 Bahrain

Meet our 2023-2024 WIn fellows from Bahrain: a group of dynamic women entrepreneurs poised to expand their leadership and executive skills. They are on a mission to scale their startups to new heights, setting new benchmarks for success.

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Event Recap Nov 13, 2023

Fostering Growth: Women in Bahrain’s fintech sector

By Nibras Basitkey

Event recap for Bahrain second workshop, focused on Bahrain’s booming fintech industry and the growing role of women in the sector.

Economy & Business Middle East

Event Recap Oct 30, 2023

Navigating the future of women’s healthcare in Saudi Arabia: Insights and challenges

By Lynn Monzer

Event recap for Women’s economic participation and its impact on healthcare in Saudi Arabia

Economy & Business Middle East

MENASource Sep 20, 2021

‘Investing in women is just good business’: Ways to increase funding for women-led ventures in the Middle East

By Stefanie Hausheer Ali

On September 14, 2021 the Atlantic Council’s empowerME Initiative held a workshop on “Venture Capital Financing: How to Increase Funding for Women-led Ventures.”

Middle East The Gulf

Sponsors & in-country partner

empowerME

empowerME at the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East is shaping solutions to empower entrepreneurs, women, and youth and building coalitions of public and private partnerships to drive regional economic integration, prosperity, and job creation.

Explore the initiative

The post Key strategies for Bahraini women entrepreneurs to scale their businesses across the MENA region appeared first on Atlantic Council.

The Women Innovators (WIn) Fellowship, part of the Atlantic Council’s empowerME initiative, hosted a workshop on Monday, January 29. The event delved into the transformative power of digital technology in Saudi Arabia’s startup ecosystem, exploring its impact on women entrepreneurs and the nuanced challenges and opportunities that women face in this evolving landscape.

Diana Korayim, chairwoman of the Women in Business Committee at the American Chamber of Commerce in Saudi Arabia, delivered the welcoming remarks. The event featured a moderated discussion led by Maha Akeel, faculty lecturer at Dar Al-Hekma University, and included insights from Mohammed Aldossary, co-founder and CEO of Sary; Sarah Al-Husseini, head of government affairs and public policy for Saudi Arabia at Google; Manal AlNemari, consultant of digital health transformation at the Saudi Arabia Ministry of Health; and Saima Jabeen, research fellow at the AI Research Center at Alfaisal University.

Amy Archibald, counselor for economic affairs at the US Embassy in Riyadh, delivered the closing remarks, showing gratitude for the WIn Fellowship’s work with the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh in working toward the embassy’s objectives of economic diversification, economic growth, and women’s empowerment across sectors in Saudi Arabia. Archibald echoed the panelists’ acknowledgment of the challenges faces by women entrepreneurs in Saudi Arabia’s business landscape, including difficulties in securing capital, scaling business, networking, and working within social expectations for women to act as caretakers. At the same time, she expressed her optimism for the change Vision 2030 has created over the past decade and looks forward to further empowering even more women in the years ahead.

Main Takeaways

Mohammed Aldossary led off the discussion by describing Saudi Arabia’s evolving economic landscape over the past five years, citing shockwaves like COVID and inflation as the main causes for some entrepreneurs to exit the business world while also creating numerous entry points into the market. This phenomenon, he said, allowed entrepreneurs from both the private and public sectors to seize the opportunity of newfound capital availability and grow their startups. During this economic upheaval, the Kingdom’s digital initiatives, part of Vision 2030, helped catalyze change and innovation by creating an opportunity platform for entrepreneurs to solve significant problems with local insights.

Aldossary then highlighted that women lead around 45 percent of SMEs, yet the majority of these businesses, approximately 88 percent, are actually micro-SMEs. Challenges emerge in scaling micro-SMEs to a retail level, and they intensify beyond the national level due to the difficulties women encounter in securing financing and accessing regional or global markets. He emphasized that the keys to overcoming these obstacles include a compelling proof of concept showcasing a product’s feasibility and a high-quality retail platform that facilitates streamlined interaction between retailers and customers.

Sarah Al-Husseini emphasized the importance of balancing regulatory frameworks with fostering innovation. She underlined the importance of safeguarding users and regulating the industry while also warning against excessive bureaucratic hurdles in Saudi Arabia’s market, which holds immense potential. Removing barriers at the national level, she said, allows for greater transparency of information, thereby enabling women and other underrepresented communities to participate in the technology sector.

Manal AlNemari expanded upon Al-Husseini’s points, focusing on technology’s impacts on women in the healthcare field specifically. As part of the Kingdom’s Vision 2030 and particularly in response to COVID, AlNemari explained, telemedicine and electronic health services have proliferated, providing women with opportunities for greater participation in the field. She specifically discussed Seha Virtual Hospital, led by Mona Al-Subaie, as a notable example of this trend, expressing her belief that that Al-Subaie’s success story will inspire more women and girls to pursue careers in the health industry and address health issues affecting women. Moderator Maha Akeel added that this shift is already underway in Saudi Arabia, as women make up over 40 percent of the Gulf’s IT workers, compared to approximately 15 percent in Europe.

Saima Jabeen built on AlNemari’s points while discussing the impact of artificial intelligence on digital transformation in Saudi Arabia. She highlighted AI’s vast potential, which companies are already utilizing across sectors such as health, education, transportation, and finance. These applications, she noted, also benefit entrepreneurs by providing them with helpful algorithms and data-driven approaches to grow their businesses. Jabeen concluded by emphasizing Saudi Arabia’s university programs and initiatives driving gender inclusivity in the field of AI, including revised curricula, workshops, and professional boot camps, ensuring that women have access to the cutting edge of machine learning and AI software.

In addition to Saudi Arabia’s efforts towards gender inclusion in the field, Al-Husseini elaborated on Google’s initiatives with similar aims. The digital skills training program, Maharat min Google, has already helped countless Arabic speakers in mastering the fundamentals of digital marketing. Al-Husseini explained the mutually beneficial aspects of these programs, as Google gains directly from users engaging with the platform’s services in novel and transformative ways, while users can maximize the platform’s potential. Finally, collaborative initiatives, such as the partnership between Google and the Saudi Authority for Data and Artificial Intelligence (SDAIA) as well as the WIn Fellowship, play a pivotal role in highlighting successful women in business, thereby instilling confidence in others to follow suit.

While there are numerous reasons to be optimistic about women in business today, Aldossary emphasized some of the challenges women entrepreneurs still encounter. The primary hurdle is access to the supply chain. As women were historically excluded from the wholesale or retail markets as stakeholders, entering this field poses an additional barrier to the already daunting task of launching a business. The prevalence of commercial concealment in Saudi Arabia’s offline market further exacerbates this issue. Aldossary explained that addressing this multifaceted problem requires a comprehensive solution, which includes greater transparency in the market and investing in women leaders.

The second major challenge facing women, Aldossary commented, is their confinement to micro-level businesses. This barrier partly originates from women’s historical exclusion from the business sector, but the ongoing stagnation also results from a systemic lack of investment at the micro-level. Despite the Kingdom’s stated intentions to increase investment at this level significantly, financing for micro-SMEs remains around 2 or 3 percent. Closing this gap would therefore represent a step in overcoming a major obstacle for Saudi Arabian women entrepreneurs.

AlNemari also proposed potential solutions, especially within the framework of the Saudi Health Ministry’s Vision 2030 goals. AlNemari stressed the importance of providing women with greater access to capital to enable the healthcare industry’s growth. Additionally, she advocated for a more targeted approach to investing in women entrepreneurs in healthcare, suggesting the implementation of networking and mentorship programs within the Saudi Ministry of Health, along with training focused on new technologies and research tailored to women’s needs. Lastly, AlNemari emphasized the necessity of combating social barriers that women often face in the business world. She argued that by shifting perceptions of women entrepreneurs, other challenges would also see improvement.

Jabeen circled back to AlNemari’s point on research specifically, highlighting the need for a stronger relationship and increased collaboration between the technology industry and academia. She proposed joint projects involving students and faculty to address industry challenges, fostering research and classroom investigations into potential solutions. Additionally, Jabeen praised Saudi Arabia’s rule requiring private companies with at least 25 employees to provide internship programs for students, which Jabeen said would help the students gain exposure to problems in the industry while still maintaining a fresh perspective. Lastly, Jabeen recommended hosting workshops open to company employees, faculty, and students to promote greater cooperation and understanding around new technologies.

The Way Forward:

In recent years, Saudi Arabia has seen major improvements to incorporating women into the tech sector. Following the 2016 launch of Vision 2030 and the accompanying gender reforms in the workplace, women have gone from 17.4 percent of the workforce in 2017 to 35.6 percent in 2022. Growth in the tech sector has likewise improved through different governmental initiatives which focused on development of women’s workforce participation and entrepreneurial skills in the tech field. As a result, the share of women in the tech sector rose to around 28 percent in 2021, far outstripping Europe’s 17.5 percent. Similarly, women in STEM programs at the college level comprised 36.8 percent of graduates as of 2018 (around the same level as the US, UK and Germany), and in 2021, women in the Kingdom officially surpassed men in founding tech startups.

While these numbers are encouraging, challenges persist for women in the sector. Securing financing, scaling business beyond the micro-level, and gaining access to supply chains all pose major obstacles to women in tech today. Furthermore, pervasive social attitudes toward women leaders only compound these issues, and voices championing the cause are lacking, as women comprise only 2.9 percent of company board seats as of 2022. For Saudi Arabia to achieve its Vision 2030 objectives and position itself at the forefront of information technology, it is crucial to tackle these issues.

Achieving this potential requires investment in the early stages of women’s careers. Since 2016, over 70 percent of scaled tech companies in Saudi Arabia were founded by individuals with a STEM degree. Given women’s recent progress at the college level in STEM, this statistic seems promising. However, education does not occur in isolation. A professional network is vital for founding a business and accessing leadership positions. Expanding current government-mandated internship programs to include gender-specific quotas would be a good start in addressing this issue, developing women’s networks early and placing them on a path toward leadership. Likewise, quotas as a prerequisite to government funding or as a requirement for boardroom representation in publicly listed companies would ensure women’s inclusion at the leadership and board levels in tech companies while also enhancing sector-wide efforts to improve women involvement in tech.

Just like education, the roots to solving challenges in securing financing and scaling business also already exist. Initiatives like the Falak Investment Hub’s Standard Chartered Women in Tech program, which awards cash rewards to female-led tech startups to encourage innovation, provide a solid starting point. However, it is imperative for the Saudi government and tech sector to consider expanding such programs and enhancing their financial offerings, considering that tech products often require substantial investment.

Finally, social perceptions of women also often pose a challenge to women in the tech industry, like stereotypes about competency in leadership positions and expectations for women to act primarily as caretakers. Challenging such perceptions requires a concerted effort for both the private and public sectors to invest in and uplift women leaders. Joint initiatives like Google and SDAIA’s Elevate, which works to empower women through AI, and the WIn Fellowship, which showcases women entrepreneurs in MENA, help to highlight women’s talent at the highest levels of business and tech, enabling a more effective and inclusive environment for innovators globally.

Jun 14, 2023

The WIn Fellowship 2023-2024 cohort

Building on the success of its inaugural cohort, the Women Innovators Fellowship (WIn) is expanding to Bahrain and the UAE, in addition to Saudi Arabia, as it continues to empower more women entrepreneurs from the Middle East. The program is thrilled to announce this year’s eighty-six recipients of its 2023 WIn Fellowship. The participants will receive a year-long program of executive education, mentoring, and networking opportunities in collaboration with Georgetown McDonough School of Business and with the support of the United States embassies in the three target countries and PepsiCo.

Feb 24, 2023

2023 WIn Fellowship Roadshow

The WIn Fellowship roadshow is led by the Atlantic Council’s empowerME Initiative in cooperation with Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business with support from US Embassy Riyadh, UPS, and PepsiCo. The WIn Fellowship Roadshow participants, chosen from a highly competitive cohort of more than thirty applicants, receive a fully sponsored trip to the United States for leadership training at Georgetown and meetings with US business and government leaders.

Jun 14, 2023

WIn Fellowship 2023-2024 KSA

Meet our 2023-2024 WIn fellows from Saudi Arabia: a group of dynamic women entrepreneurs poised to expand their leadership and executive skills. They are on a mission to scale their startups to new heights, setting new benchmarks for success.

Event Recap Dec 15, 2023

Decoding the dynamics of venture capital in the MENA region

By Diane Mohamed & Rachel Friedman

Event Recap for the virtual discussion on venture capital in MENA region.

Economy & Business International Markets

Event Recap Nov 13, 2023

Fostering Growth: Women in Bahrain’s fintech sector

By Nibras Basitkey

Event recap for Bahrain second workshop, focused on Bahrain’s booming fintech industry and the growing role of women in the sector.

Economy & Business Middle East

Event Recap Jul 24, 2023

Bridging the gender gap in venture capital

By Lynn Monzer, Nibras Basitkey

Event recap on the significance of venture funding for women entrepreneurs in the UAE.

Economy & Business Middle East

Event Recap Jul 31, 2023

Empowering the future: The rising women workforce in Saudi Arabia’s private sector

By Lynn Monzer, Nibras Basitkey

Event recap on the empowering future of the workplace in Saudi Arabia and its impact on the private sector.

Economy & Business Future of Work

empowerME

empowerME at the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East is shaping solutions to empower entrepreneurs, women, and youth and building coalitions of public and private partnerships to drive regional economic integration, prosperity, and job creation.

Explore the initiative

The post Transforming Saudi Arabia’s digital landscape through empowering women entrepreneurs appeared first on Atlantic Council.

On December 12th, 2023, the Atlantic Council’s empowerME initiative, in collaboration with the United States Embassy in Manama, the United States Mission to the United Arab Emirates, the United States Embassy in Saudi Arabia, and PepsiCo, held an insightful WIn Fellowship virtual workshop. This engaging discussion focused on demystifying venture capital (VC) ecosystem, explored its various stages, and shed light on the roles and expectations of VC investors.

Opening remarks were delivered by Lynn Monzer, associate director of the WIn Fellowship at the Atlantic Council. The conversation was led by Amjad Ahmad, chairman of the empowerME initiative at the Atlantic Council, featuring two exceptional speakers: Amal Dokhan, general partner at 500 Global MENA, and Tammer Qaddumi, co-founder & general partner at VentureSouq.

Lynn Monzer highlighted that in the Middle East and North Africa, “women lead fewer than 5 percent of businesses. Interestingly, around 66 percent of these entrepreneurs rely on personal savings and family support instead of actively seeking formal financing.” As of September 2022, only 1 percent of the $374 billion invested in the Middle East went to companies founded or co-founded by women. This reluctance is rooted in a lack of trust and transparency in the venture capital landscape, exacerbated by cultural norms and a predominantly male industry, creating an environment where women find it intimidating to pitch and negotiate.

Main takeaways

Amal Dokhan defined venture capital as high-risk funding for high-risk companies directed towards high-risk companies. She underscored the importance of understanding VC structures, sector preferences, and the capitalization table. She detailed 500 Global’s unique approach, which combines investment with an accelerator model for early-stage founders. The accelerator focuses on evaluating the early stage of a company, ensuring the presence of a foundational team, including at least one founder and a technology-focused Chief Technology Officer (CTO).

Tammer Qaddumi highlighted that venture capital represents just one category of capital among a diverse range of funding options available for businesses. He emphasized the importance of companies to evaluate if venture capital aligns with a company’s specific goals. Qaddumi outlined three criteria for considering venture capital: potential for rapid scaling, substantial upfront time investment before monetization, and a technology centric approach. He cautioned that venture capital, with its equity expenses and long-term partnership, may not be suitable for every business and suggested exploring alternative financing methods. Additionally, he highlighted the value proposition of banks as an alternative to venture capital for financing.

Tammer Qaddumi and Amal Dokhan both emphasized the need for alignment of interests and the significance of selecting an investor who will be a long-term partner for the company. They advised entrepreneurs to understand the investors’ business models, stakeholders, and objectives. Using the example of VentureSouq, Qaddumi underlined the critical importance of aligning with the investor’s specialization, ensuring that the business matches the fund’s focus and objectives. Dokhan discouraged entrepreneurs from pursuing trendy problems without genuine connection or expertise. She stressed the importance of timing, personal commitment, and the defensibility of business models. She favored coachable founders with internal tech expertise and stressed effective communication and compatibility in the investor-founder relationship.

Qaddumi explained that the criteria venture capital firms use to evaluate start-ups are not always consistent. It is in fact a dynamic equation involving an interplay between the team, the product, and the market that lead to entrepreneurial success. But, above all, it is the conviction of the founder that matters. Venture capital firms are drawn to start-ups whose founders are fully committed to the company, with the start-up being their only job. If you are not willing to risk your personal success on your idea, why should investors be?” Qaddumi said.

The significance of a start-up’s founder was a key point made by Amjad Ahmad. He mentioned that there are no new or unique business models anymore, the real value is with the founder. He explained that when a venture capital firm is presented with ten similar business models, they will choose the one with the founder who they believe is the most capable of executing the idea. Echoing this perspective, Qaddumi emphasized the importance of transparency when meeting with investors. Consumers will not buy a product without knowing who is behind the business and how it operates. If investors do not see this openness, they may doubt the business’s scalability and choose not to invest. Dokhan added that she often sees this cagy behavior in first-time founders, often due to advice from lawyers inexperienced with start-ups, who recommend protecting business ideas and requesting non-disclosure agreements. Instead, Dokhan suggested speaking with founders who have recently successfully financed and are in a similar stage as your company, as a more effective strategy.  

Amjad Ahmad pointed out that the aim of venture capital, simply put, is to make money. Therefore, firms are looking for an idea that will be big. It is difficult for a start-up to prove their success without first creating their product and engaging in the market on a smaller scale. Dokhan elaborated on the process investors use to de-risk, which involves understanding the business’s components they might invest in. She advised wise founders, when searching for financing, to familiarize themselves with the process, collect evidence, and prepare a comprehensive business plan. Qaddumi advised founders to familiarize themselves with the methods like the BURKE’s method so they are able to meet the financing criteria used by many venture capital firms.

Another key element to securing financing is through networking. Qaddumi suggested leveraging the founder’s network for warm introduction to investors. “At the first meeting, don’t ask for money. Instead, ask for advice or other introductions,” he emphasized. “Build rapport and a relationship with the investor before asking for money. Even if this first opportunity does not pan out, venture capital firms talk to each other and could introduce you to a firm better suited to your field.” Dokhan added that, as an investor, the best way she meets founders is through intros from other founders. If someone in her community refers a founder, she knows that the first round of vetting has already been done.

Finally, in terms of common factors that lead to successful start-ups and investments, both Dokhan and Qaddumi agreed that the ability to market to larger, diverse markets is a key success factor. When it comes to the Middle East, no single country has a large enough population to produce a true business success by venture capital standards. But selling to diverse markets across the MENA region is easier said than done. Dokhan clarified that this not only requires the ability to quickly launch in different countries, but that it is essential to be able to understand customers and their consumer behaviors in different markets. Different countries will need separate strategies and marketing unique to their consumers. Ahmad added that this is an area where venture capital can help the companies, they are investing in. Having investors who are positioned in these different markets can help companies gain understanding and provide important local introductions.

Closing Remarks

In the closing remarks given by Nibras Basitkey, she outlined the guidance panelists provided to founders interested in understanding, navigating, and securing venture capital funding. Venture capital is not suitable for all business models. If you want to pursue this form of financing, you must actively integrate cutting-edge technologies into your startup’s core offerings. You will need to highlight how these technological advancements disrupt the market, tackle a specific problem, and create significant value for investors.

The first step in acquiring venture capital funding is through thorough research. It is necessary to find a firm that aligns with your startup’s specific needs and goals. After that, founders must build a compelling case to sell to investors. Clearly define the problem your startup tackles and be able to articulate its solution; explain how your business will generate substantial returns for investors and show scalability; and be sure to demonstrate your commitment as a full-time founder. Finally, when seeking meetings with investors, utilize your network. Ensure that all introductions are “warm,” coming from shared contacts and always build a rapport and relationship before requesting funding.

Venture capital can be a confusing and intimidating space but with the right tools and knowledge it can grow your startup into a thriving business.

Explore the WIn Fellowship

Jun 14, 2023

WIn Fellowship 2023-2024 KSA

Meet our 2023-2024 WIn fellows from Saudi Arabia: a group of dynamic women entrepreneurs poised to expand their leadership and executive skills. They are on a mission to scale their startups to new heights, setting new benchmarks for success.

Jun 14, 2023

WIn Fellowship 2023-2024 UAE

Meet our 2023-2024 WIn fellows from United Arab Emirates: a group of dynamic women entrepreneurs poised to expand their leadership and executive skills. They are on a mission to scale their startups to new heights, setting new benchmarks for success.

Jun 14, 2023

WIn Fellowship 2023-2024 Bahrain

Meet our 2023-2024 WIn fellows from Bahrain: a group of dynamic women entrepreneurs poised to expand their leadership and executive skills. They are on a mission to scale their startups to new heights, setting new benchmarks for success.

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By Nibras Basitkey

Event recap for Bahrain second workshop, focused on Bahrain’s booming fintech industry and the growing role of women in the sector.

Economy & Business Middle East

Event Recap Oct 30, 2023

Navigating the future of women’s healthcare in Saudi Arabia: Insights and challenges

By Lynn Monzer

Event recap for Women’s economic participation and its impact on healthcare in Saudi Arabia

Economy & Business Middle East

MENASource Sep 20, 2021

‘Investing in women is just good business’: Ways to increase funding for women-led ventures in the Middle East

By Stefanie Hausheer Ali

On September 14, 2021 the Atlantic Council’s empowerME Initiative held a workshop on “Venture Capital Financing: How to Increase Funding for Women-led Ventures.”

Middle East The Gulf

Sponsors & in-country partner

empowerME

empowerME at the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East is shaping solutions to empower entrepreneurs, women, and youth and building coalitions of public and private partnerships to drive regional economic integration, prosperity, and job creation.

Explore the initiative

The post Decoding the dynamics of venture capital in the MENA region appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Public Event Tue, December 12, 2023 • 9:00 am ET

AfriNEXT

The Atlantic Council and global development company DAI convened high-level experts to reframe the narrative on African successes and innovation.

Africa

Event transcript

Uncorrected transcript: Check against delivery

Speakers

Rebecca Harrison
Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder, African Management Institute

Anita Erskine
Chief Executive Officer of Erskine Global Communications

Betty Beenzu Chilonde
Founder, Bulongo Incubator for Creative Skills

Moderator

Sarah Zaaimi
Deputy Director for Communications, Rafik Hariri Center & Middle East Programs, Atlantic Council

SARAH ZAAIMI: Hello, ladies and gentlemen. I would like to welcome you to another panel, an exciting panel on “Advancing [Women’s] Leadership in Africa.”

Let me first start with a conundrum that I’ve been struggling with myself. Women in Africa represent half of the population, and yet they are only 8 percent of wage earners and they only bring 13 percent of the GDP. But yet, if you scratch the surface, you will find a thriving ecosystem where women entrepreneurs such as the ladies here on my left and all the attendants that you’ve been listening to throughout this conference, they show a different image of Africa. They tell a different story of Africa where women leadership is a true success story.

For example, members are also talking about this. Women entrepreneurs, for example, in Africa are over 26 percent, and that’s above the global average. And also, most of the women in Africa are self-employed, and that’s, like, over 58 percent.

So to help me untangle this conundrum and discuss this, we have a panel of trailblazers and entrepreneurs, inspiring ladies who have been working in the continent. Let me introduce to you our panel today.

So, to my immediate left, Rebecca Harrison, who’s the CEO and co-founder of [African] Management Institute. She comes to us from Kenya today. She’s been doing a tremendous job. Her institute has over fifty-thousand beneficiaries from over thirty-five countries in Africa.

Next is our host that you’ve been acquainted to throughout this morning, Anita Erskine, who is the CEO of Erskine Global Communications. She’s a media personality. She runs her own shows on the radio and TV. But she’s also a social entrepreneur, advancing women, especially young girls learning in STEM, among other things. I’ll let you discover more.

And last but not least, coming from Zambia, is Betty Beenzu Chilonde, And she’s the founder of Bulongo Incubator, but she’s also a social entrepreneur herself and a fashion designer. She’s passionate about sustainability and has been doing a lot of work on the ground.

So welcome, ladies.

Let me start with you, Anita. How can we tell a better story of African women beyond the headlines, the scary headlines of war and conflict and things we’ve been listening to? How can we scratch the surface and show the real face of women leadership in the continent?

ANITA ERSKINE: Thanks, Sarah.

I think, first of all, we can by not pretending that those negatives [don’t] exist, you know, because you don’t tell a real story by sweeping the realities under the carpet. You actually look at the problems head on. You talk about drought and flooding in Somalia, and you talk about the women who are—perhaps who bear the brunt of—you know, brunt of this. You talk about the entrepreneurial ecosystem and the women who are frontlining it, who are at the forefront of it. You talk about perhaps a corporate world, you know, technology, et cetera. And you also underline the women who have, quote/unquote, “broken the glass ceiling” to be at the forefront.

But I think, ultimately, the element of owning that narrative is also—it’s kind of like double-sided. You don’t tell Africa’s story only on the one side of talking about how beautiful and how culturally layered it is without talking about the negatives as well, so that then you own how that story is told. So when you focus on women’s leadership specifically on the continent, you also don’t focus on the CEOs, you know, and the entrepreneurs; you talk about, you know, the women who lead their communities, you know, right down there, so to speak, at the grassroot level, and the women who, you know, sacrifice everything to ensure that their children go to school. That is a form of leadership as well. You know, so make sure that you project the entire story so that somebody doesn’t have to tell the other side for you.

SARAH ZAAIMI: That’s very, very pertinent on how granular the story of Africa is. And I would just want to add to that also is that there is some kind of essentialism on the way we tell the story of Africa as if it’s one country or one culture or one thing although there are different layers and layers to this continent and sometimes many disparities and many success stories but also stories of sadness. So thank you for saying that.

I’m moving to you, Betsy. I know you care a lot about innovation and I think that’s a theme that’s recurrent throughout this conference that we’ve been hearing throughout the different panels this day. There was this study—staggering study by UNESCO in 2021 that actually most women entrepreneurs in Africa are innovating somehow. Like, I think 24 percent, they innovate in a certain way.

I think maybe it’s the reality on the ground or the… specificity of what they have been doing. How do you explain that and how do you live that throughout your own journey as an entrepreneur and a designer and someone at the forefront of innovation in Africa?

BETTY BEENZU CHILONDE: Thank you, Sarah.

I think to answer that question, really, I would say that, you know, different things happen every day as women do their businesses and go about whatever they are doing and so to remain stagnated is really, like, something bad for a woman.

As you go through challenges you have always to think about how best you can do something, how best you can deliver, how different you can do things in order to achieve, at the end of the day.

So basically I think as a person who supports innovation and who has been through certain struggles as an entrepreneur, as a woman, I think it’s important really to also educate oneself how you can do things better, you know, as opposed to just focusing in one line.

It’s always best to look around what other people are doing, what other countries are doing, how are they, you know, reaching a certain target or how are they getting or surviving. So, really, innovation in that way is continued and you keep learning like that.

SARAH ZAAIMI: No, thank you so much for that. It’s very wise words coming from someone who have been, you know, grappling with this and working with this every day.

I’m turning to you, Rebecca. I know you spent a lot of time in the continent and you have roots there working with women and trying to open new perspectives in tech, in venture capital, and other fields.

I want to go back to the fact that women are still underrepresented in businesses. In board members, for example, they make less than 8 percent in board members of businesses but they also make less than 20 [percent], 24 percent at best in parliament. So even as decision makers they are, largely, underrepresented.

How do you explain that and how do you overcome it in your day-to-day life trying to work as a social entrepreneur and also as an economic entrepreneur?

REBECCA HARRISON: Yeah. What a great question. If I could answer that we would be fixing this problem, I guess.

But yeah, I guess I wear two hats as an entrepreneur myself and then like Betty also working with entrepreneurs, and I guess when I think about women in entrepreneurship particularly, you know, capital is the issue that we often end up coming back to, that women are just so underrepresented when it comes to seeking capital and accessing capital.

And I think there’s a few—so maybe I’ll just focus my answer on that—I think there are a few challenges there. One is the pipeline building, that there aren’t—there still aren’t enough strong female-led businesses coming through the pipeline to be able to access capital, at least in theory. That’s what the male capital allocators say.

I’m not so sure it’s true. But, arguably, the pipeline is still, you know, like you were saying I think 24 percent of businesses are women-owned. Of the businesses that we support we’re almost half and we’re very intentional about that because we feel like it’s our role to build that pipeline so that investors don’t have that excuse anymore.

We know that there are great women-led businesses out there and we want to help get them ready to be able to access that capital. So that’s one is building the pipeline.

The second is I think our models of capital have been very driven. I think one of the panels this morning made this point that you can’t just kind of take a Silicon Valley VC model and kind of put that in an African context and expect it to work. It’s just—the businesses are so different. The risk profiling is so different. And a lot of the women that we work with don’t necessarily want, you know, hockey-stick growth. They’re not looking for that. They’re working—they want to build profitable, sustainable businesses that grow. They’re ambitious, but they also want to integrate that with their lives and their communities.

So I really believe we need different types of capital and we need to embrace different journeys rather than just having this kind of techbro-driven, like, VC culture that women feel alienated from and don’t even want to be a part of anyway. We need kind of different models that are—that are more inclusive of kind of the incredible women entrepreneurs out there.

SARAH ZAAIMI: As a follow-up question to that, do you think equity investment is something that needs to be incentivized and put forward, and maybe also incentivized by other allies from outside who could, you know—you know, push the governments in the continent to adopt more equitable policies towards women, especially in the startup and entrepreneurship sectors?

REBECCA HARRISON: Yeah. I mean, I think it’s something that kind of allies from all spaces can contribute to because it needs intentionality at every level, whether it’s pipeline building, whether it’s capital. I mean, just an interesting stat, we’ve seen how women entrepreneurs are much—A, they create more jobs in relation to revenue than male entrepreneurs, but they create significantly more jobs for women. So, of the entrepreneurs that we support, more—so 75 percent of them have more than 50 percent female workforce, compared to, I mean, low double digits for men. It’s just so stark it’s fascinating.

So women champion other women, typically. So if we can get more women into kind of every stage of the value chain of entrepreneur support, from kind of mentors to capital allocators to entrepreneurs themselves, you know, whatever it is, I think that’s how we’ll see change, is really—and everyone can be an ally on that wherever you are in that kind of value chain.

SARAH ZAAIMI: That’s very important, especially to find allies within other women, women elevating other women and that peer-to-peer building up to find your footprint.

I’m turning to you, Anita. I know in our initial discussions we spoke a lot about agency. I know you built your own company from, you know, the bottom up. Is the startup and entrepreneurial ecosystem in Africa hostile for women? And how can agency reverse that trend or help empower women in that leadership?

ANITA ERSKINE: I’m sorry, I think women own the startup and entrepreneurial space.

SARAH ZAAIMI: OK.

ANITA ERSKINE: No, I think we own it. And I don’t have the data in front of me, but you can challenge me. I find that so many more small organizations/startups created from, you know, fashion startups, innovative startups, tech startups… are all run by women. But you perhaps don’t know about them and see them, perhaps because women tend to focus on getting the work done. Sorry, guys; mean no harm. You know, her focus is in the back office, is in the factory, because she’s responsible for so much more than just herself. So I find that, no, the women are there.

Of course, I mean, post-COVID we’re all going into a world of telling our stories, and people becoming a lot more vocal, and people saying, well, you know what, let’s own the narrative, which I strongly—you know, I advocate for. But I think that women really do what they do best, and that is they lead. You know, women don’t necessarily stand up and shout: Hey, look at me. I’m the founder. I’m the CEO. But she will start something, even on a small scale.

And when you talk about agency, I find that a lot of the time women are over-mentored and underfunded. So when you talk about agency, you know, you tend to be—you tend to confuse that with a woman being able to start her business. No, my focus on agency, really, is her ability to not only empower herself, but ensure that she’s got a story to tell that empowers other people, ensure that she’s educated enough to make the kinds of decisions that affect her positively, ensure that she’s able to understand the business, she’s able to understand the financing behind the business, financial literacy, and that when she comes up with an idea she’s surrounded by people who only are ready to say, you know, a tap on the back—Go, Rebecca! Go, Betty!—but who are able to back that up with cash, with money.

You know, so, listen, we could talk all day about this. But I think that, to be very honest with you—and I’m very happy, Rebecca; you need to help me define the data—but I think that a lot of the entrepreneurs, a lot of the leaders in the entrepreneurial and startup ecosystem are women, and they’re getting the world to pay attention to the continent. They’re just not talking about it.

SARAH ZAAIMI: No, thank you for that myth-busting discourse.

I would like to challenge you on that. There was a recent report by Brookings that says that women in Africa tend to confine themselves to certain comfortable sectors that the society expects them to be in. I know you, throughout the sectors that you are working on, you are busting that myth as well. But is that something across the continent that you’re seeing, or is it just among the elites in certain capitals—maybe Accra or Casablanca or other place, Nairobi? But is it—is it across the continent, or is it just a bubble that we are seeing and we are just seeing through those elites?

ANITA ERSKINE: I work on a project called Africa’s Business Heroes, and every year we see about twenty-seven thousand or thirty-thousand applications from across the continent. And it would shock you how many businesses, you know, focusing on social impact work or focusing on impact at the ground level and all the way up, how many of these entrepreneurs are women. So they are not only—and they’re not only in the cities. They’re not only in Joburg or in Accra or in Nairobi; no, they are in the rural areas as well. Some of them are giving up their full-time glamorous jobs in the big cities and then moving to their hometowns to build businesses just so that they can feed and employ other women on the ground.

So, no, it’s not—you know, the bubble is not per city or is not, you know, according to, you know, the 1 percent or 2 percent from middle to high income. No. In fact, if we did our research a little bit well—and perhaps we should have, you know, prior to coming here—we’d find out that a lot of, you know, a lot of the women are, you know, grassroots-driven. And I don’t know, hundreds of women who are employed at that rural and grassroots level are employed by other women.

SARAH ZAAIMI: Just to deconstruct that a bit further with you, Betty, we chatted a bit briefly about the weight of culture, and the cultural restraints and cultural norms that sometimes would tend to belittle the work of women. That’s what you were telling me through your story and through how people perceive, for example, designers. They say, well, designer is not a real job. You know, like, there is a lot of weight of culture on women trying to lead. Can you develop more on that from your personal experience? And how did you overcome that? And what would be your advice for young women entrepreneurs having, you know, to overcome all the stigma around what they do and trying to explain themselves to the society?

BETTY BEENZU CHILONDE: Thank you, Sarah. I think I’ll also just echo what Anita has said. There are so many women, young women out there who really want to do it, who want to make it, who want to do big things out there. But then, also, speaking from experience back in Zambia, you find that, just like you have mentioned, the weight of culture. You know, there is a certain responsibility that is placed on the woman to be able to be the homemaker, OK? She’s expected to take care of the children. She’s expected to nurture everything that is around and the man is supposed to work. So you find that even as much as she wants to make it, certain responsibilities restrain her from achieving more than the male counterpart. So you find that in some way she will be trying, but there are so many challenges that are coming against her. But, true, there are so many women out there.

And also, sometimes there’s a fear that if I go against, you know, what the culture expects me to do or, you know, what—there’s this, what they call, marriage material. I don’t know how many people have heard it, but the marriage material kind of woman is the woman who is submissive, who is not out there who wants to achieve, and who—the one who is going to be listening to what others are saying and really conforming to what society wants her to do or what they believe her to be able to be in society. So as much as they want to go out there, there’s a fear that, you know, they will be seen to be less marriage material and they will not get married at a certain age, and you know, then they are not good enough women. So all those constraints really come against the woman and they are not able to go forward.

The other thing that I would want to mention also is for those that actually manage to make it, they are seen to be maybe promiscuous, you know, as to mean maybe they have achieved because they have compromised in a way. So women are expected not to achieve more because, oh, you are pretty, so because you are pretty then you went against certain things, and that’s how you’ve made it. So there’s all those challenges, really, that come against the woman. But, yes, the women are there and they are ready to do it, but we need to sort of like help them to come out of those fears.

SARAH ZAAIMI: I want also to focus on the reverse phase of culture, because I feel also it’s the African culture that sometimes allowed these women to be empowered. Because if we tap into the history of the continent, we will find lots of stories of women fighters and, you know, women fighting patriarchy or even matriarchal societies where the woman is the breadwinner or is the head of the tribe or is the healer or is highly esteemed. And that’s not something that people maybe are familiar with. So do you also think that maybe culture is what made you and empowered you to become a leader?

BETTY BEENZU CHILONDE: I would say yes and no.

Yes in a sense that, of course, the African continent has so many languages, tribes, and all those things. If I come to Zambia, I come from a tribe of the Tongas, and these are the farmers, the healers. You know, they are the ones who are seen to be providers, more like food providers and all those things. So culturally, yes, some cultures really push the woman to be out there. Like in the Tonga land, women are the ones who are seen to be workers and the men would, like, really sit back and they will marry five women, and the women will be farming and they’ll be producing food and all this. So women are seen to be assets in a sense that they are the ones who are going to come and work to provide for the family. So, yes, in that way women are seen now to push themselves to be seen as workers to lead, to be able to provide for the family, and all those things. But when you come—you bring that kind of culture back to the city, these are the women who want to achieve. They want to achieve higher grades in school. They want to be seen to be doing better than the men and all those things. So, yes, culturally I think that thing is there.

But because of a mixture of culture, there’s now so many culture mixing here and there, there are so many different beliefs and different upbringing that have sort of, like, diluted how people value things, how they value marriage. I want to say this because I’ve mentioned that you know, women don’t want to come out because they want to be married and all those things. But then, also, I would want to say that I think you know, the way people are brought up, the values that they are—are instilled in them as they are growing, also sort of like affects how they think, you know, and what they pursue. Yeah.

SARAH ZAAIMI: I want to explore that point a bit further about what values and what education do we instigate in women and plant in women that seed of empowerment and self-reliance. And I know, Rebecca, you care a lot about training, about education, about advocacy. How can we empower women to play that role through effective education? And are there any case studies or anything you care to share with us from the success stories that you’ve been—you’ve been living or implementing around you?

REBECCA HARRISON: Yeah. And I’m ambivalent on this one because I agree with you, Anita; women are empowered already. We have power and we’re doing—we’re doing it. We’re building businesses across the continent. And sometimes I feel conflicted about this. I feel like as an ecosystem we’ve responded to what’s essentially a problem with the system by telling women to be more confident, right? Like, sometimes I’m like, well, actually, women are just quite accurate at describing their business success.

So if we look, for example—when I look at the data from our businesses and we disaggregate by gender, we see that women are really good at describing accurately the performance of their business. When we ask them, you know, a few months later, how is your business doing; have you increased revenue, profit, whatever; what they tell us matches up with what we see the actual—has happened in the business. Men, on the other hand—(laughter)—consistently overestimate how well their business is doing. They always tell us their business is growing, they’re making a profit, they’re doing so well. Then we look at the numbers and we’re, like, well, some of you are, you know.

And so—and we are guilty of this as well. Not guilty. I mean, it is a real thing that we need to encourage women to take up space and to own their voice and particularly in some countries. So we have a—we have a program called Speak Up To Lead, which we often run—we don’t—we try not to run too many programs that separate out women and men because networks are so important.

But we sometimes give women—we offer women on a program this extra module on kind of finding voice and agency and speaking up to lead. But I have to say I have this ambivalence because at the same time I’m, like, you know, rather than telling women to be more confident sometimes I’m, like, men should just be more accurate. Maybe that would stop things.

SARAH ZAAIMI: Is it maybe a marketing skill that they need to present their work better to the world?

REBECCA HARRISON: Yeah. I mean, I think that there’s something in it and for sure, like, I think, you know, many women do need to be bolder at times about telling our stories. But again, like, when you look at the data on raising capital male VCs consistently ask women about risk mitigation strategies and they asked men about opportunity.

So no matter how good you are at being bold and telling your story if the system is consistently kind of asking you the wrong questions I mean, yeah, we need to get really smart about navigating that. But, yeah, I just—I really resonate with your point about kind of over mentored and underfunded, I think.

As much as we need to encourage women to get out there and own our stories, really, the system’s got to shift for us as well, I think.

SARAH ZAAIMI: On the point of over mentor them—I’m turning to you, Anita—also maybe accessing funds and capital has to do with access to networks and sometimes what’s lacking is that one contact that you meet, the someone who is willing to take the risk with you, and so what—how can we make women have more access to those networks where capital resides?

And how can women empower women and help them get that access instead of having an ecosystem where women are competing with women because there is so little capital that everyone is just preying on that 8 percent?

ANITA ERSKINE: Listen, I think women compete with women because women are told there’s only two seats in the room and half the time you really don’t want to bring the other person or the other woman who’s as good as you. Then you don’t become the first.

I love awards. I love recognition. But sometimes I think that women are made to believe and think that there can only be one winner and there can only be—you know, and you want to be the first woman to be the oil magnate. You want to be the first woman to be the diamond magnate. You want to be the first woman to tell—you know, and so the entire space is filled with you must compete for this one spot.

But if there’s a second spot do not bring someone who is as good or better than you because then you won’t be the first, and that’s the bottom line. So I feel that women are in this space. We are in the—look at us. We are here. We are in this space. And then, of course, women don’t ask each other what’s your name and what are you into and how can we—and how can we interact, how can we work together.

You know, women always wait to be asked, oh, what’s your name and half the time, you know, because we don’t have the confidence to walk across the room because the room is so cold, you know, we kind of wait and hope that someone will ask us the necessary question and with that question we can give them the right answer and with that right answer it can open a door.

But having said that, I see a shift and that’s why I love the new generation of women. The new generation of women don’t even wait to be invited. They ask and say, I am coming to. You know, the new generation of women will hop on a flight and will travel across the world because there’s something essential happening on the other side of the world.

And so access to that capital is in the rooms that we find too cold to enter and access to capital is in breaking that essence that there can only be two of us. For me, every single time I’m invited somewhere, I mean, I am known to be the S-H-I-T disturber who will always say, hey, can I have five more invitations because there are five young women who are in my program that I would love to be in the room.

We didn’t get taught how to speak in these kind of rooms. We had to discover it the hard way. And, Betty, you said it. I mean, then they say, oh, Anita, you talk too much. Oh, this one is too wild. Oh, this one is too this. Oh, you know what, she’s too aggressive.

You know, but it’s not that. It’s the self-assurance. It’s the self-knowledge. It’s the self-empowerment. It’s the self-inspiration with which I walk.

And so you have this generation of women, and so if you want to break that concept of being in the room, accessing capital and all of that then you mustn’t have a room filled with fifty-something-year-old women. You must have a room fairly balanced with fifty-something-year-old, thirty-something-year-old, twenty-something-year-old, and perhaps sometimes even late teenagers to understand how you do it, how do you move in the room, how do you shake it, how do you, you know, be so concerned that one person is Caucasian, another person is Indian.

Who cares? You know, so the perception that we can’t—you know, one, we can’t all win is absolutely wrong. Then the perception that, oh, well, if one person wins it means next year there can’t be another female winner is another wrong thing.

But it happened to us. Let us not let it happen to the generation of women that are coming.

Did I even answer the question?

SARAH ZAAIMI: Oh, yeah. You did answer exhaustively the question. Thank you for your inspirational words.

I hope that a lot of women and a lot of allies and a lot of people working on Africa would hear this message and it will resonate with them.

I’m moving again to you, Betty, to maybe talk about solutions. I think we entangled enough the challenges and the landscape itself. If we move to actionable things let’s start by government policies.

What needs to be changed, reformed? I come from Morocco and I know in the 1990s there was that quota—women quota system that really elevated women representation in the parliament by, you know, instigating a 35 percent representation in women.

There are other things that could be done in the continent. You spoke about family and about perception and culture, maybe reforming family codes and giving more margins to women could be helpful. Maybe also gender-sensitive budgeting or maybe even removing taxation on some of the startups that are women led.

What are other things that you think from your experience from the concrete challenges that you are facing every day should be made at the government level?

BETTY BEENZU CHILONDE: Thank you so much, Sarah.

I think mentorship is one thing that can work to help women be elevated. I say mentorship because, you know, just like Anita has said whenever there’s an event there needs to be a balance, OK, and this balance sort of, like, creates an opportunity for the younger generation to learn from those who have already done it before.

And I think what the government needs to do—I know back home the government has made intentional provisions for women to be in politics—for example, a certain percentage to be also, like, in parliament and all those things.

But I think when it comes to women entrepreneurship and business and all that I think maybe what other incentives that can be there really is to allow the woman to be a woman. I say that because, you know, we cannot be the same as men.

I know there’s gender equality, all those things, you know. But let the woman be the woman and when I say that, really, I mean let the woman experience being a mother, for example. Give her enough rest when she needs it. OK. When they have babies do you give them enough time for them to recover and then come back to work?

Because when you look at the work landscape you find that maybe the leave for the woman is thirty days or forty—or forty days, same as the man. But you need the woman to recover. You need her to take care of the child and come back to the same opportunities and be able to be at the same level with the men, because biologically the woman is different.

So I think that needs to be recognized. And also by virtue of having a woman obviously she needs more time. You find that certain opportunities she’s not able to take—she’s not able to take those opportunities because of maybe, you know, biological clock and things like that. So I think those things need to be considered and she needs to be given, you know, equal opportunity and, you know, be able to be who she is and still continue pursuing careers and entrepreneurship.

SARAH ZAAIMI: So it’s gender-sensitive laws and allowing women to be women.

If we turn to the international community—and I know here there are many agencies and organizations and even investors among us here in the audience and people listening to us online as well—Rebecca, what would be the incentives or the actions that these allies internationally could do to lend a hand to empower and advance women leadership in the continent?

REBECCA HARRISON: Yeah. I mean, I think it’s about bringing a gender lens across the board and kind of asking those questions about participation of women across programming. So whether that’s around kind of finance allocation where, you know, there’s pros and cons against kind of—for and against quotas, but at least like taking a really intentional view; looking at design, ensuring that kind of gender lens is built into design; that products and solutions, that we’re taking a kind of human-sensitive design approach with women at the center, actually designing for the needs of women; and then ensuring that we’re elevating women’s voices within that programming so women are actually making decisions. And the more that we have women in positions of power and influence, the more I think we’ll see that kind of, you know, trickle down throughout kind of different components of programming.

SARAH ZAAIMI: Thank you, ladies. I also wanted to thank you for the insightful case studies and testimonies and voices that you lended to this discussion.

I also wanted to give the floor to the audience here if they have any questions, comments, additions to this discussion. So we could—and then I’ll turn back to you to answer.

Q: Hi, thank you so much, ladies. This has been a very insightful conversation. My name, again, is Joy LeFour with the Valcrest Institute.

And my question, any of the panelists can take it, but I have followed Rebecca Harrison for years and I really salute your work. And all the other ladies here, thank you so much for the insights shared.

Now, in the context of advancing women leadership in Africa, can any of you tell me, how can we leverage public—the partnership between the private sector and the public sector to create a sustainable opportunity to support systems for women in Africa, and especially in the rural areas?

ANITA ERSKINE: Do you want to take that?

SARAH ZAAIMI: Any other questions before we answer, our comments?

Q: Hi. I’m Audra Killian and I’m with DAI. And so thank you so much for the insightful responses for the—to the panel.

And I think one of the things that’s clear from the panel is the amount of female entrepreneurs across the continent. I was wondering if the female leadership in the private sector has been translating to the public sector and to politics and government, not necessarily just at the high level but also at kind of like the public-facing roles? So with civil servants, at the ministry level, just because not everybody can be President Sirleaf. So I’m just wondering about has there also been, like, a gradual growth of women leaders in politics and governance. Thank you.

SARAH ZAAIMI: Anyone else before we answer? No?

OK, any one of you want to take those?

ANITA ERSKINE: I can start from the first and then come to the second.

So I think it is Rwanda that has an increasing amount of women in—

REBECCA HARRISON: Parliament.

SARAH ZAAIMI: Fifty percent. Yeah. Yeah.

ANITA ERSKINE: Fifty percent, yeah?… Sixty-one [percent]? It’s 61 [percent]? Yes. So then my automatic answer would be yes. And even when I look at back home in Ghana, every four years when we have the presidential elections and for members of parliament you see more women actively participating in wanting to be in those various rooms, so to speak. So, yes, you can see the increase.

And I think that gradually we’re being able to debunk or break down the fears and the concept that to be a woman in politics you’ve got to be the female version of Arnold Schwarzenegger. And you know, so making it a little bit more attractive for women, but also realizing that the more we wait for, you know, certain decisions to be made on our behalf, the more regression that we encounter. So I’m seeing that a lot.

And in terms of the first question about, I guess, the interface between public and private, let me just talk from the perspective of girls’ education and banning early marriage as an example, because leadership doesn’t just happen when you are born. Leadership is actually the result of where you come from, how you are brought up, who leads you, what are you protected by. And I see that a lot more African countries are beginning to fight against, for example, early marriage. A lot more are beginning to look at helping girls pursue careers in STEM because that’s where the leadership eventually comes from.

So, of course, as I said before, I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but I know even in the space that I work in in STEM or in communications or the media or across other industries that there’s a lot more government policies and conversations, you know, at the parliament level about how to get more girls educated. In Ghana we’ve got the Free SHS, which means that more girls automatically are able to go, you know, to school. But that doesn’t mean that girls don’t go to school where there is poor sanitation facilities, which eventually kind of kicks them out. So I see that increasingly we’re all becoming very conscious of how to make sure and ensure that the ecosystem, so to speak, is favorable, you know, for girls.

REBECCA HARRISON: Can I just add something on the public-private partnership? And thank you so much for the shout-out.

But we’ve—we stumbled upon a super interesting model for public-private partnership recently, which is leadership incubators. So we’ve been running a program on agricultural transformation with a partner, AGRA, where we bring together leaders at fairly senior level from public, private, and civil society and put them through a pretty intensive kind of transformational leadership experience. And what’s been so exciting and unexpected about this is how individuals connecting with individuals drives change so quickly. I mean, it’s obvious, right, but just to see this happen so quickly.

So, for example, we saw—we have the delegates working together on kind of practical action-learning projects, right? And so one project in Tanzania, we had a female entrepreneur who’s one of the leading entrepreneurs in the poultry sector in Tanzania in a group with a policymaker in the agricultural ministry, and they together worked to change Tanzania’s poultry policy just through, like a leadership project. And it really—and you know, I know that it’s ag, it’s a little bit off topic, but it really got me thinking about, you know, could we make this happen for gender? Could you get, you know, women from across public and private sector, civil society together in a really transformational leadership experience? What might that kind of generate? Could we do it for climate? So if any funders out there, you know, who want to collaborate on this—but, no, seriously, I think it’s a super exciting kind of idea to explore. If anyone, you know, wants to kind of co-create on that, would love to.

SARAH ZAAIMI: One more question and then we could turn to our guests with some closing remarks. We have under one minute.

Q: Thank you. I am Sarah from Zimbabwe. I just wanted to appreciate the panel. I enjoyed everything that you said.

I am just wondering at the top of my head if maybe you could comment on the role of men in supporting women’s leadership, because I’m thinking that we are fighting this battle because of mostly the patriarchal systems that we have. And maybe the battle is harder because some of the men are pushing back. So I feel that maybe if we don’t have them on our side or at least allowing us space, it’s going to take some time for us to be fifty-fifty at the table, be it in government, be it in the private sector, be it in the academia. So I’m just thinking, what are your thoughts on that? Thank you.

SARAH ZAAIMI: Thank you so much. I’m turning to you, Betty, if you could quickly maybe answer and also give any last remarks.

BETTY BEENZU CHILONDE: Yeah, thank you so much. I think that’s very important what you have just brought up, because as much as we talk about these things I think it’s very important for men to accept and want to support women.

What I have noticed is that men who are—who are, like, living in the diaspora are more willing to assist the women back home with home duties and also make—understanding that the women have to work and then they have to also take part in, you know, providing for the family in that sense. But when it’s back in Africa, it’s a very different story. You find that the men are not willing to assist the woman. So that becomes very, very difficult for the—for the woman.

And that actually brings out the fact that men are actually pushing back. And as much as they are talking about it on the political level and all those things, they are not willing at a personal level to accept and support the woman. So the woman has double work. They have to work, and also they have to work in the other sense. So I think it starts from accepting that the men have to accept to want to support the woman and be able to offload some of the duties that the woman is going through to be able to, you know, uplift the woman.

SARAH ZAAIMI: Any very, very last words before we close? I think we ran out of time.

ANITA ERSKINE: Oh, my husband absolutely loves the fact that I’m who I am. But, no, I mean, that’s why I said initially there’s two sides to everything. I married someone who absolutely loves the fact that I get to travel around the world and who is at home right now taking care of the kids. My daughter was unwell yesterday. He’s happy to give her her Benylin, you know what I mean? So I think there’s the other—there is the other kind of—you know, we don’t even have time to talk about the kind of man you should marry.

But just to finish off, I think that if there are women who have the money—we talked about women not being funded. Fund a women-owned business or a woman-owned business. What stops you from putting money into a woman-owned business? I think that’s a thing that is key. Two, stop trying to be the only woman in the room. And, three, gender equality doesn’t mean you get to do what the man does or, you know—you know, they say sometimes what a man can do a woman can do better. I disagree. I think women are good at doing exceptional things, some things, and women cannot do other things. Same thing with men. So if you pursue your career, pursue your dreams, pursue ambition, pursue it from the perspective of being the best woman you can, not the best woman that is better than the man in the room. And I think that’s how, then, you are able to also get the—to get the men to support.

SARAH ZAAIMI: Thank you. Thank you.

Watch the full event

The post Entrepreneurs are changing the narrative about women’s leadership in Africa appeared first on Atlantic Council.

People from all corners of the world packed the room, and it was standing room only at our COP28 Resilience Hub, where she held court as the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center (Arsht-Rock) ambassador for heat, health, and gender.

“Extreme heat has to be viewed as one of the most dangerous results of the changing climate,” she said, recounting a trip to India, where she saw the harm done to livelihoods, particularly those of women working outdoors as farmers, street vendors, waste collectors, and salt pan and construction workers. “This is not just a health issue,” Clinton warned. “It’s an economic issue, a social issue, [and] a political issue.”

Working with Clinton and with Reema Nanavaty, director of the nearly three-million-member Self-Employed Women’s Association, the Atlantic Council has been implementing a parametric insurance program as a part of Arsht-Rock’s Extreme Heat Protection Initiative. This program protects women working in India’s informal sector from having to make an impossible choice: pausing their work during heat waves (to protect their health) or continuing to work and earn money, while putting their wellbeing at risk.

What has been winning the headlines here so far at this twenty-eighth United Nations Climate Change Conference has been the announcement on the first day of a landmark, $400-milllion loss and damage fund, a mechanism that provides financial assistance to the countries most affected by, but often least responsible for, the climate crisis. There has also been media attention on the hydrocarbon companies that have come to this conference in greater numbers than ever before—many with concrete commitments and plans to reduce emissions.

With over seventy thousand delegates and observers at COP28, actions that aim to improve lives—such as insurance programs to support workers in the informal economy, many of them women—deserve notice. For these workers especially, “their lives and livelihoods are at stake,” said Eleni Myrivili, the global chief heat officer for United Nations-Habitat and Arsht-Rock.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on Twitter @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points Today newsletter, a column of quick-hit insights on a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

The post A big idea to address the biggest killer of the climate crisis appeared first on Atlantic Council.

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On November 1^st, the Atlantic Council’s empowerME Initiative, in collaboration with the United States Embassy in Bahrain and Bahrain FinTech Bay, hosted the second workshop in a series of four for the first cohort of the Women Innovators Fellowship (WIn Fellowship) in Bahrain. The session took place both virtually and in-person at the Bahrain FinTech Bay offices. The event focused on Bahrain’s booming fintech industry and the growing role of women in the sector.

Lynn Monzer, associate director of the Atlantic Council’s WIn Fellowship initiative, offered the opening remarks. The panel included Bader Sater, the chief executive officer of Bahrain FinTech Bay; Noora Al-Nusuf, head of corporate affairs for the Middle East at Standard Chartered Bank; Jamal Fakhro, managing partner of KPMG in Bahrain; and Batool Alkhaja, director of public policy at Rain Management with Lynn Monzer moderating.

The panelists shared their expertise in finance, technology, and fintech, touching upon the progress Bahrain has made in gender parity in employment, the challenges women entrepreneurs face, and shared advice for women navigating the industry.

Key discussion points

The workshop started with Lynn Monzer highlighting the fellowship’s commitment in the progress of women entrepreneurs in the Middle East. She emphasized the crucial focus of the topic of the panel – the intersectionality of women, technology, and finance in Bahrain stating that “the country is becoming a hub of innovation and growth, standing as a unique microcosm in the global fintech arena.”

Bader Sater provided an overview of the current state of the nascent fintech industry in Bahrain. He expressed that his aspiration for its success and growth is quite high, the adoption of banks and financial institutions of new technology, and the growing start-up ecosystem. While Noora Al-Nusuf highlighted the current state of women in Bahrain’s financial sector asserting that the recent reforms in the Kingdom enabled women to access a wide range of roles and leadership positions across the entire work force. Yet, in the financial sector, women hold only 13 percent of the sector’s workforce, and 32 percent of them are in leadership or managerial positions.

Although men and women in Bahrain have equal employment opportunities, Jamal Fakhro notes that the low level of female participation in fintech can be explained by the newness of the industry. He anticipates a rise in of women’s participation in the Fintech industry once it becomes more established in Bahrain emphasizing the job flexibility that the industry provides. Sater observed that cultural barriers hinder women’s access to the sector. He pointed out the significant increase in the number of women in tech and coding roles over the years, attributing this change to the dismantling of social stigma.

Batool Alkhaja highlighted the foundational contribution of women in fintech, particularly in crypto currency and blockchain. Alkhaja mentioned that pivotal role of Rain Management in shaping the regulatory environment in Bahrain, noting that women have been integral part of this process. She also noted that 38% of Rain’s employees and 50% of the leadership are women.

As the conversation moved to female entrepreneurship, Bader Sater pointed out that although the share of women-led start-ups is not high, there are several initiatives actively working to grow and support female-led companies across Bahrain. Sater explained that the lack of equal respect that his female colleagues – founders of companies or in leadership roles – is another problem related to the cultural perception and can be changed as the norms evolve.

Noora Al-Nusuf mentioned no existing technical barriers preventing women from accessing financial services, the financial sector is proactively working to make services and employment more accessible to demographics that previously found it challenging. She mentioned digitization and AI, as well as initiatives for flexible working hours, remote working, and parental leave for both mothers and fathers. Al-Nusuf highlighted programs by Standard Chartered Bank that encourages women to enter the tech industry highlighting the importance of these programs in fighting social stigma. Batool Alkhaja echoed Al-Nusuf, referring to her personal experience stepping out of her comfort zone into the tech industry and now seeing change in the industry.

On solutions, Bader Sater emphasized the importance of role models and presenting women’s successes to inspire change. Al-Nusuf and Alkhaja noted the importance of early education in increasing women participation in different industries. Collaboration between the government and the private sector can also help catalyze this change. Al-Nusuf explained that the private sector can help by sharing best practices and policies that are already embedded in the company with the government to help inform legal rules, regulations, and government-sponsored programs. Jamal Fakhro urged all women, especially in fintech, to find mentors – someone you believe in, to ask and to observe.

The Way Forward

Bahrain is among the world’s leading fintech hubs, contributing over 17% to its GDP and driving economic growth. The financial sector is also Bahrain’s largest employer, with Bahrainis accounting for over 67% of the nearly 14,000-strong workforce. The technological advancements adopted by the sector are propelling its growth not only domestically but also positioning it as a leader in fintech across the Middle East region.

While the fintech industry has emerged as a promising field relatively unburdened by traditional gender biases, women’s representation remains concentrated at the bottom of the organizational hierarchy in the sector, with few breaking through the glass ceiling to reach managerial and decision-making positions. This is evident in the fact that only 32% of the financial sector workforce in Bahrain are women, and only 13% of women in the financial sector hold leadership positions.

Unlocking the full potential of Bahrain’s fintech sector requires cultivating an ecosystem that empowers and supports female entrepreneurs to flourish. With the fintech industry projected to expand sixfold, from $245 billion to $1.5 trillion by 2030, this presents a significant opportunity for the industry to capitalize on the contributions of women. This can be achieved by investing in education and skill development programs tailored to women’s needs is essential to equip them with the knowledge and expertise required to succeed in the fintech sector. This includes fostering STEM education from an early age to cultivate a pipeline of women with the technical aptitude to thrive in the industry.

Public-private partnerships can play a pivotal role in bridging the funding gap faced by women entrepreneurs in the fintech sector. These collaborations can provide women-led fintech startups with the necessary capital and funding to launch and scale their ventures. Dedicated funding programs specifically designed for women-owned fintech startups can be established through these partnerships. Additionally, streamlining loan application processes through collaborations with financial institutions can further facilitate women’s access to funding.

Bahrain has made significant strides in embracing technology and innovation, positioning itself as a regional leader in the fintech industry. However, there is still room for improvement, particularly in fostering an inclusive environment that empowers women to thrive in the sector as mentioned by the panelists. The discussion needs to shift to action in order to transform the takeaways and suggestions from the event into sustainable progress.

Nibras Basitkey is the Program Assistant with Atlantic Council’s empowerME initiative at the Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East.

Rachel Friedman, Young Global Professional with the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East.

WIn Fellowship cohorts

Jun 14, 2023

The WIn Fellowship 2023-2024 cohort

Building on the success of its inaugural cohort, the Women Innovators Fellowship (WIn) is expanding to Bahrain and the UAE, in addition to Saudi Arabia, as it continues to empower more women entrepreneurs from the Middle East. The program is thrilled to announce this year’s eighty-six recipients of its 2023 WIn Fellowship. The participants will receive a year-long program of executive education, mentoring, and networking opportunities in collaboration with Georgetown McDonough School of Business and with the support of the United States embassies in the three target countries and PepsiCo.

Feb 24, 2023

2023 WIn Fellowship Roadshow

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Jun 14, 2023

WIn Fellowship 2023-2024 Bahrain

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On December 14, the Atlantic Council’s empowerME Initiative held a virtual event on “MENA’s Fintech innovators: Digitizing financial services” in partnership with ABANA.

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Explore the initiative

The post Fostering Growth: Women in Bahrain’s fintech sector appeared first on Atlantic Council.

On October 18th, the Atlantic Council’s empowerME Initiative, in collaboration with the United States Embassy in Saudi Arabia and PepsiCo, held a workshop titled “Women’s economic participation and its impact on healthcare in Saudi Arabia.” The panel focused on the shifting roles of women within Saudi society, with a deep dive into the ripple effects this phenomenon has on the healthcare sector.

Keynote remarks were provided by Dana AlAjlani, co-chairwoman of The American Chamber of Commerce in Saudi Arabia, and Lynn Monzer, associate director of the WIn Fellowship at the Atlantic Council, delivered the closing remarks. The discussion was led by Noor Osama Nugali, acting deputy editor-in-chief at Arab News, and featured three prominent Saudi women in the healthcare: Fatimah Alhamlan, a consultant and women’s health advocate at the King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Centre; Samar Nassar, managing director for healthcare services and technologies at the Saudi Arabia Ministry of Investment; and Naseem Almulla, customer experience director at the Council of Health Insurance.

Dana AlAjlani highlighted that women in healthcare in Saudi Arabia, from midwives to doctors and administrators, showcase exceptional skills, education, and dedication in delivering patient therapy and shaping patient-centered care models globally. However, despite their significance presence, the healthcare industry still grapples with gender-related challenges.

Progress Made in Women’s Healthcare in Saudi Arabia

Samar Nassar discussed the healthcare sector’s resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic, highlighting the rapid developments made, particularly in virtual care. Dr. Fatimah Alhamlan highlighted the substantial progress in women’s healthcare in Saudi Arabia, marked by notable advancements in legal and social reforms. For instance, women no longer require male guardian approval to receive medical treatment or make healthcare decisions. This means more autonomy, independence, and assurance of confidentiality for women’s health. Dr. Alhamlan also emphasized the importance of social entrepreneurship in creating value-driven opportunities within the healthcare sector. Recognizing the challenges women face taking their children to hospitals, Saudi entrepreneurs have responded by establishing women’s health clinics in malls to ensure accessibility for all.

Naseem Almulla noted that as more women have entered the private sector, there has been a growing emphasis on providing access to preventive services rather than relying on treatment. In 2022, the Ministry of Health released an essential reference package that includes special components for women’s health, such as breast cancer screening, surveillance, pre- and post-menopausal care, pregnancy support, and bone density exams. This represents a significant shift towards proactive healthcare for women. 

Dr. Alhamlan noted that there is a shift towards prioritizing health and wellness in Saudi Arabia rather than solely focusing on disease treatment. While Saudi Arabia has top-tier hospitals and cutting-edge technologies, the focus is now on preventive medicine. The goal is to enhance overall health and quality of life and ultimately reduce the number of patients in hospitals. Dr. Alhamlan recalled the definition of health according to the World Health Organization (WHO): “Health is not merely the absence of disease; it encompasses mental, physical, and social well-being. Even for individuals with chronic illnesses, the emphasis is on promoting well-being, adaption, and a high quality of life. Companies like Kayani, a fitness entity, are working to empower women and provide the necessary infrastructure for sports and physical activities. She mentioned that the Public Investment Fund (PIF) consistently announces new healthcare and wellness-related initiatives, reflecting a strong dedication to disease prevention and a high quality of life.

Challenges and Opportunities

All panelists agreed on the ongoing challenges of women ascending to leadership positions within healthcare. Almulla highlighted the ongoing limitations in women’s involvement in financial decisions, digital transformations, and operational aspects of the healthcare industry. Samar pointed out the conspicuous disparity in executive leadership roles, which have remained stagnant at 20 percent over the past two decades. According to WHO, women make up 67 percent of the global healthcare workforce and 76 percent in the United States. It’s important to note that these statistics include a variety of roles within healthcare, such as technologists and practitioners. In comparison, Nassar pointed out that the Saudi Commission for Health Specialties has reported a 40 percent representation of women, suggesting a relatively strong level of female representation. Yet, this figure becomes less impressive when considering that women account for one or two out of every ten executive leadership positions. Almulla stated that the integration of women into more operational, engineering facilities, and financial decisions is pivotal for the future of the Saudi healthcare system. Nassar underscored that increased women’s participation leads to more disposable income, greater spending, improved productivity, and better utilization of healthcare services.

The healthcare sector’s risk-averse nature is driven by the imperative to prioritize patient well-being and data privacy, which relegates health entrepreneurs to a less prominent position. Nassar discussed the stark gap in women’s representation in entrepreneurship in the healthcare sector in Saudi Arabia, notably falling below 1 percent. Bridging this gap has significant economic benefits. As a representative of the Ministry of Investment, she confirmed that the diversity and inclusion of women, in the workforce and in leadership positions, enhance Saudi Arabia’s appeal to investors, promoting a thriving Saudi entrepreneurial ecosystem. She spotlighted a successful example, Sophie Smith, a WIn Fellowship Mentor from the UAE, who created Nabta Health. This women’s health app addresses the significant gap in healthcare technology tailored to women’s physiology, an area traditionally overlooked. 

A broader issue of gender diversity exists in various fields in Saudi Arabia, including fintech and STEM, as well as the gender gap in research and funding. Nassar emphasized the need to establish mentorship programs that support promising talent in healthcare, guide them toward venture development and secure the necessary funding. Incorporating women into recruitment strategies, providing intensive development programs, and offering training initiatives is crucial. Ultimately, fostering diversity and innovation in healthcare has a significant and positive economic impact.

Dr. Alhamlan, Almulla, and Nassar agreed that aside from the burden women face of proving themselves in the workplace, women lack the services and facilities to enable them to work while simultaneously starting a family. All the panelists emphasized the necessity of a support system to break the vicious cycle of struggles faced by women. Dr. Alhamlan underscored the significance of work-life balance as more women dedicate extended hours to the workplace. The ongoing social changes and transformations demand equilibrium between work and family life, a key determinant of individuals’ quality of life.

Nassar highlighted that the quality of life hinges upon service availability, highlighting the imperative for Saudi Arabia to enhance its services as countries like the UAE and Singapore offer more accessible and top-notch service provisions. Dr. Alhamlanfounded the Rofaida Women’s Health Organization to address challenges in the healthcare system. She collaborates with civil society organizations to elevate the community’s voice and drive progress through research. Almulla and Dr. Alhamlan stressed the importance of support systems for maternity care and maternity leave, drawing from their own polar experiences and contrasting the support system in the United States versus Saudi Arabia. Almulla noted that some countries offer up to three years of paid maternity leave. They underlined that supporting woman in the workforce, especially in demanding fields like nursing, addressing cultural barriers, and improving pay are crucial steps in elevating the healthcare system and strengthening the overall economy in Saudi Arabia. 

The Way Forward

Policy changes, societal acceptance, and an expansion of healthcare services have considerably widened the scope of women’s roles within the healthcare industry. However, a persistent glass ceiling still limits women’s full participation in leadership and entrepreneurship within the healthcare industry. Addressing this discrepancy is a multifaceted challenge that calls for concerted efforts from governmental bodies, corporations, and civil society alike.

The Saudi Arabian healthcare sector should aim to be more proactive in opening channels for innovation and entrepreneurship for women. With the Femtech market in the MENA region expected to hit $3.8 billion by 2031, there is a significant opportunity to leverage technology that targets women’s health issues. Femtech, also known as female technology, is a range of software, diagnostic tools, products, and services that leverage technology to address women’s health issues.Female entrepreneurship has the potential to address the unique and overlooked healthcare needs, like UAE based Nabta Health’s focus on women’s physiology, creating an enabling environment for FemTech startups should be a priority.

Furthermore, the government and private sector stakeholders should engage in dialogue to address the specific challenges and opportunities in increasing women’s participation in healthcare. For instance, the predominance of male investors in the region means a lack of understanding and investment in healthcare products geared toward women. Hence, a gender-sensitive approach is the right strategy for economic growth and for enhancing Saudi Arabia’s appeal to international investors. Improving healthcare for women not only benefits female patients and consumers but also creates value for investors, stakeholders throughout the value chain, and society at large.

Gender equity in healthcare is a shared responsibility that demands the active participation of all stakeholders. The insights from this panel provide not just a snapshot of where we are, but also a roadmap for where we need to go. The focus must now shift from discussion to action, turning the insights and recommendations of this event into sustainable progress.

Lynn Monzer is the Associate Director with the Atlantic Council’s empowerME initiative at the Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East.

Diane Mohamed is a Young Global Professional with the Middle East Programs at the Atlantic Council. 

Explore the WIn Fellowship

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empowerME

empowerME at the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East is shaping solutions to empower entrepreneurs, women, and youth and building coalitions of public and private partnerships to drive regional economic integration, prosperity, and job creation.

Explore the initiative

The post Navigating the future of women’s healthcare in Saudi Arabia: Insights and challenges appeared first on Atlantic Council.

On October 5, the Atlantic Council’s Strategic Litigation Project, together with the Global Justice Center, issued a joint letter and legal brief urging the international community to codify the crime of gender apartheid in the UN’s crimes against humanity treaty. The letter and legal brief were endorsed by dozens of prominent jurists, scholars, and civil society representatives. This includes Afghan women’s rights defender Shaharzad Akbar and Nobel laureates Shirin Ebadi, Malala Yousafzai, and Nadia Murad. It also includes South African jurists Justice Richard Goldstone and Navi Pillay, former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former Irish President Mary Robinson, former International Criminal Court Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda, and renowned global feminist Gloria Steinem. Former Executive Director of Human Rights Watch Kenneth Roth, former Mongolian President Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj, and Baroness Helena Kennedy endorsed the letter and legal brief as well. 

The prominence and diversity of this group speak to the high stakes of this issue. Some people might be encountering this term for the first time, however, so it is worth exploring the crime of gender apartheid in greater detail.

1. What is gender apartheid?

Gender apartheid occurs when perpetrators seek to maintain a form of governance designed to systematically oppress and dominate another gender group or groups so that the dominant group may live alongside them and benefit from their subjugation. 

In Afghanistan, gender apartheid is seen in the Taliban banning women and girls from education and almost all employment, and from traveling long distances without a male guardian, all while having to abide by a severe dress code. Women in Afghanistan are banned from almost all public spaces including public parks, gyms, and most recently beauty salons.

In Iran, gender apartheid is seen in the Islamic Republic not allowing a woman the right to divorce her husband or to gain custody of her children, and in banning women from obtaining a passport and traveling outside the country without the permission of a male guardian. Women in Iran are banned from many fields of study and are not permitted into sports stadiums. Their lives and their testimony are worth half a man’s under the law, and they are forced to wear compulsory hijab.

Gender apartheid in these countries is seen in a series of policies and daily abuses that bar women and girls from engaging in public life and having hopes of any financial autonomy. It is in all these measures designed and enacted by the Taliban and the Islamic Republic as a system of governance that aims to compress and relegate Afghan and Iranian women and girls into narrow roles: as child-bearers, child-rearers, and sources of unremunerated domestic labor.

Although it has not yet been codified as a crime under international law, gender apartheid has long been recognized as a concept. It dates back at least to the Taliban’s first takeover of Afghanistan in 1996. In our letter to UN member states, we’ve defined the crime of gender apartheid as the commission of inhuman acts with the intent to maintain an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination of one gender group over another. This amends the existing definition of the crime of race-based apartheid under the Rome Statute—the animating document of the International Criminal Court—to encompass the same act and mental element, but with regard to domination of gender groups rather than racial groups.

2. Why should gender apartheid be recognized under international law?

The addition of the crime of gender apartheid under international law will give victims and survivors a clear legal avenue to hold perpetrators—whether state or individual—to account for the totality of crimes being perpetrated against them. The situations of women and girls living under the Taliban and Islamic Republic of Iran, for example, demonstrate just what’s at stake. As these regimes continue to tighten their grip, aiming to entrench a system of governance that eviscerates any semblance of women and girls’ autonomy and agency, every available option is needed to prevent and punish the full scale of their conduct. Codifying gender apartheid would equip the international community with a new and powerful tool for accountability to mobilize against these deteriorating situations.

3. Who supports the codification of gender apartheid? 

On March 8, 2023 a group of prominent Afghan and Iranian human rights defenders, international jurists, and civil society leaders launched the End Gender Apartheid Campaign, which calls for the global recognition of the crime of gender apartheid. Their demands were powered by the deteriorating situation for women and girls in Afghanistan with each successive Taliban decree and the rise of the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement in Iran capturing global attention in support of women’s rights in these countries. 

The campaign builds upon a long history of work on this issue. For decades, international officials, lawyers, scholars, and activists have increasingly recognized the commission of gender apartheid and sought to codify it. Over the last year, UN Secretary-General António Guterres and other UN experts specifically recognized the deteriorating situation for women and girls in Afghanistan as gender apartheid. UN experts have also come together to caution against laws in Iran that are a form of gender apartheid. Just last month, UN Women’s Executive Director Sima Bahous called on the international community to explicitly codify gender apartheid under international law.

4. What can the international community do to recognize gender apartheid?

The United Nations has a unique opportunity to codify gender apartheid as a crime under international criminal law because the draft crimes against humanity treaty—the first major global treaty on core international crimes since the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court—is moving forward. However, the International Law Commission’s draft articles, the starting point for the treaty, replicate the twenty-five-year-old definition of apartheid from the Rome Statute, which focuses on race-based apartheid only. The Rome Statute’s focus is not surprising given the recent memories of apartheid-era South Africa when it was written, but the definition of apartheid can and should be expanded today.

The letter we issued to UN member states—endorsed by dozens of leading jurists and rights defenders, including those who worked to dismantle the apartheid regime in South Africa—urges states to amend the draft definition of the crime of apartheid to encompass gender-based apartheid, too. UN member states will have an opportunity to debate next steps for the draft treaty on October 11-12 during the ongoing UN Sixth Committee session. They can then submit written comments by the end of this year and debate the draft treaty provisions in substance in April 2024.

5. How is gender apartheid distinct from the international crime of gender persecution?

The crime of apartheid is different from what is on the books now because of its distinguishing intent and animating context. This means gender apartheid requires the commission of an inhuman act of requisite character with the intent to maintain an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination. The crime of gender persecution requires neither such context nor intent. Rather, it concerns itself with the “severe deprivation of fundamental rights” where the victim or victims have been targeted “by reason of the identity of a group or collectivity or targeted the group or collectivity as such.” 

The intent to maintain an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination of one group over others is markedly different in scope and dystopian ambition from the crime of persecution, as serious and significant as the latter is. This is already recognized, without controversy, given that the current definition of race-based apartheid sits neatly alongside the crime of persecution on the ground of race in the Rome Statute’s 1998 codification of international crimes. To the extent that the two crimes involve overlapping facts, it is also well-settled under international law that courts can charge perpetrators with cumulative crimes in order to capture the full extent of criminal conduct.

6. How would prosecution work?

Accountability against governmental actors in Afghanistan and Iran has been tough. The proposed codification would open new avenues to hold perpetrators—both state and individual—to account.

If the crimes against humanity treaty is adopted and the crime of gender apartheid is included, countries that are party to the treaty would be obligated to criminalize gender apartheid and take other measures to prevent and punish crimes against humanity under their domestic laws. This could potentially open the pathway to prosecutions under the principle of universal jurisdiction, which essentially means that some crimes are so heinous that they can be prosecuted in courts anywhere, even if the perpetrator is from a different country, the victims are from a different country, or the acts occurred in a different country. 

Iranian officials responsible for the architecture of gender apartheid do travel outside of Iran and into countries with universal jurisdiction laws—so this could expand options for prosecution of officials, much in the same way a former Iranian official was convicted by a Swedish district court in July 2022 for the executions of thousands of political prisoners in Iran’s jails. With respect to the Taliban, similar approaches may apply. 

Codification of the crime of gender apartheid in the crimes against humanity treaty would also affirm the obligations of states and international organizations to prevent and punish gender apartheid, even if they’re not direct parties to the treaty. In this way, the hope is that codification will mobilize diplomatic, legal, and social movements of resistance, including in the contexts of Afghanistan and Iran, and also in similar crisis situations now and in the future.

Gissou Nia is the founder and director of the Strategic Litigation Project at the Atlantic Council and advisor to the End Gender Apartheid Campaign.

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Written by the playwright Sasha Denisova and directed by Yury Urnov, this new theatrical production highlights Ukraine’s remarkable resistance to Russia’s ongoing invasion and centers on Zelenskyy’s secret weapon, a brash grandmother named Olga Ivanovna who guards her Kyiv apartment with a rifle. “They’re getting closer,” she declares at the outset. “The situation is grave. They’re getting closer on all fronts.” There is no need to elucidate who “they” are.

In between whipping up elaborate meals in her tiny but immaculate post-Soviet kitchen, Olga Ivanovna plots with the Ukrainian president to outwit the Russians and shame the West into supporting Ukraine. The play exemplifies Ukraine’s true grit as it repels Russia’s murderous war of conquest, all with a dash of humor and endless mother-daughter conflict.

As the world watches the Russian invasion of Ukraine unfold, UkraineAlert delivers the best Atlantic Council expert insight and analysis on Ukraine twice a week directly to your inbox.

Denisova, who grew up in Kyiv, is a well-known playwright whose previous work The Gaaga (the Russian pronunciation for The Hague) imagined a future war crimes trial of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his cronies. For her new play, she drew upon her mother’s WhatsApp messages sent after the onset of Russia’s full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022.

Denisova recently told the Guardian newspaper, “when Mama went international in her writing, when she started appealing to Emmanuel Macron and Olaf Scholz, when she started calling Vladimir Putin a Ruscist bastard scum, I started feeling OK, she is on this level where it needs to become a play.”

Denisova deftly explores her mother’s life to provide a riveting account of Ukrainian resistance to tyranny. Olga Ivanovna was born in a bomb shelter on the very day in 1941 that the Nazis began bombing Kyiv, including the hospital where she was supposed to be born. The parallels with today’s Russian assault are obvious. Indeed, in a February 2022 address to the Russian people, Zelenskyy himself observed, “Tonight you began bombing residential areas in the hero city of Kyiv. This is like 1941.”

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The protagonist Olga Ivanovna, who lives with her much younger husband, is an incendiary presence. As the play progresses, she recounts her turbulent love life, zest for travel, and passion for engineering. But the Russian menace is never far away: The ingenious staging has drones periodically buzzing by that Olga Ivanovna tries to deflect and destroy with everything from a fly swatter to a pickle jar. The mix of frustration, exasperation, and anger is palpable as she shouts at Zelenskyy for permission to bring them down. At one point, the play even has her in the cockpit of a fighter jet targeting the Kremlin itself.

Olga Ivanovna is fearless: In several extremely effective scenes, television footage of French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz offering tepid support for Ukraine are beamed onto the stage. Olga Ivanovna yells at them to man up. The chasm between their banalities and her righteous moral indignation could hardly be more palpable.

When Biden visits her apartment wearing his trademark dark aviator glasses, Olga Ivanovna serves him Ukrainian delicacies and prods him to do more for her country. Perhaps the most evocative scene of the entire play arrives when Putin himself slithers into her apartment. Olga Ivanovna bashes the despot over the head with a pickle jar, but not before a vengeful Putin detonates a tactical nuclear weapon.

Olga Ivanovna is undaunted. The play shows her bargaining with God himself to intervene on behalf of Ukraine and stop the war while Bach’s “Air on a G string” plays in the background. Even the almighty himself finds it difficult to resist this woman.

Surreal and moving, the play sometimes threatens to lurch out of control, particularly towards the end as Denisova pulls out all the stops in her homage to her irrepressible mother. But ultimately it succeeds in highlighting the everyday resistance that ordinary Ukrainians have displayed in spades. From the outset of the full-scale invasion, Ukrainians of all ages and backgrounds have volunteered in myriad ways to help defend their country.

The play also underscores the resilience that Zelenskyy himself embodies. Putin has sought not only to win fresh territory, but also to extirpate Ukrainian culture and nationhood. The Kremlin’s latest move has reportedly been to order Russian state media to stop referring to Zelenskyy as “president” and to employ the term “Zelenskyy regime.” Denisova’s absorbing play offers a potent reminder of why Putin’s quest will not end in Ukraine’s demise but his own.

Jacob Heilbrunn is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, editor of the National Interest, and author of the forthcoming “America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators.”

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Surveys on GBV in the Caribbean show that many cases go unreported. Often, the blame is assigned to the victim. To address this severe problem, civil society organizations (CSOs) have been among the most vocal and effective actors on the ground. From building shelters for victims and staging awareness campaigns to working with governments to pass comprehensive legislation, CSOs are at the forefront of the fight against violence against women.

As part of the Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center’s partnership with UN Women, Atlantic Council experts met with local CSO leaders to understand the challenges and opportunities they face on the ground. Below, CSO leaders from Guyana and Jamaica share how they view the crisis and why addressing it requires an approach that includes communities, government officials, and the private sector.

How do you view the problem of gender-based violence in your country?

We are quite concerned about the levels of gender-based violence occurring in the country. A recent prevalence survey indicated that one in two women had experienced some form of violence in Guyana. It can be said that this speaks to the permissiveness of society to accept violence as a response option. We see the problem of gender violence as being rooted in societal attitudes, norms, and power dynamics that perpetuate inequality and discrimination. It is not just a private matter; it has broader social, economic, and health implications.

—Renata Chuck-A-Sang is the chief executive officer of Guyana Women and Gender Equality Commission.

Gender-based violence, femicide, and teenage as well as unintended pregnancies are leading issues facing women and girls in Jamaica. Social and cultural attitudes, such as sexism and misogyny, significantly contribute to the maintenance of entrenched gender roles within society leading to a significantly high level of intimate partner violence faced by women and girls. There is a normalized culture of sexual harassment with which women must contend, and this is compounded by high teenage pregnancy rates, childhood violence, and early cohabitation with male partners.

—Sannia Sutherland is a program coordinator at the Caribbean Vulnerable Communities Coalition, Jamaica.

What are some of the existing policy efforts or interventions that governments and the private sector have implemented to address gender-based violence?

In Guyana, the existence of a Sexual Offenses Act—with a second Domestic Violence Act being reviewed—is commendable. Moreover, under the Spotlight Initiative (a United Nations initiative to eliminate violence against women and girls), the Ministry of Human Services and Social Security has been working to implement several programs to protect women from GBV. The ministry has also conducted training for women in an effort for them to start their own small businesses, a crucial step toward allowing financial independence, which is intimately linked with GBV. Finally, the establishment of a police academy where candidates are required to take courses on how to respond to GBV is a step in the right direction. Nonetheless, these programs need to improve their monitoring and evaluation to register their effectiveness.

—Rosemarie Ramitt is a senior program officer at the Women with Disabilities Network, Guyana Council of Organisations for Persons with Disabilities.

The Jamaican government recently established the first two government-owned shelters for survivors of domestic violence, a necessary program to offer immediate support to women escaping abusive relationships. These shelters were also supported by private companies, showing a case of successful private-public cooperation. On the legislative front, the recent passing of the Sexual Harassment Act—which offers women employees protection in the workplace—is a positive development, although the legislative process was subject to excessive delays.

—Joyce Hewet is executive director of Woman Inc., Jamaica.

What is needed to create sustainable public policy to prevent and eradicate gender violence in your country?

In Guyana, we require more stringent penalties for perpetrators, improved enforcement mechanisms, and streamlined processes for obtaining restraining orders or timely judicial responses. Accessible and sensitive support services for survivors, such as shelters, counseling, and legal aid, continue to be essential for helping individuals escape abusive situations and rebuild their lives. Recognizing that gender violence is not just a women’s issue, more efforts to engage men and boys in discussions about healthy masculinity and the prevention of violence can have a positive impact on reducing gender-based violence, too. Finally, it is crucial to access accurate data on the prevalence and types of gender violence to understand the scope of the problem and to design effective interventions.

—Renata Chuck-A-Sang

In Jamaica, some concrete first steps to create a sustainable public policy would be to involve GBV survivors and advocates in public policy decision-making processes, as well as accompanying these processes with the necessary financial support. The government should prioritize effective communication campaigns (i.e., highlighting personal stories in multimedia formats) to showcase the wide-ranging impacts of GBV on individuals, families, and society at large. Moreover, any effective policy to address gender-based violence needs to include policy mechanisms that promote independent income generation and enhance women’s economic empowerment.

—Judith Wedderburn is the director of WMW JAMAICA.

Martin Cassinelli is a project assistant at the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center.

This article is part of the Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center’s partnership with UN Women Multi-Country Office—Caribbean.

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For the last year, Iran, too, has been suspended between a new life and a death-like state. Mobilized by Amini’s story, protesters took to the streets in all thirty-one of Iran’s provinces to voice opposition to the clerical establishment led by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. A “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement grew that drew on years of Iranians’ frustrations—hardened by systemic corruption and mismanagement—and the repressive nature of the Islamic Republic. While the numbers are smaller today, protesters continue to call for its demise. In the face of these ongoing protests, however, the clerical establishment has dug in, intent on retaining its grim hold on power by ruling through fear. It has arrested protesters and taken lives, and it continues to deny Iranians their freedom.

Below, experts answer twenty questions about how Iran has changed—and is still changing—a year after Amini’s death.

1. How would you assess the overall impact of the protests in Iran?

The protests in Iran over the last year following Amini’s death will not be relegated to the annals of forgotten history as the Islamic Republic of Iran would certainly prefer. But the reality is that twelve months after extraordinarily brave Iranian women and men took to the streets, there are no meaningful, permanent reforms instituted, nor is the regime’s power reduced; indeed, the opposite may be true. There’s been a lot written over the years on the trajectories of revolutions and what would be required for one to succeed in Iran specifically. Many of the historically recognized signposts, unfortunately, are still missing in Iran—for example, defections of some of the security establishment to the protesters. Moreover, the lack of clear leadership has probably also stymied the protests from having greater success thus far. But while the hope embodied in the now-global slogan of “Woman, Life, Freedom,” may still be years—perhaps decades—away from being fulfilled, that doesn’t mean the protests haven’t had an impact. Indeed, the protests have shined a light on the regime’s brutal tactics that continues to penetrate the world’s conscience, while highlighting the heroism of so many young Iranians determined to live in a freer Iran.

—Jonathan Panikoff is the director of the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council’s Middle East Program. A former career US intelligence officer, Panikoff served as the deputy national intelligence officer for the Near East at the National Intelligence Council from 2015 to 2020.

While some maintain skepticism by pointing to the small numbers in the streets, the vigor of protests shouldn’t be based solely on how many individuals gather in a public space. Every day, Iranian women protest by not abiding by mandatory hijab despite the threat of arrest, having their vehicle confiscated, losing their jobs, and even the possibility of being forced to wash corpses in a morgue as a punishment. The Iranian Gen Z participates in civil disobedience by expressing themselves in the most ordinary ways. Anti-regime graffiti, such as “Iran is drowning in revolution,” is scrawled on the walls of various cities and towns, and chants of “Khamenei is a murderer, his guardianship is invalid” are heard from rooftops and windows. In parts of the country dominated by neglected ethnic minorities, such as Sistan and Baluchistan province, protests continue every Friday after prayer.

Historian Ali Ansari told me that the ongoing protests are in a “pre-revolutionary phase,” meaning “within a phase when revolution becomes possible.” This does not discount the fact that protesters already see this as their revolution. Additionally, what separates these protests from previous ones is their continuity since Amini’s death. Never have protests taken place day in and day out.

While the embers of this uprising burn below the surface, it’s only a matter of time before another major event prompted by the incompetence or repressive nature of the Islamic Republic pushes large numbers of people into the streets. It is inevitable.

—Holly Dagres is a nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Middle East Programs. She is also the editor of the Council’s IranSource and MENASource sections and curator for the weekly newsletter, The Iranist. A version of this answer appeared earlier on IranSource.

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2. Has the regime made any concessions in response to the protests and continued popular defiance?

The regime’s response to the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement was a massive crackdown, which aimed at halting demonstrations and reclaiming public space from the protesters. More than five hundred demonstrators were killed and thousands arrested. Authorities have resorted to punishments, such as layoffs, university expulsions, imprisonment, flogging, and especially the death penalty. To date, twenty-five protesters have been sentenced to death following mock trials, with seven of them already hanged. In response, the movement has changed from street protests to widespread civil disobedience. Women are still refusing to wear the hijab, and their visibility in the public space has compelled the regime to devise new and costly repressive policies. The deadlock between state and society in Iran is insurmountable. As it claims to embody God, the Iranian theocracy has never been able to engage in a real dialogue with the society it dominates. The movement’s greatest achievement was to shed light on the cultural, social, and political estrangement between state and society in Iran; it changed the world’s perception of the Islamic regime’s might and stability, and has, it seems, moderated the regime’s aggressive élan in its foreign policy. Hence the irony, for if there have been any concessions from the Islamic Republic, they were not made to the Iranian people but to the international community.

—Ladan Boroumand is the co-founder of the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for the Promotion of Human Rights and Democracy in Iran, a nongovernmental organization that promotes human rights awareness through education and information dissemination.

3. Have the protests changed the trajectory of women’s rights in Iran?

Iran has a decades-long history of movements promoting women’s rights. When I protested against mandatory hijab, the number of people who joined me was small. Although many sympathized with us, we were alone and a collective movement did not form. However, since last year, a collective movement has emerged. The general attitude of society and the world toward women’s rights in Iran has changed since then. 

In my opinion, women in Iran have become braver, and their voices have become louder than before. They are no longer afraid and even fight to the death to get their rights. The most important issue is Iranian men’s support for women, and that women are not alone in their struggle. We are currently witnessing the struggle of women and men alongside each other to achieve women’s rights.

—Azam Jangravi is an information security analyst, researcher, and women’s rights advocate. She is one of the “Revolution Street” women arrested for protesting against the Islamic Republic’s mandatory hijab laws.

4. How has the international community responded to the protests, and what more could outside powers do?

It’s frustrating to all of us that our governments don’t have more levers to pull that will support the legitimate protests in Iran without being counterproductive. Over the last four decades, our traction on the terrible human rights situation in the Islamic Republic has been limited. But there are three important things that outside powers can and must do. Sanctions against human rights abusers are meaningful even where their practical effect is limited—the international community should continue to put resources and creativity into this. Using our international voices to support the Iranian people’s rights matters too: We need to keep demonstrating that we stand for universal values and avoid playing into the regime’s narratives. And most importantly, we must continue to enable and protect the independent and courageous journalism that covers what is happening inside the country. The Iranian regime has directly threatened media outlets based in the West. Defending that space is a weighty responsibility. 

—Rob Macaire is a British diplomat who served as the UK ambassador to Iran from 2018 to 2021. He is part of the advisory committee for the Atlantic Council’s Iran Strategy Project.

5. How has the regime responded to calls for its overthrow?

The Islamic Republic suppressed the movement with sheer brutality, shooting unarmed protesters in Tehran, Zahedan, and many other cities early on in the movement. While there were signs of potential discord and dissent among the security forces, the protest movement never gained a political leadership that could cultivate such sentiments and seriously divide the security forces, which have considerable manpower and experience. 

Most importantly, Khamenei and the regime leadership maintained a united front and decided to give zero concessions to protesters, knowing full well that significant concessions might have further encouraged the movement. This is mostly in line with Khamenei’s approach; he has never responded to mass protests with concessions. Even when he has given some concessions, they have been in moments when he felt more secure in his own power (such as in 2013) and not when he felt threatened. 

At the same time, with the movement’s street phase receding, many of the regime’s more farsighted strategists are aware that deep discontent continues, and something must be done to respond to it. Yet, attempts to further enforce the compulsory hijab continue (with a new bill making it even more strict) and there seems to be no plan to even slightly open up the political space ahead of the upcoming parliamentary elections in March 2024. 

—Arash Azizi is a senior lecturer in political science and history at Clemson University and a fellow at the Center for Middle East and Global Order. He is the author of The Shadow Commander: Soleimani, the US and Iran’s Global Ambitions and the upcoming What Iranians Want: Women, Life, Freedom.

6. How has social media and technology impacted the organization and mobilization of protests?

The viral photo of a bruised Amini hooked up to an intensive care unit, and the later photo of her parents’ painful embrace outside her hospital room, prompted the hashtag #MahsaAmini in Persian to go viral on social media. That anger expressed online then moved to the streets and transferred into the ongoing protest movement now seen today. 

Since the 2009 post-election protests known as the Green Movement, the Islamic Republic has viewed the Internet and social media as a national security threat, and it has dealt with them as such. Thirty-five percent of the world’s most popular websites are blocked and Iranians must use circumvention tools like virtual private networks to get past this great cyber wall of censorship. At times of unrest, authorities have slowed the Internet to a snail-like pace. In November 2019, the government deliberately shut down the Internet, using it as a cover to kill 1,500 protesters in November 2019. 

Social media is the only way for Iranian voices to be heard by the international community and has been an integral tool in amplifying those voices—it allows Iranians to show the world what they’re seeing, express how they’re feeling, and put faces to the names of slain and arrested protesters. Social media also gives credence to those very demonstrations. Human rights violations committed by security forces and uploaded online have been documented by rights organizations, but it’s also the brutal crackdowns found in those very videos and images uploaded from cell phones that mobilize the masses. It’s for that reason that many Iranians want the Islamic Republic gone and why they are so willing to remain defiant day in and day out knowing full well they risk arrest, death, imprisonment, and even sexual assault. 

—Holly Dagres

7. How has Iran’s economy been affected by the protests?

Iran’s economy is fraught with longstanding challenges, including unprecedented inflation, high unemployment, a weakening currency, rising poverty, and routine water and electricity outages. Economic data are so discouraging that a parliamentarian suggested they be kept secret. 

How much of the worsening circumstances are due to the unrest caused by Amini’s death is difficult to quantify. The protests have certainly swelled the ranks of disaffected Iranians and shaken the regime, despite its brutal heavy-handedness. Prolonged and widespread protests in any country disrupt normal business activities, lower consumer spending, and erode investor confidence. Iran is no exception. The protests have overshadowed everything and paralyzed the regime’s ability to consider meaningful economic policies. The protests have also absorbed the regime’s attention and financial resources to quell dissent. Moreover, the administration of President Ebrahim Raisi is seen as the least competent since the 1979 revolution.  

The regime’s immediate Achilles’ heel is the cost of petrol subsidies, which is three times the country’s development budget. Removing them will further fuel inflation and increase discontent even faster. Keeping them as they are will simply bankrupt the regime. The “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement has certainly made economic policymaking much harder.  

—Nadereh Chamlou is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s empowerME initiative and an international development advisor.

8. Are there any signs of divisions within the political elite or security forces?

Achieving substantial political change in the Islamic Republic hinges on undermining elite cohesion, fostering top-level divisions, and eroding security forces’ loyalty. Currently, identifying such divisions is not possible. This doesn’t imply complete uniformity within the Iranian elite. Institutional complexity and disagreements among power centers are notable and enduring traits within the Iranian system. Yet, current disputes among political and security elites don’t seem to weaken their determination or ability to counter internal threats to the regime’s stability.

Even amid differing opinions within the conservative camp, the ruling political elite maintains internal cohesion. Unlike the shah’s elite, which held strong connections with the West and had the option to seek political and economic refuge outside Iran, the current ruling elite of the Islamic Republic has no alternative but to contend for power domestically. Furthermore, the regime retains security and repression support, primarily from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRCG), whose survival and capacity to pursue their political and economic interests primarily rely on the regime’s survival. The potential transition that could follow from Khamenei’s passing could expedite the IRGC’s empowerment and facilitate an alternative governing model. Yet the IRGC remains subordinate to the supreme leader and reliant on him.

—Raz Zimmt is a research associate at the Institute for National Security Studies and the Alliance Center for Iranian Studies at Tel Aviv University.

9. What has been the role of marginalized groups in the uprising, and how were they affected by it?

When it was difficult to project that Kurds in Iran could challenge the four decades of rule by the Islamic regime following their withdrawal from military confrontation in 1996, the catalyst for change emerged from the Kurdistan region, marking a pivotal shift in the country’s political landscape. This marked the first time in modern Iranian history that a revolutionary movement originated from marginalized groups in the periphery and subsequently spread to central cities.

A remarkable turn of events unfolded as protests erupted in Tehran and other central cities, showing solidarity with Kurdistan and Balochistan. The regime’s divide-and-rule strategy and disinformation campaigns began to crumble. The slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom,” which originated in Kurdistan, resonated across Iran, breaking down the four-decade-old barriers the regime had erected between central and peripheral regions.

However, the regime has perpetuated a divisive narrative, portraying Kurds and other national minority groups such as Baluches and Arabs as traitors and secessionists to justify its oppressive actions under the pretext of safeguarding national security and territorial integrity. This oppressive policy of the regime against these groups only fueled their determination to demand regime change. These groups have emerged as strongholds for organizing and empowering opposition forces against the regime, creating new opportunities for unity and change.

This uprising also underscored the deep-rooted challenges facing these populations. Overcoming historical distrust, fostering dialogue among different opposition groups, and achieving inclusivity in the struggle for a democratic Iran remain pivotal. The path ahead involves constructing intricate alliances, accommodating diverse ethnic and national minorities’ demands, and establishing a collective vision for a just and free Iran.

—Shukriya Bradost is an Iranian-Kurdish Middle Eastern security analyst.

All people suffer under the Islamic Republic’s rule, but my people struggle every day to avoid death and destruction. We are struggling for our children to have schools, food, water, medicine. 

Baluchistan is often described as impoverished. But we live on a land that is rife with wealth, a land where poverty is man-made.

On top of plundering our land, the regime has also systematically demonized my people, portraying us as thugs and terrorists, creating a chasm between us and the rest of the nation.

But despite local and international outlets ignoring our fight and our suffering, my people, peacefully protesting, with blood and tears, have preserved the flame of this revolution and preserved the spark of hope. With their courage and bodies, they have bridged that chasm.

With their perseverance, my people have proved to all that their heart beats for Iran. And despite years of marginalization and oppression, despite accounting for the highest casualty rate among protesters during the recent uprising and the regime committing atrocities like the Bloody Friday of Zahedan, Baluchistan has remained the beating heart of this revolution. 

My people are putting their lives on the line for the love of their motherland and for liberty because they have nothing to lose but their chains.

And the voice of a people who have nothing to lose shakes the foundations of every despot’s throne. The Islamic Republic has been no exception. That is why the regime fears Baluchistan. We have nothing to lose. We will keep fighting until the certain day of victory, the certain day of liberation.

—Fariba Balouch is a human rights defender from Iran’s Baluch ethnic minority.