WADAN’ S QUIET DEFIANCE:
Building Opportunity for Afghan Women
By Bella Pich
Since the Taliban returned to power, reaching Afghan women with education and opportunity has never been harder. CAI ' s partnership with WADAN, a local Afghan organization, makes it possible.
It is easy to believe that the unimaginable happens somewhere else. For many of us, the idea of losing the right to attend school, work, move freely, or participate in public life is difficult to comprehend. For the women and girls of Afghanistan, however, these are not hypothetical concerns. They are the realities of daily life.
Since the Taliban returned to power in 2021, the rights of Afghan women and girls have been stripped away almost entirely. Girls are barred from school beyond grade 6. Women are barred from most employment, and increasingly from public life itself.
Where so many organizations have been forced out, the Welfare Association for the Development of Afghanistan( WADAN) has stayed, continuing its work even as the space to do it keeps shrinking. Founded in 2002, WADAN works to strengthen the capacity of Afghan citizens to build a healthy, peaceful, and developed Afghanistan, with a focus on sustainable development, social justice, human rights, and grassroots governance across the country ' s diverse communities.¹
" For WADAN, staying means standing with communities when support is most needed," explains Khalilullah Tawhidyar, WADAN ' s Education Manager. " Our commitment is not simply about implementing a project; it is about building trust and remaining accountable to the women and families we serve."
Central Asia Institute( CAI) has partnered with WADAN since 2022. Since then, the partnership has expanded access to education by covering teacher salaries, training, operational costs, and learning materials, while also delivering technical mentoring and entrepreneurship programming built around dairy processing and livestock rearing. Education remains the foundation of this work. The Taliban ' s ban on girls ' education above grade 6 has forced an estimated 2.6 million girls out of school.² Millions more never reach a classroom at all, and with each year that passes,
24 | 2026-2027 JOURNEY OF HOPE
CENTRAL ASIA INSTITUTE