Wilfrid Laurier University (WLU) students are helping Afghan women pursue higher education through a unique initiative. This program aims to empower these women and promote gender equality in education. Read the story.

When the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan in August 2021 Hasina Hamidi’s life came to a near stop.

The young university grad was working for a telecom company in Kabul at the time, but the Islamic extremists immediately banned women from working outside home.

“They really don’t care about the women,” said Hamidi. She was on the move again, soon after, thanks to the changing political fortunes of the Central Asian country.

Hamidi was born in an Afghan refugee camp in Peshawar, Pakistan. Her parents fled to Pakistan after the Taliban first rose to power in the 1990s and Hamidi attended elementary and high schools there. In 2013, the family returned to Kabul where Hamidi finished high school, completed an undergrad degree at Kabul University and then started working for an international telecommunications company.

“I had a very good job, a very good salary,” said Hamidi.

That was only possible because the American-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 quickly pushed the Taliban from power for providing a haven for Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida. The Taliban — Islamic extremists dominated by the Pashtun ethnic group — beat the international coalition of 34 countries in a 20-year-long war. More than 40,000 Canadians fought in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2014 where 158 were killed and many others wounded.

With the return of the Taliban, Hamidi decided to leave Afghanistan and did an master’s of business administration (MBA) in marketing at the Almaty Technical University in neighbouring Kazakhstan. After graduating from there, she heard about a group called International Students Overcoming War at Wilfrid Laurier University (WLU) in Waterloo. 

Since it was founded in 2013, the group provided 43 students from war-ravaged countries with full scholarships for degrees at WLU. Hamidi applied, was accepted and started her master’s in international public policy at WLU’s main campus in October 2023. There are two young women from Afghanistan studying at WLU now thanks to the student group and another two are expected to arrive in January.

Hamidi, who is now 28, regularly speaks with her 17-year-old sister, who remains in Kabul with their parents. The conversations are heartbreaking — since seizing power in August 2021, the Taliban banned women from schools, work outside the home, going outside without a male relative with them, medical treatment from male doctors and most recently, from speaking in public.

“The basic thing women in Afghanistan need is education,” said Hamidi. “Women should have all of their rights, but education is the first thing.” She would like to see her little sister studying in one of the clandestine schools for girls now operating in her country.

Hamidi told her story during an interview in the main theatre inside the Lazaridis School of Business and Economics at WLU. Sitting in the next row of seats was Hazrat Wahriz, an interpreter for Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada. The Toronto-based Wahriz is a former university professor in Kabul. He helped establish underground schools for girls in Afghanistan.

Wahriz came to Canada in 2013 and started recruiting women to teach in the clandestine schools years before the American-led coalition pulled out.

“We could predict that the Taliban were coming,” said Wahriz. “We expected them to treat women and girls the way they are right now.”

There are now hundreds of underground schools for girls operating in 20 of the 34 provinces in Afghanistan. They have hundreds of teachers and thousands of students. They are able to do this because of widespread support in the communities where they are located, said Wahriz.

After the first clandestine school for girls opened, word spread quickly and quietly. Within six months they had schools in four provinces. After two years they were in 17 provinces and today they have girls’ schools in 20 provinces.

“Right now we have 4,500 students and 175 female teachers,” said Wahriz. “We have graduates from these schools and somehow we have managed to find scholarships for them.”

The students learn math, physics, geometry, algebra and English, among other subjects. The network of clandestine schools published its own textbooks. Depending on where in Afghanistan a school is located, the textbook is in Pashto, Dari or Farsi, three of the dominant languages in the country. Classes are held in private homes.

In 2025, Wahriz hopes to work with two groups, Northern Lights Canada and For the Refugees, to bring some of those young women to Canada for post-secondary studies.

“We have a good network, we have mechanisms to secure the safety of our students and our teachers,” said Wahriz. “We have community support, without that it is impossible to have these activities.”

The relatives and friends living abroad support the students in the clandestine schools. There is no central organization in Afghanistan for the network and no communication among the illegal schools for girls. “The schools operate autonomously,” said Wahriz. “We were working 45 days after the Taliban came to power and we have not had a single incident.”

Wahriz and Hamidi were at the Lazaridis School Wednesday night to hear a presentation by Shams Erfan, who fled Afghanistan in 2014 after the Taliban threatened him and the school where he taught English. Erfan, who is now a writer in residence at George Brown College in Toronto, languished for years in the Pontianak prison camp in Indonesia.

He bribed prison workers to bring him a smartphone and started writing about the horrible conditions at the prison camp and posted the anonymous articles on the web. Through that, he became connected with a Burlington-based member of the Northern Lights Canada, which sponsors and support refugees.

After coming to Canada in March 2022, Erfan has worked to raise awareness of the Afghan refugees and the plight of women and girls remaining in the country. He is a member of the PEN Canada Writers in Exile program and is the PEN Canada writer in residence at George Brown College in Toronto.

Nothing underscores the failure of the Taliban’s virulent misogyny like the young Afghan women studying at WLU thanks to International Students Overcoming War, he said. “One day the Taliban will be eliminated, their ideology will be buried,” said Erfan at the start of his presentation.

Erfan is among the 54,730 Afghan refugees who came to Canada during the past three years, reported Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, with 1,220 of those people setting in the Kitchener and Waterloo area.

Terry Pender is a Waterloo Region-based general assignment reporter for the Record. Reach him at tpender@therecord.com.