Even under severe exclusion from public life, Afghan women continue to organize and lead. This reality framed the high-level event “What Leadership Do We Need for the Future?”, during which the Women’s Jirga for Afghanistan (WJA) was launched on March 8, 2026, on the margins of the Commission on the Status of Women in New York.
The initiative was presented as a women-led global process designed to place Afghan women’s lived realities, priorities, and policy demands at the center of international engagement on Afghanistan. Nearly five years after the Taliban’s takeover, speakers underscored that over one hundred edicts restrict women’s access to education, work, mobility, and public life. Recalling Afghanistan’s democratic past, Steering Committee member Fatima Gailani said: “I remember an Afghanistan where men and women received the right to vote on the same day. This is the Afghanistan we must reclaim.” The initiative underscores Afghan women not only as rights-holders, but as solution-builders shaping pathways for Afghanistan’s future.
Swiss Ambassador Pascale Baeriswyl, Dr. Stéphanie Lachat, Co-Director of the Swiss Federal Office for Gender Equality, our Vice President Dr. Sibylle von Heydebrand and Swiss Federal Councilor Elisabeth Baume-Schneider at the inauguration event at the Morgan Library in New York
Drawing on Afghanistan’s traditional consultative mechanism, the jirga, the initiative reclaims a historically male-dominated forum and repositions it as a women-led platform for political agency and collective strategy. As peacebuilder and scholar Palwasha Kakar emphasized, “Sustainable solutions cannot be imposed from outside; they must come from Afghan women themselves.” The Women’s Jirga seeks to translate priorities into policy recommendations and accountability measures for governments, multilateral institutions, and donors.
Speakers also warned that shifting geopolitical priorities and overlapping crises risk pushing Afghan women’s rights further to the margins. Steering Committee member Nadima Sahar noted: “Today, Afghanistan is the only country in the world where girls are banned from both secondary school and university.” Through regional consultations and a global convening later in 2026, the initiative aims to strengthen solidarity and articulate collective demands.
For international women’s organizations such as IAW, the Women’s Jirga illustrates how culturally grounded leadership can sustain women’s agency under repression. The launch made one point unmistakably clear: Afghan women are not only defending their rights — they are shaping the terms of future leadership.
The event was hosted by the Permanent Representatives of Albania, Cabo Verde, the Kyrgyz Republic, Switzerland, and Uruguay on behalf of the Circle of Women Ambassadors, in collaboration with the President of the United Nations General Assembly, H.E. Annalena Baerbock, and in the presence of Swiss Federal Councilor Elisabeth Baume-Schneider, H.E. Ambassador Pascale Baeriswyl, and Dr. Stéphanie Lachat, Co-Director of the Swiss Federal Office for Gender Equality.
Dr. Sibylle von Heydebrand, Executive Vice President of IAW
Arlesheim, Switzerland
