Co-sponsored by the Slater International Center and the Wellesley Centers for Women (WCW), we celebrate International Women’s Day at Wellesley College! The 2022 International Women’s Day theme is gender equality and #BreaktheBias.

Our guest speaker will be Pashtana Dorani. Dorani is a visiting fellow at the Wellesley Centers for Women. She is an Afghan human rights activist and community development expert whose focus is girls’ education. At WCW, she is continuing her research to help Afghan women and girls pursue education and support the health of Afghan mothers and babies.

Dorani is the founder of LEARN Afghanistan (@LearnAfg), a grassroots organization established to safely and securely provide education to girls through a distributed network of tablet computers using an offline platform. Through LEARN, she has developed models on education, healthcare, and menstrual hygiene management. LEARN has educated 7,000 girls and boys in Kandahar, Afghanistan, trained more than 80 teachers in digital literacy, and trained 700 girls in menstrual hygiene management.

Dorani was named an Education Champion by the Malala Fund for her outstanding work to advance Afghan girls’ education. She was a global youth representative for Amnesty International and served on a climate change committee of the United Nations Development Programme. She is also a winner for the 2021 Tällberg-SNF-Eliasson Emerging Leader prize, which recognizes leaders who have addressed complex global challenges in innovative ways. Dorani was among the BBC’s and Time’s 100 influential women lists of 2021.

Please register for this IWD event, open in-person only to students, staff, and faculty in the Wellesley College testing protocol with their College ID. If you would like to attend virtually, you will receive a Zoom link after registering. This event will also be recorded.