page_title: Sima Wali
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Sima Wali / Career
caption_attribution_description: English: Sima Wali leads a training seminar for Afghan refugees at a camp in Peshawar, Pakistan, in 1998.
context_page_description: Sima Wali was one of the foremost Afghan human rights advocates in the world, serving as an international campaigner for the liberties and empowerment of refugee and internally displaced populations. She was the Chief Executive Officer of Refugee Women in Development, Inc., a global non-profit organization that advocated for the civil rights of refugee women and girls fleeing from conflict and for their equitable reintegration into their societies. She was also the vice president of the Sisterhood Is Global Institute, the world’s first feminist think tank.
  Wali said that her personal experience as a refugee of the Soviet-Afghan War inspired her fight for the human rights of uprooted populations. Her testimonies throughout her career before the United Nations, the United States Congress and the U.S. State Department led to the appropriation of millions of dollars supporting Afghan women-led NGOs and the participation of women in Afghanistan's nascent democracy.
  She delivered the keynote address at the United Nations' celebration of International Women's Day in 2002, speaking alongside U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, First Lady Laura Bush, and Queen Noor of Jordan.
context_section_description: In 2001, Sima Wali was one of only three female delegates at the U.N.-organized Bonn Agreement in Germany, which formed a new Afghan government, following the fall of the Taliban. She served as a representative of King Mohammed Zahir Shah's Rome delegation.
  At the conference, Wali was pivotal in the creation of the Ministry of Women's Affairs, insisting that her male counterparts permanently include the ministry in the new administration. She was then nominated to lead that ministry, but declined in order to focus on her international activism. Wali went on to nominate Sima Samar to the position of Minister of Women's Affairs and also selected other women to serve in the interim government and ensured that gender-sensitive language was incorporated into the peace agreement.
  "Women must be actively involved in negotiating peace. As non-combatants, they are best equipped in building and sustaining a culture of peace. We will no longer stand to settle for decisions that are not gender-sensitive as we form the future of our war-ravaged nation." -Sima Wali in Bonn, Germany, 2001
  That same year, Wali served as the chief organizer of the Afghan Women's Summit for Democracy in Brussels, Belgium, an unparalleled gathering of its kind. The summit was convened with the help of Equality Now, UNIFEM, the Gender Advisor to the U.N. Secretary-General, along with a coalition of women's organizations. According to Equality Now, the Afghan Women’s Summit "adopted an historic expression of the long held dreams and aspirations of Afghan women, together with a list of concrete demands for immediate implementation relating to the reconstruction of Afghanistan."
  In June 2003, Wali was accompanied by Women's Edge co-founder and executive director Ritu Sharma on a human rights advocacy mission to Afghanistan. It was one of several trips Wali undertook to her homeland and to Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan, where she led dozens of training and empowerment seminars. Wali often spoke out against "the constant marginalization" of females in refugee and post-war societies, calling for training that helps those women to become leaders.
  According to the NGO Dropping Knowledge, "Wali has pioneered in developing program models aimed at empowering women affected by conflict, rebuilding post-conflict democratic civil society institutions, and advocating for human rights protection of women and their male counterparts."  In the 1990s, Wali played a strong role in supporting the development of NGOs in Bosnia and Croatia during the war in what was then Yugoslavia.
  She also played a key role in creating the Policy Council on Afghan Women, a coalition of non-governmental organizations that works to advance women's status in Afghanistan and to ensure that women there are equal recipients of U.S. development assistance funds.
  While she was in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, in 2005 to launch a project on building democracy among women, Wali narrowly escaped death at the hands of Taliban, Al-Qaeda, and Pakistani militants. Although she had received a death threat from the Taliban before, this was the closest she had come to being killed by forces opposed to her work.
  Since their ascent in the mid-1990s, Wali had been a vocal opponent of the Taliban's ideology. At the State of the World Forum in 1998, she said:
  "The Taliban is using culture and religion to keep women down, but there is nothing in my religion that teaches keeping women at home, not educating them, starving them, and withholding medical treatment from them, so they die. Islam teaches us to care for and protect women, so arguing the treatment of women in Afghanistan is okay because it's our culture and religion is an argument in a vacuum."
  She had also been a bold critic of what she felt was the American government's abandonment of Afghanistan between the 12 years that the Soviet-Afghan War ended and the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan began.
  "The United States helped create and support the 'Holy Warriors,' the most fanatic group that got the lion's share of the weapons from the U.S. It's played a major rol
caption: Sima Wali leads a training seminar for Afghan refugees at a camp in Peshawar, Pakistan, in 1998.
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