At the age of just 14, Afghan rights activist Aziza Rahimzada has already surmounted legal hurdles preventing 25,000 refugee children from attending school, and cajoled authorities into providing tap water to a camp housing more than 100 families.
Now she has been nominated for the International Children’s Peace Prize — an award previously won by Malala Yousafzai — and, like her Pakistani counterpart, hopes to spread her message of universal education and fundamental rights for Afghanistan’s youth.
“These children are the products of war,” Aziza says during an interview with AFP from the Kabul camp for internally displaced people where she was born after her family fled fighting in the Parwan province in 2001.
“They have suffered a lot during the war years. I give them advice and council them on the value of education,” she says in Dari, wearing a black-and-white headscarf as she sits on the floor of the tiny mud brick home that houses her family of eight.
“Their families are also uneducated so sometimes we have to convince them too.”It is a thin line to walk, both for someone so young and without stirring a backlash in a conservative society unused to children, particularly girls, speaking up for themselves.
Aziza’s confidence impressed the Mobile Mini Circus for Children (MMCC), an international humanitarian group founded by Danes Berit Muhlhausen and David Mason, who moved to Afghanistan shortly after the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001.
Her persistence eventually led to a breakthrough allowing some 25,000 children living in Kabul’s 59 refugee camps to register in the capital, making them eligible to attend school.
She is among the final three nominees for the award along with Abraham Keita, 17, from Liberia and Jeanesha Bou, also 17, of Puerto Rico, with the winner announced in the Hague on November 9.
