Great news: my daughter Elizabeth is now CEO of Charmaghz, an international non-profit development organization. Now for the bad news: it’s been outlawed, shut down, by Afghanistan’s Taliban regime, hostile to its mission of girls’ education, which they’ve forbidden past sixth grade.
Most Afghans actually disagree with that. Charmaghz started there about eight years ago, deploying a fleet of mobile libraries bringing books to children, with great success and popularity. Managing to continue even under the Taliban; but now the regime has cracked down. The organization couldn’t even save the vehicles.
Elizabeth’s challenge is to re-invent Charmaghz and its mission, converting it to provide girls’ educational services remotely. Given the harsh exigencies of life in Afghanistan, especially for females, this is a great challenge indeed. But she’s tackling it with determination and elan.
Now 33, her decade’s experience with a variety of work in the non-governmental sphere makes her well-equipped for this. She’s lived in Afghanistan, and first connected with Charmaghz as a volunteer. Now its founder, Freshta Karim, has stepped back. Elizabeth will be leading it from her London home base.
Charmaghz’s seriousness is attested by its chief donors; two are heroes of mine. One has been the Malala Fund. Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai was a near-martyr for the cause of girls’ education in this region — shot in the head for it — now making this her life’s mission.
Another key funder has been billionaire George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, working globally for human rights, democracy, equity, and justice. Which, sad to say, makes it very needed — and highly controversial — in today’s world. (Soros being Jewish doesn’t help. Hungary’s Orban regime (and ours) have cast him as a bête noire.)
Girls’ education in less developed countries is crucial to their progress. In fact, in such places, girls often do not get much learning. But when they do, with enough reaching a certain grade level, that’s been shown to be positively transformative for their societies. So this has been central in my own philanthropy. What Elizabeth is undertaking is an important, noble effort for good in a world so beset by evil.
