WAW's Staff, Board of Directors and Advisory Committee

Manizha Naderi, Executive Director was born in Kabul, Afghanistan in 1975 and was raised in New York and New Jersey. She has a BA in English Language Arts from Hunter College. Until very recently she lived amid the Afghan community in Queens, NY with her daughter and was a member of the Queens General Assembly. She currently lives in Kabul, Afghanistan, where she is directing WAW’s Afghanistan work and initiating a groundbreaking project in that country: building safe houses and family guidance centers for women who are victims of domestic violence or who are about to be released from prison after having served time for “moral crimes”. 


NY Office Staff
Shakila Hamidi, Program Manager
Naheed Samadi, Case Worker
Shazia Akberzai, Office Manager

Afghanistan Office Staff
Jamila Ghairat, Administrator
Shahbibi Halimi, Program Manager
Jamila Zafar, Social Work Supervisor
Zarmina Akbary, Social Worker
Roya Amin, Social Worker
Belquis Husseini, Social Worker
Sayed Ali Murtazawi, Social Worker
Sayed Ahmad Mossavi, Social Worker
Khalida Sikander, Lawyer
Maryam, Lawyer
Maryam Shah, Administrative Assistant
Shir Jan Tahuri
Daoud Amin
Homaira Razvi, Shelter Caretaker
Qamar, Shelter Caretaker
Noorullah, Guard
Habibullah, Guard
Farid-guard


Board of Directors
Esther Hyneman spent her professional life teaching literature, Women's Studies and Gender Studies at the Brooklyn Campus of Long Island University. She retired from the classroom last August. She now devotes much of her time to her painting, where she struggles to combine her interest in realism, her appreciation for the way women have been rendered in Western art, her commitment to feminism, and her belief in the transformative power of visual beauty. She joined WAW when searching for a way to turn her long frustration about the women of Afghanistan into practical action

Sunita Viswanath (formerly Mehta) Sunita is co founder and board member of Women for Afghan Women, and editor of Women for Afghan Women: Shattering Myths and Claiming the Future (Palgrave/St. Martins Press, October 2002). She is a board member of Women in Media and News, and former board member of SAKHI for South Asian Women and the Center for Anti-Violence Education. She also served on the founding board of the Third Wave Foundation. Sunita worked for many years as Dierctor of Grants and Programs at The Sister Fund, where WAW was founded and incubated. Ms. Mehta has a B.A in Mathematics from Douglass College , Rutgers University and a MA in Sociology from SNDT Women's University, Mumbai , India .  She lives in Brooklyn , NY with her husband Stephan and their three sons Gautama, Akash, and Satya.  Until recently, Sunita was Executive Director of Funders Concerned About AIDS.  However, she has recently resigned from that position in order to spend her time on her two loves: her family and WAW!

Masuda Sultan has been working on the economic and political empowerment of Afghan women through a variety of roles over the last four years.  She serves  on the advisory board of the Business Council for Peace, an organization that helps women build sustainable businesses in post-conflict countries. She is a member of the Women Waging Peace network and  co-authored the report on Afghanistan entitled, From Rhetoric to Reality: Afghan Women on the Agenda for Peace. Ms. Sultan produced and narrated "From Ground Zero to Ground Zero", the first documentary on Afghan civilian casualties to air on US television, later shown in Europe and Japan. She is a contributing author to Women for Afghan Women: Shattering Myths and Claiming the Future and author of the recently released, My War At Home. She recently completed her Master's in Public Administration at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Masuda is currently living in Afghanistan and is working as Advisor to the Ministry of Finance.

Fahima Vorgetts has been working for many years for women's rights in Afghanistan. In Kabul, she served as director of a women's literacy program and studied chemistry in graduate school. She has testified about Taliban abuses before the United Nations and other organizations. Ms. Vorgetts runs an import business and owns a cafe on the West Coast, with portions of profits from her businesses going to the women of Afghanistan.


Advisory Committee
Belquis Ahmadi first joined the Global Rights (formerly International Human Rights Law Group) Women's Rights Advocacy Program team in 2000 as a New Voices Fellow sponsored by the Academy for Educational Development. Now the Global Rights Afghanistan Program Coordinator, Ms. Ahmadi works with our field staff in Kabul to design and implement program activities, and handles program management responsibilities at our Washington Headquarters.

Ms. Ahmadi was selected to participate in Afghanistan's recent loya jirga, convened to determine the new government. Following the events of September 11, 2001, she participated in the major conferences convened in Europe to discuss and plan for the future of Afghanistan, including the Afghan Women's Summit and the Roundtable on Women's Leadership in Afghanistan (both in Brussels), and the Civil Society Conference (in Bonn). Ms. Ahmadi has also participated in various university panel discussions on women's rights and the future of Afghanistan including the University of Wisconsin (Madison) and American University (Washington, DC) and St. Louis University.

Ms. Ahmadi has been working for the rights of women in Afghanistan since 1990 and maintains extensive contact with women leaders, academics, journalists, writers, doctors and grassroots community leaders inside Afghanistan. She specializes in peace building, with an emphasis on education programs for Afghan women and youth. Since 1996, Ms. Ahmadi has designed several programs for Afghan youth to highlight the need for peace and democratic values in Afghan society.

Ms. Ahmadi earned her internationally-focused LLM in Women's Human Rights from Georgetown University. She has written extensively on the rights of Afghan women and has raised the issue of violence against Afghan women at the United Nations Commission on Human Rights and before other international policy fora. Ms. Ahmadi is fluent in English and the Afghan languages of Dari and Pashtu, and has working knowledge of French and Urdu.

Rina Amiri was born in Afghanistan. She is actively working with the Afghan Diaspora community to establish sustainable peace. In November 1999 she served as one of the organizers for the Emergency Committee of the Loya Jirga in Rome. She is a member of the Afghan Women's Network and an advisor to the Afghan Women's Educational Center in Pakistan. Ms. Amiri was one of the chief architects of Women Waging Peace, a network of women peace-builders from around the world.  Ms. Amiri is currently the Senior Associate for Research at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

Sara Amiryar received her bachelors degree from Kabul University and her masters degree from Georgetown University in International Affairs. She is currently the Associate Director of Affirmative Actions Program, the Coordinator of the American with Disabilities Act, and a Certified Mediator at Georgetown University. She is the Vice President of the Central Asia Research and Development Center. Ms. Amiryar served as President of the Afghan Association for Solidarity and Cooperation from 1994-1996. She participated in the Afghan Women's Summit for Democracy as well as the UNIFEM Conference on Afghanistan in Brussels.

Zohra Yusuf Daoud was the first and last woman to hold the title of Miss Afghanistan. She currently lives in Malibu, California and hosts a talk show, 24 Hour Voice of Afghanistan. Ms. Daoud frequently organizes events celebrating Afghan art and culture and is the Director of Culture and Communications of the Afghan Women's Association of Southern California.

DECEASED - Malalai Kakar was the only female police officer in Kandahar when WAW members went to Kandahar in 2003.  She worked as a police officer since the age of 15, ceasing her career only during the years of the Taliban.  She attended WAW's third annual conference, Women and the Constitution: Kandahar 2003 and helped WAW release of a female prisoner in Kandahar.  Malalai lived in Kandahar with her husband and six children until she was killed in a drive-by shooting in 2008. All in WAW mourn her loss, and continue to be inspired by her courageous spirit.
 
Helena Malikyar is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Middle East Studies at New York University.  Helena holds an MA in near eastern languages and literatures from NYU and a BA in Middle East and South Asian Studies from the University of Arizona. Her academic area of research is Afghanistan, with a particular focus on Afghan administrative history, modernization and reform processes. She has also conducted research and published a number of articles on the issue of women's status in Afghanistan. Helena has worked with several Afghan political organizations, including the former king of Afghanistan's group in Rome.

Mariam A. Nawabi is an attorney practicing in Washington, D.C. in the areas of commercial litigation and intellectual property law.  Mariam received her Juris Doctorate degree cum laude from Georgetown University School of Law in 1999 and graduated summa cum laude from George Mason University in 1995, majoring in International Studies.  Mariam has been doing humanitarian work for Afghanistan since 1993.  She was appointed to the Legal Affairs Working Group in 2002, advising on the issue of women's rights in the new constitution of Afghanistan.  Mariam is on the Advisory Board of Children of War and a member of Nooristan Foundation and Humanity in Crisis.  Mariam is currently coordinating a commercial law reform project for Afghanistan in order to promote and improve the legal climate for private investment and business in the country.

Katha Pollitt is an essayist, poet and associate editor of The Nation. Ms. Pollitt is the author of "Reasonable Creatures: Essays on Women and Feminism" and "Antarctic Traveler," which won the National Book Critic Circle Award.  Her column, "Subject to Debate," appears bimonthly in The Nation. She is a regular reviewer for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Republic, Grand Street, Time and other publications. Her poetry has appeared in such publications as The New Yorker, Paris Review, The New Republic, The Yale Review and Poetry. Ms. Pollitt, who lives in New York, has won fellowships from the Guggenheim and Whiting Foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts, and is the recipient of a National Magazine Award in Essays and Criticism.

Sima Wali is the President and CEO of Refugee Women in Development, an international institution focusing on women in conflict and post conflict reintegration issues. She is a native of Afghanistan. Her personal experience as a woman and a refugee inspires her work for uprooted women's human rights. She advocates nationally and internationally for refugee women and girls whose rights have been violated. Ms. Wali is the recipient of Amnesty International's 1999 Third Annual Ginetta Sagan Fund Award in recognition of her work on Afghan women and human rights.