SECRETARY BLINKEN: Good morning. (Applause.)
MS AMIRI: Good morning, everyone. It is my distinct honor to welcome you to the Alliance for Afghan Women’s Economic Resilience Summit. Today marks 898 days since Afghan girls were banned from secondary school, 890 days since Afghan women were told to stay home from work. As a woman, imagine being stripped of your profession and the capacity to earn and feed your family. As a parent, imagine looking into the eyes of your 12-year-old and telling her that she can no longer go to school and the door to her hopes and her dreams have closed. As a spouse or family member, imagine seeing the potential of the women and girls in your family squandered. As a citizen, imagine half of your population’s participation potential and economic contribution erased overnight.
We start at this somber note to anchor you in the surreal situation in Afghanistan and to really get you to understand the immense hurdles Afghan women are facing and what they are trying to overcome to get their right back to education and to work. On each of your seats and scattered throughout the venue, you have letters from schoolgirls from inside Afghanistan. We ask that you read these letters with a couple of key points in mind. One, Afghan women and girls are not asking us to see them as victims. They are asking you to recognize their dignified struggle for their rights. Two, they want us to engage them as partners. And three, they ask us to be guided by their creativity, their resilience, and their determination.
We have attempted to answer this call through the establishment of the Afghan Women’s Economic Resilience Initiative, which we launched in 2022. The alliance – or AWER, as we call it – is a public-private partnership between the Department of State and Boston University that catalyzes innovative and scalable collaborations between the private sector, civil society, academia, government, and Afghan women leaders to support Afghan women’s education, employment, and entrepreneurship. We launched it in 2022, and we are going to announce some of the efforts that we have been able to put in place.
Through the next few hours, you will hear from our partners, from Afghan women, and from a number of – about a number of initiatives that we have put together to capture the spirit and approach that Afghan women have asked us to be guided by. It is our fervent hope that you will join us in this effort. Everyone has a role to play.
And with that, I have the honor of welcoming U.S. Secretery of State Antony Blinken, without whose leadership and support none of this would be possible. Thank you very much. (Applause.)
SECRETARY BLINKEN: Thank you. Good morning. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the State Department.
To our Special Envoy Amiri, Rina, thank you not only for the introduction but thank you for the truly remarkable work that you, Ambassador Gupta, Special Representative West, Assistant Secretary Lu, and all of your teams are doing every single day to fight for Afghan women and girls.
So as Rina said, when she started, in sort of setting the picture that all of you know so well, it’s extraordinarily challenging, but today represents a real ray of light in some of the darkness. And again, that’s because of the work that so many of you are engaged in.
Thanks to our leadership team, thanks to Boston University, joining forces in 2022 to launch the Alliance for Afghan Women’s Economic Resilience. We have seen results, and it’s even more extraordinary given the environment in which those results have been achieved.
We developed this initiative to try to grow public-private partnerships that would benefit women and girls living in Afghanistan under a Taliban that severely represses their rights – and help Afghan women and girls who fled the country, including those who came here to the United States. Together…
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