Caught between Trump and the Taliban!
Dear Zan Times reader!
We were a group of journalists with little to no fundraising experience when we started Zan Times in August 2022. We were confident in one thing: We knew how to tell stories.
For the past three years, our team of women journalists have reported on critical issues: uncovering sexual violence perpetrated by the Taliban as well as forced marriage, the epidemic of gender-based violence, and the systematic targeting of politically active women. We spent a year investigating the story of a famous female YouTuber who was killed by the Taliban, who later covered up her murder.
We are able to do this time-consuming work because we work with a group of professional women journalists in Afghanistan. And as part of our work, we are training more women journalists, especially in provinces where there are no women journalists. We want to reach every corner of Afghanistan.
Like most Afghan media, Zan Times derived a significant part of its funding from international non-governmental organizations. These funds are frozen or suspended following recent executive orders by the U.S. President Donald Trump, putting our work at immediate risk.
That is why we launched a crowd fundraising on GoFundMe to call for support.
We need to raise $120,000 to continue reporting and training a group of women journalists in Afghanistan.
At Zan Times, our mission is to empower Afghan women journalists to write our own stories and shape our own future. For us, empowerment means providing them with knowledge, skills, equipment, and, most importantly, an opportunity to show what they can do.
Why does it matter?
Since the Taliban took over, four out of five women journalists working in Afghanistan have been forced out of the profession. Schools and universities are closed to women and girls and there is no official training for women to become journalists. That’s why in 2024, we used Zoom webinars to train 30 women journalists in Afghanistan. This year, we have selected 35 Afghan women. That training is now in jeopardy due to a halt in our funding. You can make a difference in the lives of these women journalists by supporting our fundraising campaign.
Any donation, big or small, goes a long way to support our work.
Thank you for supporting us in our fight for human rights and press freedom.
