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Zahra Joya, an Afghan journalist, has been chosen as one of Time’s women of the year 2022 for her work of publicizing the tales of Afghan women’s life through her news agency, Rukhshana Media.
Joya has worked as a journalist for over a decade, first in local news agencies and subsequently as an investigative reporter for Kabul publications. She planned to be a prosecutor at first, but a university colleague recommended she do some work on a local newspaper for a few days. She was instantly hooked.
Joya founded Rukhshana Media with her own money in December 2020 as Afghanistan’s first feminist news agency, with the goal of being the first national news source where an Afghan woman from any area may see her own life reflected in the articles published every day.
Angelina Jolie interviewed Joya for Time’s Women of the Year issue, which also included human rights lawyer Amal Clooney, Olympian Allyson Felix, and poet Amanda Gorman. “Although it has never been easy to be a woman and a journalist in Afghanistan, now our reporting has been almost eradicated,” she told Jolie.
During the Taliban takeover in August 2021, Rukhshana Media collaborated with the Guardian on the Women Report Afghanistan series, which told the stories of women fleeing their homes as the Taliban advanced, as well as the plight of divorced and single mothers, attacks on female police officers, and the crushing of protests.
She had always thought that her generation of women were trailblazers, paving the way for others to follow. “Despite all the difficulties and dangers we faced, me and my friends believed that we were the future of our country, we were the ones who would change things and change the course of history,” she says. “I believed we were building a new Afghanistan.”
Joya, who is now a refugee in the United Kingdom, continues to manage Rukhshana Media from exile, disseminating the reporting of her team of female journalists across Afghanistan on life for women under Taliban control.
