How mountaineering is helping build Afghanistan’s newest leaders

Shogufa never thought she would be a role model for anyone. Growing up in a poor household in Kabul, Afghanistan, she didn’t have many advantages. She was set to follow the path taken by millions of Afghan girls: do housework, attend school when you can, try to finish high school, marry when you are told.

So when I asked Shogufa about her goals for the future back in 2016, she struggled to find something to say. She was just hoping to join Ascend because she liked sports and she had heard about us at a school presentation.

Fast forward to 2021. Shogufa is now the senior instructor in our leadership through sports program at Ascend. She is a role model to the 70+ girls who come to our sports center in Kabul every day to work out, to learn and to have fun together. Several of the girls say their families allowed them to join because they see Shogufa as a positive influence. She’s a new type of leader.

It’s risky to generalize too much about the inherent advantages of female leadership. But it’s well established that gender equality correlates strongly with peaceful and stable outcomes across the world, and that peace negotiations that include a meaningful role for women are much more likely to stick. But in a country like Afghanistan, where roles are strictly segregated according to gender, it is men who dominate the public space. It is male figures who are most often mentioned when girls urgently need female heroes to turn to for inspiration and ideas. After four decades of violence and conflict, the most common model of leader is the strongman, the warlord - and that applies to women too, many of whom adopted the same tactics to fight for their right to participate in today’s political scene.

All of this is pretty uninspiring for many of Afghanistan’s youth. Girls are looking for a different model.

That’s the need I hoped to address when I started Ascend in 2015, and developed an athletics-based leadership program for girls. Sport-for-development programs are increasingly popular around the world; ours takes advantage of Afghanistan’s spectacular terrain and uses mountaineering and rock climbing as a foundation for teaching leadership and civic engagement.

Our intensive training program is designed to create role models who are authentic change makers; they are ordinary girls who are getting a chance to shine. Most of our participants are teenagers from very humble backgrounds; they’re unlikely heroes. And yet they accomplish historic athletic feats, like one of our team members who became the first Afghan woman to summit Afghanistan’s highest peak, Mt Noshaq.

Climbing provides an environment to develop individual skills and strength; service projects are a way to practice collaboration and contribute to a community. These projects have become the heart of our program. Serving is empowering; it is an act of leadership. Our girls design and implement projects within their communities, creating bonds that help build a stronger fabric across Afghan society. They are teaching illiterate women, planting trees, picking up trash, painting murals in schools, and teaching disadvantaged children. As a result, they start to see themselves as capable of making change, not powerless victims.

Our team members are seizing the chance to become role models for others, and they're joyful, they're energetic, they're loud and boisterous, and given half a chance, and given permission to be themselves, they're amazing.

Some might ask, is it worth investing in girls when the political future looks so grim? Come what may in Afghanistan's political order, investing in girls, and giving them the tools to create positive change, will always be worth it. Empowering girls helps countries improve their economies, their prospects for peace, and their overall quality of life. As the Taliban gain ground in some parts of Afghanistan, and the world wonders what will happen as foreign militaries step away, at Ascend we are looking ahead with resolve. Alongside our partners in civil society, we are staying, because the work is in front of us. Afghan girls have nowhere to go, and it’s up to them to fight for a better future. We plan to stand with them.

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Find out more:
Girls Are Also Strong
A Tour of our Sports Center

Marina LeGree is the founding director of Ascend and has been working in Afghanistan and other post-conflict environments for two decades.