Drimonis: Canadian initiative helps educate Afghan women
The Resilient Futures program by Montreal non-profit For the Refugees aims to provide Afghan women post-secondary education in Canada.
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When Montreal immigration lawyer Gabrielle Thiboutot was beginning her career in 2021, thousands of miles away in Afghanistan, women her age were being deprived of one.
After Kabul fell to the Taliban, 20 years of progress was suddenly undone. “I had just started as an immigration lawyer,” Thiboutot says, “and we were suddenly swamped with messages from desperate people trying to get out.”
Under the Taliban, the rights of women and girls were eliminated. Girls over age 12 were forbidden to attend school; educated women risked arrest, torture and death.
Deeply troubled, Thiboutot felt compelled to act. She started working with For the Refugees, a non-profit founded in 2016 by three Montreal lawyers, and would soon be introduced to Sooriya, a women’s rights activist, journalist and lawyer who’d fled Kabul after the Taliban re-emerged. “She was about my age, and she had a target on her back.”
Thiboutot, who is 27, has since been heavily involved in For the Refugees’ Resilient Futures program, which aims to provide eligible Afghan women a path to safety through post-secondary education opportunities in Canada. Sooriya will be the first person the initiative helps. “I reached out to a University of Ottawa professor,” Thiboutot says, “and I was able to secure admission from the university with a partial scholarship.” What started as an effort for one woman eventually expanded to seven.
“We kept knocking on doors and we were able to get 15 scholarships worth $500,000,” she says. With For the Refugees expecting even more women, it needs to raise money to sponsor them and cover their tuition and living expenses. The first cohort arrives in September, from all over the world, but as international students, they must have between $25,000 and $30,000 for their studies before being admitted to Canada. Donations to the Resilient Futures campaign that launched this week can be made directly on the website.
Among the seven women are a doctor and an engineer and “Fatima,” who is pursuing a master’s in international public policy. She spoke to me under condition of anonymity because her five younger siblings are still back home. Her parents, vocal proponents of women’s education, have both been abducted and she doesn’t know their whereabouts.
Fatima is grateful for the solidarity. “It’s amazing to me that while our own countrymen are trying to harm us, people who don’t know us, from other corners of the world, are standing up to help us,” she says. “That’s called humanity.”
With billions invested in Afghan development efforts over 20 years — roughly between the U.S.-led invasion and the international withdrawal in 2020 — Canada’s presence and engagement opened the door to new opportunities for women. The return of the Taliban to power erased that progress. For the Refugees wants Ottawa to create policy to assist Afghan women’s education here that would extend its legacy. “We have the moral obligation to help them,” Thiboutot says. “We invested so much in that country, and we just left?”
She says she admires the women’s resiliency. “They’re all teaching women back home online because they know the gender gap will only grow while the Taliban remain in power.”
Fatima, 24, tells me she can’t wait to go home. “The day the Taliban leave,” she says, “the next day I will return. Every Afghan I know is waiting for that day to return to our country.” In the meantime, education is essential. “We don’t want fancy clothes; we can survive in a tent. But we want an education. Without it, moving ahead is not possible.”
For Thiboutot, who has spent the better part of three years on this project, the campaign is a celebration. Everything finally coming together.
“I hope that if one day I’m ever in that kind of situation — where my human rights were being denied — other women would help me too.”
Toula Drimonis is a Montreal journalist and the author of We, the Others: Allophones, Immigrants, and Belonging in Canada. She can be reached on X @toulastake
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