Zahra Joya is an Afghan journalist and founder of Rukhshana Media. She lives under physical threat for employing women reporters in Afghanistan in defiance of the Taliban.
Zahra was five years old when the Taliban came to power and banned girls’ education. Determined to go to school, she dressed as a boy and calling herself “Mohammed”, walking two hours each way to class.
After the US invasion of 2001, she could study openly as a woman and trained as a lawyer before becoming a journalist in 2011.
In 2020 she started her own company, named Rukhshana, after a 19-year-old girl in rural Afghanistan. In 2015 the Taliban stoned her to death. Zahra says she established the news agency as a reminder not to forget her.
The Taliban takeover of 2021 put Zahra’s own life in danger and she joined those fleeing oppression in the British evacuation from Kabul.
Now based in London, she works tirelessly to give voice to the women of Afghanistan by publishing stories from her reporters who work in secret in the country.
In 2022, she was named a Time Woman of the Year.
The actress and campaigner Angelina Jolie who interviewed Zahra for Time magazine, said she greatly admired her work and that she was making a real difference for the women of Afghanistan.
Rukhshana Media was awarded the Foreign Press 2022 Award from the US Foreign Press Correspondents Association and the Nieman Foundation’s Louis M. Lyons Award for Conscience and Integrity in Journalism.
Zahra was recognised as a Goalkeepers Changemaker Winner from the Gates Foundation in 2022.
In the UK, Zahra has been honoured with the Marie Colvin Award, named as one of BBC’s 100 Women in 2022 and the Sandford St. Martin Trust Award. In Spain, she was honoured with the Llibertat d’Expressio 2022. In 2022, she was awarded the One Young World Award and has been published in the Sunday Times and Guardian newspapers.
She is painfully separated from her parents, who are in exile in another country, and lives with her siblings in London.
