For the future of Afghan women

Medica Afghanistan

medica mondiale has been working on a range of projects to benefit women and girls in Afghanistan since 2002. The organisation’s workers there offer them psychosocial, medical and legal support, aiming to provide practical measures to help them deal with the trauma they experienced. At the same time, women’s rights within Afghan society need to be strengthened. The project work mainly takes place in the cities Kabul, Herat and Mazar-i-Sharif. Support provided in Kandahar had to be discontinued at the end of 2008 because of the difficult security situation.

In 2011, the Afghan workers took over full control of the work. An independent Afghan NGO was founded in Kabul: Medica Afghanistan - Women Support Organisation. medica mondiale continues to work very closely with Medica Afghanistan, providing both advice and funding.

Women in Afghanistan today

More than three decades of war have left deep scars on Afghan civil society. The fall of the Taliban was in 2001 but peace has still not fully returned to the country. After initial improvements, women’s lives have regressed again in recent years. Their everyday life has been seriously affected by the increasing influence of extremely conservative and fundamentalist fractions in the government on the one hand and the insurgents becoming stronger again on the other. Women in Afghanistan generally experience high levels of everyday violence and a lack of rights within their families. Added to this, there is increasing pressure on women who stand up for their rights.

Psychosocial counselling and training

In several consultation rooms in Kabul and Herat, counsellors from Medica Afghanistan offer individual and group counselling for women who are suffering from the mental or physical consequences of sexualised and other forms of violence. There are hardly any contact points for traumatised women in Afghanistan so the demand for counselling services is high. Furthermore, there is a lack of qualified personnel with specific training in providing care for survivors of sexualised violence. For this reason, Medica Afghanistan continually offers training programmes for female professionals who work in medical and psychosocial professions. The objective: To provide well-founded counselling training to female professionals looking after women who have to cope with rape and other types of violence as part of their daily lives.

Training medical specialists

In Afghanistan, the hospitals often don’t offer appropriate medical provision for women, especially those who experienced violence. It is still the case that a husband generally decides if his wife will receive medical treatment or not. Many women only turn to a doctor when the health problems they suffer as a consequence of violence become very serious.

This is why Medica Afghanistan has been working to ensure an improved, trauma-sensitive approach to health care for women in state-run Afghan hospitals. Since 2002, the organisation has been running intensive further training and awareness-raising courses for medical staff in the Afghan health system. A significant practical result of this work is the setting up of special consultation rooms in three hospitals in Kabul and Herat to provide a sheltered environment where women and girls can speak to the health specialists confidentially.

Legal assistance for Afghan women and girls

The Afghan constitution of 2004 stipulates the equality of men and women. However, the prevailing administration of justice is still characterised by Islamic jurisdiction based on a conservative interpretation of the Sharia. Traditional justice is also particularly prevalent in rural areas. In everyday life, the choice of the particular jurisdiction applied is often very arbitrary. A law to combat violence against women came into force in 2009 but judges very rarely apply it.

Human rights – for women, too!

The central political call of Medica Afghanistan: To enforce the statutory rights of women in everyday life. The status of Afghan women is still determined by very conservative traditional rules of behaviour – and not by the equal status of men and women as enshrined in the new constitution. One of Medica Afghanistan’s aims is to ensure the enforcement of new laws to combat violence against women. The organisation is working together with national and international women’s and human rights organisations to achieve this and other aims, such as reforming family law and ending the practices of forced and child marriages.