by Mary Adams, AWC The Hague
The New York Times reported in the summer of 2025 that Razia Jan, an Afghan-born US citizen, had died at 81 years old. I had no idea who she was, so I researched her life. After my research, I consider Ms. Jan a “Shero” (she-hero) for human rights and education.
Razia Jan was born on June 5, 1944, in Quetta, a city in present-day Pakistan. She was one of four children of Zainab Sardar and Sardar Ali Asghar Mohammadzai. She grew up in a large, multigenerational compound. She studied early childhood education at the Government College for Women in Quetta, where she earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees. In the late 1970s, she went to America to continue her studies. A decade later, she was a single mother in Massachusetts, working as a tailor and making clothing she designed and sold at craft festivals and fairs. She soon had her own business, Razia’s Tailoring and Dry Cleaners. She became the first woman to serve as president of the Duxbury, Massachusetts chapter of Rotary International, embodying their motto “Service Above Self.” Rotary clubs across the nation and the world would become key partners in her future philanthropic work.
Following the September 11th attacks, Razia organized donations of hundreds of handmade blankets to Ground Zero rescue workers, sent care packages to US troops in Afghanistan, and partnered with the US Army on Operation ShoeFly to deliver over 30,000 pairs of shoes to Afghan children. Her massive, hand- stitched memorial quilts honoring 9/11 victims were exhibited in major venues across the US, including the Pentagon Memorial Chapel and Madison Square Garden.
In 2007, after 35 years in the US, Razia returned to Afghanistan with a vision few people believed possible: a free private school for girls in the rural district of Deh Sabz, just outside Kabul. Despite pressure to make the school co-ed or for boys only, Razia stood firm: “The girls are the future of Afghanistan.”
Razia Jan founded Razia’s Ray of Hope Foundation on the belief that education is the key to positive, peaceful change for current and future generations. The foundation improves the lives of Afghan girls through community-based education, in addition to the provision of necessities like food and warm winter clothing. It is based on the understanding that we must empower girls and young women through both education and resources to work toward brighter futures in their own villages and beyond.
A critical success factor was to convincing a suspicious male community that girls needed to be educated. Ms. Jan was a natural diplomat and skilled linguist whospoke five of the region’s languages: Dari, Pashto, Urdu, Punjabi and Balochi as well as some Arabic. She won over village patriarchs through endless teas and meetings and sheer force of will. The Zabuli Education Center, the free school named for a donor, opened in 2008 with more than 100 girls enrolled in kindergarten through fourth grade; as more girls attended, more grade levels were added. One of the first lessons kindergartners learned was how to write their fathers’ names, a canny gambit by Ms. Jan to woo the fathers, many of whom were illiterate and signed legal documents with thumbprints.
Ms. Jan created a film called What Tomorrow Brings to raise money for her next dream: a free women’s college with a midwifery program, essential in a country with high infant and maternal mortality rates. The same men who had once opposed the lower school laid the foundation stones for the new building, which opened in 2017.
When the Taliban returned to power in 2021 and made it illegal for girls to be educated beyond the sixth-grade level, Ms. Jan shuttered the secondary school and the college. But she was determined to pack the grade school with more girls. She succeeded. In 2020, there were 703 students enrolled in kindergarten through 12th grade, including 57 girls in kindergarten. Today, in 2025, the Zabuli Education Center continues to educate over 800 girls each year in grades K–6, and remains a model for private girls’ education across the country.
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