Zahra Joya is an Afghan journalist, exiled in the UK, who founded Rukhshana Media news agency to publicize the untold stories of women and girls in Afghanistan.
Born in 1992, in the Bamyan Province of Afghanistan, when the Taliban was in power, she had to dress as a boy to attend school. Later on in 2001, when the USA and allies ousted the Taliban, she enrolled in law school in Kabul. But after hearing the untold stories of her female classmates, she decided to become a journalist.
This led her to found Rukhshana Media in 2020, Afghanistan’s first feminist news agency, which was named after a young women who was stoned to death by the Taliban in 2015.
Just before Afghanistan fell to the Taliban in May 2021, she collaborated with The Guardian and published the Women Report Afghanistan project, to expose how women were being treated in the country. After being critical of the Talban, she fled to the UK, where she continues to run Rukhshana Media channel.
In 2022, Zahra was selected as one of 12 women in The Times’ Women of the Year Award and was chosen by the BBC’s 100 Women series. She also received a Change Maker Award from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.