Shaharzad Akbar

Afghanistan

MPhil Development Studies, 2011
Wolfson College
Funding: Hoffmann

Shaharzad Akbar is currently the Executive Director of Rawadari, an Afghan human rights organisation that aims to deepen and grow the human rights culture of Afghanistan.

She was previously Deputy on the National Security Council for Peace and Civilian Protection and Chairperson for the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission. Shaharzad also worked as Senior Advisor to the Afghan President on High Development Councils (August 2017-August 2018) coordinating the prioritization of development projects and programs for high level decision-making. Prior to this, Shaharzad was Country Director for Open Society Afghanistan (Sep 2014-July 2017).

Before this, she was partner and chief operating officer with QARA Consulting, a firm owned and run by young Afghans in Kabul which she co-founded in 2010, an analyst for the Free and Fair Elections Foundation, and a journalist for BBC Afghanistan. Born in Jawzjan, Afghanistan, Shaharzad lived for a few years as a refugee in Pakistan during the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

She completed an MPhil at Oxford University as a Weidenfeld scholar in 2011 (the first Afghan woman to do postgraduate studies at Oxford) after she obtained her BA (cum laude) in anthropology from Smith College in the U.S. Shaharzad’s writing has appeared in international and Afghan media including Washington Post, Newsweek and Al Jazeera, CNN, and academic journals.

Shaharzad is based in Oxford, UK.

“My time at Oxford and WHT helped me improve my confidence, delve deeper into philosophical and historical debates around leadership, adapt a critical sense to development, all important for my work since.”