Sooriya Arya, Master’s Student, American University of Central Asia (Kyrgyzstan)

Sooriya’s project aims to further promote and enhance the culture of writing and raising women’s voices as well as achieving a long-term goal that will lead to identifying women’s role in peace restoration and peace building. Media plays an important role as the main element of civil society. The media has been developed in two decades with so many sacrifices, patients and hard work put into efforts by both male and female journalists. There were 1070 female journalists in Afghanistan from 2001-2021, where there are none during the Taliban regime. These national and international journalists have written thousands of articles, newsletters, resolutions, memorandums, and data driven investigative and analytical pieces about various issues in particular peace deals and women’s role in the economic and social development as well much more is needed to be written. They have been spontaneously striving to write such pieces while confronting several challenges and threats. For sustainability and better data unification, protection and management as well as preserving articles authored by women journalists, writers, and academicians to be indications of evidence of struggles, a certain course of actions must be considered to move forward and have a data driven archive and portal.

As women are integral part of the society and have large contributions to the socio-economic, and other spheres of development, their authorship shall be protected and achieved in a unified manner where others can access and re-articulate the standards.

Sooriya envisions a collaboration with national and international women organizations, national and international media outlets, research organizations, Peace & War Institutes, and many more to share their pieces to be archived and their views will be published too. t will be the first dedicated websites to peace, security, and conflict resolution adding gender mainstreaming issues with the main focus on women’s perspective that is missing for a long time. The sustainability issue of the website will be considered serious and will be developed for the long term. The work on the development of such an important web portal will commence in one month.