We believe that women’s participation in the Afghan society is equally important as of men. Therefore, women empowerment and gender promotion and mainstreaming are important factors of development in Afghanistan. So to make women active participants of development there is undoubtedly need of proper initiatives.

SAF towards women’s empowerment mainly focuses on women’s access to healthcare and education. We assume the education and health care services as crucial tools in the empowerment of women, as healthy and educated women are more likely to be self-sufficient, and they will not be forced to marry young, or stay in abusive relationships.

We accordingly have implemented numerous developmental and humanitarian programs in different provinces of Afghanistan in order to create enabling environments for the empowerment of women and girls by addressing root factors affecting their access to health, education.  Moreover, we since 2008 have established an effective unit of Gender in the structure of SAF. We also have developed a gender policy. The gender unit is closely working with other departments and units of SAF to ensure that the gender policy is applied and gender balanced programs are followed by its employees at all levels.  The gender unit in SAF is involved in all steps of program/project development, implementation and assessments.