Begum TV, a school for Afghan women banned from accessing education

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https://english.elpais.com/international/2025-05-12/begum-tv-a-school-for-afghan-women-banned-from-accessing-education.html

Begum TV, a school for Afghan women banned from accessing education

Journalists broadcasting from Paris are sidestepping Taliban restrictions to connect girls in their home country to learning, health advice and entertainment

MARÍA D. VALDERRAMA
Paris - MAY 11, 2025 - 00:12 EDT

Wajiha Wahidi, a 25-year-old Afghan journalist, retouches her makeup before recording her first broadcast from the Begum TV studio in Paris. The premises, located in a northern neighborhood of the French capital, include a small newsroom, a recording studio and a meeting room, currently being fitted out with a green screen so that two programs can be filmed simultaneously. This expansion reflects the growth the Afghan television station-in-exile is experiencing, one year after its creation. Like the rest of her fellow journalists, Wahidi does not wear a veil and appears on-screen in street clothes, her face uncovered. She looks quite different from her audience of Afghan women. They watch her broadcasts via satellite television, which reaches one in two households in Afghanistan, a country ravaged by poverty where more than half of its 42 million inhabitants depend on humanitarian aid for their survival.

Wahidi worked as a journalist on national TV and radio stations before leaving Afghanistan in 2022, nine months after the Taliban regained power. After passing through Pakistan, she arrived as a refugee in Paris at the end of 2023 with support from Reporters Without Borders. Every one of the dozen journalists who work at Begum TV today are refugees. Their mission is crucial so that the 1.4 million girls who, according to UNESCO statistics, have been forced to stop attending school at the order of the fundamentalist regime, can continue to have some kind of access to education. It’s also important to the millions of women who have been expelled from universities and public-facing professions. Begum supplies them with information, psychological support and entertainment.

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“In Begum TV, I’ve found family again and I feel that I’m doing something useful for Afghan women,” says the journalist. Her work is bringing her out of the depressive episode of her exile, though it is also putting her loved ones in danger. Her father has been detained by the Taliban on various occasions and interrogated over his daughter’s unveiled appearances on the foreign TV channel.

Begum TV was launched in Paris by Afghan journalist Hamida Aman in March 2024, with economic support by the French Foreign Ministry, the United Nations and other public and private donations. It has become an escape route for millions of women in Afghanistan.

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