Afghan-American educator and campaigner for girls' education in Afghanistan. She died on July 20th 2025, aged 81.
Razia Jan grew up in Afghanistan in the 1940s and 1950s in a well-off, liberal family. She went freely anywhere, never covered her head and even rode a bike. She attended school and then college, studying early education, and ended up in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
She stayed in America after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. She brought up her son Lars alone, started a tailoring business on Boston's South Shore and rose to be president of her local Rotary chapter.
After the September 11th 2001 terrorist attacks her attention turned back to Afghanistan. She helped send over 30,000 pairs of children's shoes, but concluded that only education could assure a brighter future for the country.
She founded the Zabuli Education Centre, which opened in 2008 in Deh'Subz, a cluster of seven poor villages 30 miles north of Kabul. She persuaded the Afghan Ministry of Education to donate the plot. Funding came largely from American Rotary friends. The school had two storeys and 14 rooms.
More than 100 girls enrolled in the first year. By 2020 the number had reached 800. In 2016 Zabuli celebrated its first graduates from 12th grade. She established a training institute where graduates could become midwives or teachers. The school fed and clothed the girls, and sometimes their families, free of charge. It also had a tech lab with a computer and internet access, and a mobile library that continued to function for housebound young women.
When the Taliban returned to power in 2021, classes beyond sixth grade were stopped. The training institute was also closed.
An acclaimed documentary about the school, "What Tomorrow Brings", was made in 2016. She was widely known as "Auntie Razia" to her pupils.
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