These women haven’t won Nobel Prizes or hit the speaking circuit . But they’re pushing boundaries, changing norms, saving lives, and speaking up — even where bad news dominates the headlines.
The Afghan Women's Network pushes strong and smart for women's rights
The Network was founded in 1995, the same year the Taliban rose to power. The Taliban eventually stripped women of many basic rights they'd enjoyed in Afghanitan. Today, the Afghan Women's Network --and other active women's groups like Equality for Peace and Development -- is on the front lines of the fight to improve the status of women. Its members, all civil society groups, have helped enact a law to eliminate violence against women, overturn a legal provision threatening impunity for domestic violence, and tamp down a move to bring back stoning.
The Advocacy Project / Via Flickr: advocacy_project
The Speed Sisters break boundaries, even where informal borders hem them in
Palestine's first all-women racing team proves women can literally run circles around men. Because of Israel's limitations on movement, the Speed Sisters compete on makeshift tracks inside the West Bank — on Arafat’s former helicopter pad in Bethlehem, in the vegetable markets of Jenin, and next to a prison near Ramallah, to name but a few of their race sites as listed on their web page. And they win: In 2011, Noor Daoud became the first Palestinian to win first place in an Israeli race.
Speed Sisters / Via speedsisters.tv
Marguerite Barankitse, a survivor of genocide in Burundi, saves 20,000 children
In 1993, at the height of a genocide in Burundi, Marguerite Barankitse tried to talk sense into the killers in her village. They decided to punish her by tying her, naked, to a chair and making her watch the slaughter of her neighbors in a church. Far from embittering her, the experience devoted Barankitse to peace, and when she escaped, she also sheltered and cared for 25 orphans. Since then, Barankitse and her organization, Maison Shalom ("House of Peace"), have cared for more than 20,000 orphans and vulnerable children. Barankitse also runs a hospital, schools, and a microfinance program.
Mummy Yuli gives Indonesia's aging trans population a cozy home
In Jarkarta, Yulianus Rettoblaut — warmly known locally as Mummy Yuli — is building a home for the aging transgender community in Indonesia, which has has an estimated three million trans citizens. Traditionally, elderly Indonesians are taking in by their own families, but trans people are often shunned and reduced to begging. Right now, Mummy Yuli's old folks' home has a wait list 800 deep.
Romeo Gacad/AFP / Getty Images
