When Nila Ibrahimi got down to construct an internet site telling the tales of Afghan ladies, it wasn’t simply to provide them a voice.

The 17-year-old Afghan refugee was additionally decided to remind her fellow Gen Zs in her adopted nation, Canada, that they had been comparable – they even listened to Taylor Swift identical to different teenage ladies world wide.

“I wish to make them as actual as doable in order that different individuals, particularly younger individuals, Gen Z particularly, can put themselves of their footwear,” she advised the BBC.

Nila spoke to the BBC earlier this week, earlier than selecting up the Worldwide Kids’s Peace Prize beforehand gained by schooling campaigner Malala Yousafzai and local weather activist Greta Thunberg.

Nila’s is, maybe, not a simple job. The plight of Afghanistan’s girls and ladies can really feel a world away to younger individuals dwelling in Canada, the place Nila discovered a house after fleeing her residence nation because the Taliban took over three years in the past.

In that point, the Taliban have banned teenage ladies from schooling, banned girls from travelling lengthy distances with no male chaperone, and now ordered them to maintain their voices down in public – successfully silencing half the inhabitants.

The Taliban have defended the rulings to the BBC beforehand by saying they align with non secular texts.

“The variations [between Afghanistan and Canada] are huge, so it makes it exhausting for them to really feel linked,” acknowledges Nila.

That’s the reason she helped arrange HerStory – a spot the place she and others assist share the tales of Afghan girls and ladies in their very own phrases, each inside and overseas.

“So many instances we’re misplaced within the variations that we do not see the similarities and that is our aim, to point out that to the world.”

Nila Ibrahim was chosen from 165 nominees because the twentieth winner of the celebrated prize.

The award recognises not simply the work executed on HerStory, but in addition her ardour for standing up for girls’s rights in Afghanistan.

Nila’s first stand for girls’s rights got here in March 2021, when she joined different younger Afghan ladies in sharing a video of her singing on-line.

It was a small however highly effective protest in opposition to a decree by the then-director of schooling within the Afghan capital, Kabul, who tried to ban ladies over 12 singing in public. The tried order was by no means carried out.

“That was after I actually understood the significance of performing, the significance of talking up and speaking about these points,” explains Nila, who was a part of a gaggle known as Sound of Afghanistan.

However lower than six months later, every little thing would change – and, aged 14, she must flee along with her household because the Taliban arrived.

The household – who’re a part of Afghanistan’s Hazara minority – made the tough journey to Pakistan, the place they spent a yr earlier than being granted asylum in Canada.

It was, after 12 months with out schooling, a “breath of recent air”, she says.

There, Nila was reunited along with her mates from the singing group.

She was additionally invited to talk at occasions, about her experiences of Afghanistan, permitting her to advocate for all the women left behind.

Folks, she says, had been shocked at how eloquent she was. However Nila knew there have been tens of millions of ladies and ladies in Afghanistan who had been simply as succesful – though with much less entry to the alternatives she had.

“So I believed if my potential can shock these individuals and they do not know about how educated ladies from Afghanistan could be, what if that data was accessible to them?”

HerStory – the web site which grew out of this thought – began in 2023. It options interviews and first particular person accounts from each refugees and girls inside Afghanistan.

The concept is to create a secure house the place a gaggle of people that “grew up with the tales of the primary interval of Taliban and the way horrible the lives of ladies had been on the time” share their tales – and their “shock and anger” at discovering themselves in an more and more comparable state of affairs.

The anger is a sense Nila tries to maintain separate from her work.

“Once you see Afghanistan going again in time in 20 years, in fact it makes you concern,” she says.

“It is a shared feeling. It is a shared expertise for ladies wherever.”

The award, she says, is an opportunity for Afghan ladies to as soon as once more remind the world in regards to the restrictions they face every day – a reminder “to not neglect Afghan ladies”.

Marc Dullaert, founding father of the KidsRights Basis, which runs the award, identified {that a} “staggering” variety of younger girls had been at the moment being excluded from schooling.

“Nila’s inspirational work to offer them with a voice that will probably be heard internationally makes her a really worthy winner of this yr’s twentieth Worldwide Peace Prize,” he added.

It’s also a reminder that her era – whereas younger – could make a distinction, Nila hopes.

“I believe so many instances once we speak about points and totally different causes, we speak about it with the very grownup like method of oh, that is very severe,” she says.

“The world is a really scary place, however there’s an method that’s extra Gen Z-like… and we are able to take little steps and… do no matter we are able to.”