Angela Ghayour

Angela Ghayour is an Afghan teacher, education activist and founder of Herat School – a nonprofit online school educating Afghan women and girls. Based in the United Kingdom, her online education services focus on teaching and counseling women and girls in Afghanistan following the ban on women and girls schools by Taliban. She was honored in the BBC 100 influential women in the world in 2021 in recognition of her work.

Angela Ghayour was only eight years old when the 1992 Afghan civil war broke out. Her family fled their home city of Herat to Iran as refugees. In Iran, she was unable to enroll in school for five years due to her family's temporary visa status. she started school at the age of 13 after her father secured necessary documents. Every day after returning from school, Ghayour gathered 14 other fellow Afghan children who were not eligible to enroll in school in her father's garden and taught them writing, mathematics and other subjects.

Her family returned to Afghanistan following the ousting of Taliban from power. Ghayour trained and qualified as a secondary school teacher before moving to the Netherlands in 2018 and later to the UK. Following the fall of Afghanistan back to the Taliban and the ban placed on women and girls' schools, Ghayour established Herat online school where Afghan girls study secretly in their homes. Following an upsurge in number of enrollments in the school, Ghayour posted a message on Instagram requesting volunteer teachers to join the school and over 700 people around the world responded and joined as volunteer teachers. The volunteers include about 80 psychologists counseling the students.

Ghayour reported receiving death threats from Taliban and its supporters almost on a daily basis for offering online education service to women and girls banned from school. They would threaten her that they could find people who have Taliban ideology in the UK and would find her and kill her.