Ashoka
Ashoka Fellow Sakena Yacoobi Awarded World Citizen Educator Award
Ashoka Fellow Dr. Sakena Yacoobi, an Afghan educator who braved the threat of the Taliban to bring education to girls was awarded the TRT World Citizen Educator Award at the TRT World Forum Yacoobi, who set up 80 secret schools for 3,000 girls in the country, was recognized for her outstanding work at the World Citizen Awards in Istanbul on October 5, 2018. In accepting her award, Dr. Yacoobi said, “I was happy to be invited here because the world doesn’t know what is going on with the children who are in war zones, who are in refugee camps, who lost their parents, who lost their homes, who don’t have the environment to quietly sit and read and write or draw a picture . . . . who every time they hear a sound think a bomb is exploding, to work with these traumatized children is joyful. "When you look in their faces, when they smile and then they play, it is another world,” she said.
