Fellow 2026-2027 Zarlasht Halaimzai
Zarlasht Halaimzai is a writer and social entrepreneur. She founded Amna, an organisation providing trauma care to conflict-affected and displaced communities in Greece, Albania, Kosovo, Italy, and beyond. Before setting up Amna in Greece, Zarlasht worked as an education advisor on the Syrian-Turkish border, as well as in Pakistan and Afghanistan, working to keep children in education in conflict zones.
As a researcher in the UK, she worked on programmes that sought to understand and address attainment gaps in marginalised communities. She has written extensively on displacement and trauma, publishing three long reads for the Guardian. She has also written for the Washington Post, Al Jazeera, CNN, and Vogue magazine. In 2018, Zarlasht was selected from 20,000 applicants from 191 countries as one of the twenty inaugural Obama Fellows chosen by Barack and Michelle Obama for their outstanding civic leadership. In 2021, she was named to the BBC 100 Women list, which recognises influential and exceptional women from around the world. In 2024, Zarlasht won the prestigious Elevate Prize, which celebrates outstanding leaders from around the world. Her TED talk on the impact of conflict and displacement was published in April 2022, garnering 1.7 million views.
Zarlasht and her family were forcibly displaced from Kabul, Afghanistan, when she was eleven years old. She arrived in the UK at age fifteen with her family, where they were granted asylum.