Sima Samar was born in February 1957 in Ghazani, Afghanistan. As a child in school, she learned what it meant to be a minority in Pushtun-dominated Afghanistan. She is Hazara, one of the most persecuted of the ethnic minorities in Afghanistan that comprise some 17 percent of the population. Moreover, as a female in a conservative Muslim society, she was doubly second class. At 18, she married and began her medical education. She obtained her degree in medicine in February 1982 from Kabul University, the first Hazara woman to do so. Soon after came the Russian invasion, and as a doctor, she aided the anti-Soviet resistance movement, the mujahideen. When her husband was arrested in 1984, never to be seen again, Sima Samar and her young son fled to the safety of nearby Pakistan, where she worked as a doctor in a refugee camp in the small border town of Quetta. Thousands of refugees from war-ravaged Afghanistan lived there in appalling misery, particularly the women, who were forbidden to visit male doctors, venture from their homes to work or attend school.

     With other women, Dr. Samar established her first hospital for women in 1987 and later in 1989 established the Shuhada Organization, a non-governmental and non-profit organization committed to the reconstruction and development of Afghanistan with special emphasis on the empowerment of women and children. Dr. Samar and her medical staff now run four hospitals and ten clinics in Afghanistan and another hospital in Quetta that provide much needed medical assistance and education for Afghan women and children. Worried about where the next generation of female physicians will come from, Dr. Samar also provides medical training courses at the hospitals she runs. She runs schools in rural Afghanistan for more than 20,000 students as well as a school for refugee girls in Quetta attended by over 1,000 girls. Her literacy programs are accompanied by distribution of food aid and information on hygiene and family planning. Services also include mobile health clinics and medical outreach workers who go door to door. Last year, the Taliban succeeded in closing two of her hospitals in Afghanistan but the others are still running.

     Dr. Samar refuses to accept that women must be kept in purdah (secluded from the public) and speaks out against the wearing of the burqa (head-to-foot wrap), which was enforced by the Taliban. She also has drawn attention to the fact that many women in the area are suffering from osteomalacia, a softening of the bones, due to an inadequate diet. Wearing the burqa reduces exposure to sunlight and aggravates the situation for women suffering from osteomalacia.

     Dr. Samar is also part of the international network Women Living Under Muslim Laws, which has links in 40 countries and a powerful voice at the United Nations. She received the prestigious Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership in 1984.