Lauryn Oates – BIography

Lauryn Oates is a Canadian human rights activist whose work concentrates on international development, women’s rights, and education in conflict zones. She has worked throughout the Muslim world but particularly in Afghanistan, advocating for women's rights. It was in 1996 that, at age 14, Lauryn read a newspaper article describing the new regime in Afghanistan called the Taliban, and their treatment of women and girls. She wrote up a petition demanding that the world respond to the Taliban’s misogynist policies, and has continued this work ever since, working in close partnership with a variety of Afghan women’s organizations and international charities. She is a fierce proponent of internationalism, the universalism of human rights, and frequently speaks out against cultural relativism in the Canadian and international media, in publications ranging from the Globe & Mail to Butterflies & Wheels.
 
She is the founder of the Vancouver (1999) and Montreal (2001) Chapters of the non-profit solidarity network, Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan and is currently their Projects Director, managing their Excel-erate Teacher Training Program and 12 other projects in Afghanistan, including village libraries, an orphanage, schools and training programs. On June 1st, 2010, Excel-erate graduated it’s 1,200th teacher in Kabul province; and has put more than 50,000 girls in school. She managed the CIDA-funded Women's Rights in Afghanistan Fund and other projects supporting women's movements in the Middle East and Central Asia from 2002-2006 at the International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development. In 2004 she conceived Ideaccess, which translated and distributed human rights and women’s rights resources into Arabic, Farsi and other languages free of charge in the Middle East and Central Asia. In 2006 Ideaccess was a finalist in the Stockholm Challenge, receiving honourable mention at the Nobel Hall in Stockholm. She is a founding member and a senior advisor to the Canada Afghanistan Solidarity Committee and a past coordinator of the Funders’ Network for Afghan Women. She has also helped write a manual for women on financial planning for Dress for Success Worldwide; and written numerous reports on Afghanistan for organizations such as Global Rights, medica mondiale, the Afghan Research and Evaluation Unit, and Womankind Worldwide.
 
Lauryn holds a BA Honours in International Development Studies from McGill University, an MA in Human Security and Peacebuilding from Royal Roads University, and is a PhD candidate in Language and Literacy Education at the University of British Columbia. Her graduate thesis research was concerned with the links between access to information, language and the agency of civil society in the Middle East and Central Asia, and her current doctoral research is focused on the development of mother tongue teaching resources using information communications technologies (ICT) for primary teachers in northern Uganda.
 
She is the recipient of several awards and distinctions, including the 2000 Chatelaine Women of the Year, the 2001 National Post/L’Oréal Canada Women of Influence, and a YTV Achievement Awards finalist for Public Service. In 2008, The Globe & Mail named her as the first of Ten Canadians to Watch in 2009. She has called Vancouver, Montreal and New York home, but now lives in a shack on the top of a bluff on a small island off the BC coast with an attractive carpenter named Brad and her mutt, Sam.