An academic who lost her career and became a refugee when the Taliban took control of Afghanistan has been conferred as a Visiting Professor at De Montfort University (DMU), which serves as the United Nations Academic Impact (UNAI) SDG 11 Hub Chair.

Atefa Waseq was stripped of her teaching role and her right to pursue a doctorate when the Taliban seized power. After Taliban fighters retook Kabul on 15 August 2021, edicts restricting women’s movement and banning women and girls from secondary and higher education left over 78 per cent of Afghan women out of education, a situation UN Women has warned is increasingly untenable.

Atefa fled to Central Europe with her family and was housed at the Marienfelde Refugee Center in Berlin. A chance meeting with visiting DMU scholars from the UNAI SDG Hub in 2022 led to a successful refugee advocacy project being founded in her name.

At an emotional ceremony at the Marienfelde Refugee Center Museum—one of the historical sites overseen by the Berlin Wall Foundation—Atefa was formally reinstated with an academic title.

Accepting her Visiting Professorship, Atefa said: “Today I have the honour of accepting an award that for me is far more than just personal recognition. It is a signal... that academic communities are able to build bridges between countries, between languages, between realities of life.”

Psychology alumna Natalia Stachowiak, who leads the project for the SDG Hub, said: “I joined the project shortly after it was founded a couple of years ago…Project Atefa is educating the next generation of refugee advocates in the best way possible, by working with people who had the lived experience of forced migration.”

DMU’s SDG 11 UNAI Hub Chair lead, Dr. Mark Charlton, added that meeting Atefa “inspired our students to do some powerful work…There are no greater teachers than those with lived experience.”

Prof. Dr. Axel Klausmeier of the Berlin Wall Foundation said Atefa’s reinstatement would serve “as a beacon of hope for so many oppressed and suffering people in Afghanistan and women in particular.”

The event brought the curtain down on Refugee Week 2025. Students volunteered in Leicester before continuing activities in Berlin, supported by the Ben Lazurus Fund.

During their time in Berlin, DMU students volunteered with refugee communities, as well as learned about the city’s complex history spanning the Nazi dictatorship and World War II, the Cold War and its influence on the world since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

Project Atefa has operated in Leicester and Berlin since 2022, with partners including Leicester City of Sanctuary, Red Cross Leicester, Leicester City Council, Leicestershire County Council, Marienfelde Refugee Center Museum, HERO Berlin, and Serve the City Berlin.

Staff or students interested in joining Project Atefa with the DMU UNAI SDG 11 Hub may contact mcharlton@dmu.ac.uk.

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