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Journal of International Affairs (JIA): Introduce us to the organization you founded and currently run, Girls Power Fund. Why did you start this initiative, and what is some of the current work that you're doing?
Dinara Auyelbekova (DA): During Covid in 2020, I took a gap year because I wanted to figure out what I want to do with my life. It was trial and error. I tried different things during this year, and I ended up starting the Girls Power Fund.
We work on empowering girls in STEM: science, technology, engineering, and math, and we provide different trainings in those fields so that girls can pursue careers in STEM. And what motivated me is that I live in a very patriarchal, conservative society. If you see the statistics of women representation in business, in politics, in all STEM fields, it's a very tiny percentage. There are also a lot of instances of sexual assaults, rapes. There is no law that protects women in Kazakhstan, so if a woman goes to the police and wants to report a domestic violence case, the police will probably will not consider it, and they will try to cover it, to hide it, and just won't take this report. So I was fed up with this stuff, reading it on the news. And there was no change.
I decided that I wanted to start empowering girls earlier, because it's hard to work with the victims of domestic abuse and empower women after trau- matic events. I decided to work with the root cause and start empowering girls at the younger age, so that they hopefully won't end up in financial abuse or domestic abuse. It usually happens when girls marry young, when they marry at the age of 18, especially in some regions of Kazakhstan. Then they don't get higher education. They start giving birth. They have 5 kids at the age of 30, and then obviously, they can't do anything. They can't get out of the situation because they don't have any means to sustain themselves and their children.
So I believe that education is like the cliché that can solve this problem. Education helped me to achieve all of my goals. I was lucky because I studied...