Regional Director for WLP and Program Coordinator for ADFM
Aboulfaraj (Morocco) is a Moroccan feminist, educator, and activist deeply committed to gender justice and youth leadership. Her journey with ADFM began as a volunteer and WLP participant, later growing into roles on the board, as a WLP facilitator, and eventually Vice President of ADFM Rabat. Today, she serves as Capacity Building Coordinator at ADFM Rabat and Regional Director for WLP. In her work, she leads alongside the working group transformative training workshops and strategizes to compile organizations and collaborate on a bigger level. Her activist philosophy centers on a radical truth: gender equality is not a distant goal but an urgent, lifelong mission that requires bold action today and demands empowering every single person, especially youth as today’s (not only tomorrow’s) changemakers to claim their leadership and embed justice and inclusion in every corner of life.
As we mark the 30th anniversary of the Beijing Platform for Action, I feel a conflicting blend of pride for what has been achieved and anger and frustration at how far we still have to go. This moment should be a thunderous celebration of our achievements—a moment of global pride where we can finally shout that, after 30 years, our metrics show tangible progress toward gender equality, safety, dignity, and freedom for all. Especially in this age of extreme technological advancement, we should be basking in the light of our successes. Yet instead we find ourselves confronting a growing backlash against the progress we fought tooth and nail to achieve.
WLP’s partner in Morocco, the Association Démocratique des Femmes du Maroc (ADFM), has been leading an intergenerational movement to reform Morocco’s Family Code, the Moudawana, since 1985. We sat down with ADFM board member Asmae Aboulfaraj, a young feminist activist dedicated to advocating for reforms in the parts of the Moudawana that fall short of the country's constitutional commitments to gender equality. In this interview, Asmae shares her vision for collaboration between activists and civil-society organizations in Morocco and what she thinks the next generation of leaders can do to advocate for a better future for both women and men.
