SA
Sonita Alizada
Sonita
Musician
Biography
Sonita Alizada is an Afghan rapper, human rights activist, and Rhodes Scholar, working to promote women’s rights through her music. With a poet’s soul and an activist’s passion, she uses rap and courage to stand up for women’s and girls’ rights. Sonita was born in Afghanistan under the Taliban regime and spent most of her childhood as an undocumented refugee in Iran.
Sonita’s parents tried twice to sell her into child marriage: at age 10 and again at 16. With the help of Rukhsareh Ghaemmaghami, Iranian filmmaker, who recorded her journey in a documentary “Sonita”, Ms. Alizada wrote and performed a rap song called "Daughters for Sale” which went viral and was eventually viewed around the world. The song and ensuing publicity helped Sonita to obtain a full scholarship to come to the US to start high school in 2015.
Today, Sonita has obtained a joint major from Bard College in New York in music & human rights and continues her education at Oxford in MSc Refugee and Forced Migration. As an activist working to support female voices/child marriage, she has performed for heads of state, Nobel Laureates, and renowned change-makers and helped to develop a curriculum against child marriage which has been used by over one million students. Her work has been recognized by numerous awards, including the Freedom Prize, Mother Teresa Award, MTV Europe Music Generation Change Award, and Muhammad Ali Humanitarian Award. Through her music and advocacy, Sonita wants to encourage world leaders and policymakers to take urgent action to end child marriage across the world. "If girls are forced into early marriages, societies end up in cycles of poverty and illiteracy,” she says, "if we want to see a more peaceful world, we need to invest in women/girls,”
Loading