Inspiring Women

From MSN LIfestyle: 15 Amazing Women You've Never Heard Of (I can't find any writer's credits, sorry!):
Sarah Chayes: Activist [Photo: Deborah Feingold/Corbis]
It’s a long way from Cambridge, Massachusetts to Kandahar, Afghanistan. But for reporter-turned-activist Sarah Chayes, it turned out to be the right journey. Shortly after 9/11, Harvard-educated Chayes was working as a Paris-based correspondent for National Public Radio. In light of world events at the time, she agreed to a short stint in Afghanistan.

Chayes was so moved by the Afghani people and their struggles that she ended up staying and became committed to helping rebuild Afghanistan. She accepted an invitation from the Afghanistan government to help run Afghans for Civil Society, an aid organization created to rebuild what had been destroyed during the years of Taliban rule.

In 2005, continuing her commitment to rebuilding the Afghan economy, Chayes created a foundation called Arghand, a cooperative that promotes the use of local crops, such as pomegranates, to produce highly sought after natural soap and beauty products, in an effort to replace the country’s dependency on opium poppies as a cash crop.

Zainab Salbi: Women for Women International

[photo: David Levinson/Getty Images]
Zainab Salbi was born and raised in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Surviving that nation’s wars taught her that the hardest-hit victims inevitably were the women and children—women who lost husbands, children who lost fathers, women who were used as tools of war through rape and torture.

Determined to change that, in 1993 she founded Women to Women International to help women survivors of war rebuild their lives through vocational training, providing seed capital for women to start their own businesses and helping women learn to read and write to become active citizens in their societies.

Since its inception, WFWI has raised $24 million and helped more than 55,000 women in wartorn countries including Afghanistan, Bosnia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan and Rwanda. For its trailblazing humanitarian work, WFWI was awarded the 2006 the Conrad N. Hilton Humanitarian Prize, which included a $1.5 million award to continue its work.