July 21, 2026
By Sehrish Kanwal
KOLAI-PALAS
Across Pakistan, women are entering journalism, filmmaking, and digital media in growing numbers. In Kohistan, not one woman works as a journalist — despite making up nearly half the region’s population. This means half the population remains unheard.
A regressive region
Nestled within the Hindukush, Karakoram, and the Himalayan Mountain ranges, Kohistan is one of Pakistan’s most geographically isolated regions, one of the reasons why it is also socially conservative.
Home to a population of nearly one million, the Upper Kohistan, Lower Kohistan, and Kolai-Palas districts are the country’s least developed, particularly with regard to education and women’s participation in public life. Despite its strategic location along the Karakoram Highway, where hundreds of vehicles pass by daily, development opportunities for women remain severely limited.
In this situation imagining that women would rise to the field of journalism, is unimaginable.
“The absence of working women journalists is the result of a structural issue,” said Shams ur Rehman Shams, President of the Kohistan Press Club. He points out literacy gaps, deeply entrenched tribal customs, a weak institutional infrastructure, and strict gender segregation as key reasons behind the absence of women journalists.
Women’s issues remain unaddressed
The absence of women journalists also means direct consequences for the women who live there. Issues such as maternal health, domestic violence, early marriages, and girls’ education remain underreported or filtered through male perspectives. Without women journalists, half of the population remains effectively unheard.
“There are no universities or colleges in Kohistan offering media studies,” says Hassan, a local reporter for a private TV channel. “Although women make up nearly half the population, their representation in education and media is almost non-existent.”
He adds that reporting on women’s issues itself as a result remains constrained.
“Male journalists cannot easily speak to women due to cultural barriers, which means many issues remain invisible. There is not a single woman journalist from Kohistan actively raising her voice for women’s rights.”
Some families have migrated from Kohistan to urban centers such as Islamabad, Rawalpindi, and Abbottabad. Girls in these families have pursued higher education but even among journalism remains an uncommon and often discouraged career choice. According to Hassan, even among these families, journalism is generally not considered an acceptable profession for women because it means public visibility and interaction.
A local elder tribal woman Gul Nadir acknowledges that traditional norms have limited women’s opportunities. She adds that life for women is ten times more difficult in Kohistan than for men. It is much more complicated than the lives of men, in fact it follows the rules made by men.
“For generations, families here have believed that a woman’s primary responsibility was within the home,” she says. “Concerns about security, mobility, and preserving cultural traditions have discouraged families from sending girls for higher education or professional work outside the district.”
However, Dr Nosherwan believes that attitudes are slowly changing.
“The younger generation increasingly understands the importance of girls’ education and participation in social sciences,” he says. “If educational institutions and employment opportunities are provided within Kohistan, more families may support women’s participation in public life.”
No visibility means no journalism
In 2012, the honour based killing of upto five young girls, including Shaheen, Bazeegha, Sereen Jan, Begum Jan and Amina, because of their appearance in a video on the internet, shocked the nation. The video featured a boy dancing while four girls clapped and sang along and another boy was filming the video. All of them were eventually murdered. The incident gathered national attention because of the constant campaigning by Afzal Kohistani, the journalist who filmed the wedding video and for the next seven years tried to fight for justice. Eventually he too was murdered. But this is not the only incident. In 2023, a woman was ordered by a jirgah to be killed after a viral photo of hers emerged – even though the photo was suspectedly doctored.
For women to even appear on the screen, is a ‘sin’ in the eyes of the tribal system in Kohistan, This and strict interpretations of purdah (veil) limits women’s mobility and participation in public life. In most communities, women cannot travel, work, or interact publicly without a male guardian. Journalism, which requires mobility, visibility, and public engagement, directly conflicts with these norms.
“Pursuing journalism in areas like Kohistan is extremely challenging and sometimes even dangerous,” said Shams, noting that even male journalists face resistance, making it even harder for women to enter the profession.
The situation becomes even more striking when compared with other conservative and mountainous regions of Pakistan.
In Gilgit-Baltistan, women journalists, filmmakers, and digital content creators have become increasingly visible over the past decade, reporting on issues ranging from climate change and education to governance and social development. Similarly, women from several former tribal districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa have joined community media initiatives and national news organizations despite longstanding restrictions on women’s participation in public life.
Journalists familiar with Kohistan argue that the region faces a unique combination of extremely low female literacy, limited educational infrastructure, strict mobility restrictions, and deeply entrenched tribal customs. While these challenges exist elsewhere, their cumulative effect in Kohistan has created an environment where women remain almost entirely absent from journalism and many other public-facing professions.
Education crisis
According to data from the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Education Department and the Pakistan Social and Living Standards Measurement (PSLM) Survey, nearly 79 percent of children in Upper and Lower Kohistan remain out of school, while tens of thousands of children in Kolai-Palas are not enrolled in formal education. Female literacy rates remain even low – among the lowest in the province – with some areas reporting literacy levels in single digits.
In fact the deprivation of education in Kohistan is significantly deeper than in any of the neighboring mountainous regions.
While districts in Gilgit-Baltistan have witnessed substantial progress in girls’ education, with female literacy rates exceeding 50 percent in several districts, and even Swat has seen increasing female enrollment and the emergence of women in journalism and other professions despite years of militancy and conflict, Kohistan continues to lag behind. The comparison highlights the exceptional nature of women’s exclusion in the region.
“Education in Kohistan is not a facility—it is a dream,” says journalist Sardar Ali Yousufzai. “Many of the schools here exist only on paper, they have non-functional buildings, and there is a widespread issue of ghost teachers. In several villages, children are forced to study in open spaces.”
Regarding the gap in the provision of education, an elderly resident sums it up in a comment, “The school was built, but the teachers never came.”
Girls suffer more
With such a dismally low education rate in an already backward society, it is almost understandable that for girls, the situation is even more alarming.
“We want to study, but there is no pathway for us,” says Yasmeen, a student from Upper Kohistan, reflecting on how education often ends for girls at the primary level mostly due to the absence of female teachers, long distances to schools, and severe restrictions on mobility. Under such circumstances, the emergence of women journalists, or any other profession, from the region appears almost unimaginable.
Sumaira* originally from Lower Kohistan, says her family moved to Rawalpindi 20 years ago. Now pursuing a master’s degree in sociology, she has never visited her ancestral village, but notes the vast difference in how the other young women live there.
According to Iffat Jabeen, District Education Officer (Female), Upper Kohistan, the issue is not a lack of potential but a lack of continuity.
“Many girls drop out after the fifth grade, often due to early marriages and the absence of higher educational facilities,” she explains. “There is only one girls’ high school in the area, and even that suffers from a shortage of teachers.”
She adds that many non-local teachers remain absent while continuing to draw salaries, further weakening an already fragile education system. Communication barriers add to the challenge, as female teachers often do not have direct access to mobile phones, making coordination difficult. Even when girls pursue higher education outside the region, they rarely return, widening the gap in female representation across professions.
With such limited access to education, pathways into journalism are virtually non-existent.
Another key reason of why women are not just neglecting journalism as a field, but also other professions is because of a low literacy rate.
“Women in my own family are educated, but none are working,” says Dr. Nosherwan Khan, District Deputy Health Officer in Upper Kohistan. “There are no relevant opportunities here, and cultural norms discourage employment.”
He adds that most female doctors and nurses in local facilities are outsiders from regions like Gilgit, Hunza, Ghizer, and Mansehra, with very few belonging to Kohistan itself.
He also pointed out that a difficult terrain, lack of institutions, and mobility restrictions continue to limit women’s access to education and employment, forcing those who study outside the district to settle elsewhere.
The absence of a single woman journalist in Kohistan is not merely a professional gap; it reflects a deeper crisis of educational deprivation, gender inequality, and social exclusion. In a region of nearly one million people, half of the population remains largely invisible in the media landscape.
Until structural barriers exist and remain unaddressed, such as poor educational infrastructure, mobility restrictions, institutional neglect, and deeply entrenched cultural norms, women’s voices will continue to remain unheard. It is not as if women in Kohistan have no stories to tell; the key question is whether society is prepared to let them tell those stories themselves.