Sana Asif, a 25-year-old woman hailing from Khar tehsil of Bajaurdistrict, has always been a curious, empathetic person with the spark of a trailblazer.Asif decided to participate in the local government elections, being held for the first time in the Merged Districts (previously called the Federally Administered Tribal Areas). In this endeavour, she is supported by her husband. Growing up, she says, she had seen her father and grandfather worktirelessly and voluntarily for the welfare of their people, especially the Christian community to which they belong. Shefiled her nomination papers for the position of a councillor against a seat reserved for minorities from Mir Ali Qila neighbourhood council in Khar tehsil, and was elected unopposed.

“I had wanted to become a teacher, so I joined a school. I completed many teaching courses to enhance my skills. However, I was not getting paid,” says Asif. “I kept raising the issue, submitted forms and applications, but as it happens to most of us in the Christian community, my paperwork got lost, or so it seemed.”

“After that I became disheartened and gave up on the prospect of teaching,” shesays. “But I always knew this: I wanted to make an impact on people’s lives.”

Asif says that the Christian community has been living in Bajaur for decades. She grew up in Bajaur and completed her education here. She has a BSc degree for which she studied at Government Girls Degree College, Bajaur. She has also worked at a bank in Khar as a business sales officer.

She recounts her childhood spent in Bajaur.

“Once my grandfather pretended to take my photos with a toy camera. I was a child then, extremely gullible. The next day he showed me pictures of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto in the newspaper, and told me that it was me,” she says with a giggle. “I believed him. I was jumping with joy.”

Later, she says, she learnt more about Bhutto.

Highlighting the importance of female role models, she says, “I thought to myself that being a Pakistani woman if she can overcome the challenges and become the prime minister, why can’t I?”

She says that in the last few years things have improved for women in Bajaur.

“Previously, educated women who came in the public eye used to get targetted. That is not the case any longer,” she says.

Asif says that whenshe told the women in her areaabout her plan to contest in electionsthey were very welcoming of the idea.

“They promised to vote for me provided that the men in their families and the elders allowed them,” she says. This, she says, is not as big a hurdle any longer. She saysthe men in the Merged Districts also want their favourite candidates to get elected and are encouraging women to cast their votes.

“Empowering women by allowing them to vote may not necessarily be the purpose of these men, but it is actually working in our favour,” she remarks. She adds that more women from the Merged Districts are now getting their CNICs although this was previously deemed unnecessary.

She says that women in the Merged Districts are inspiring one another and this is changing mindsets. “We all need a strong woman, respected in her community for her work, who can leadby example. Her family and her husband need to backher.”

“Empowering women by allowing them to vote may not necessarily be the purpose of these men, but it is actually working in our favour, remarks Sana Asif.”

“It becomes a million times easier for women to reason with the male family members when they can support their argument with an example,” she says. Another positive development, she says, is that men have “started taking pride in speaking about the women in their households who are gaining respect in the community”.

After the merger in 2018, the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government was faced with an unprecedented challenge and a historic opportunity to change the face of the Merged Districts, propel socioeconomic development and bring the region at par with the rest of the country –to make a meaningful impact on the lives of the people living there, strengthen its relationship with them, and reduce the trust deficit between them and the state.

One of the ways the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) government aimed to achieve that was by establishing local governments in the region. The seven Merged Districts were divided into 711 village councils and neighbourhood councils (VCNCs) and a two-tier LG system was introduced. VCNCs form the lowest tier of the system, the tehsil councils the upper.

An immediate challenge was to make people in the Merged Districts aware of the new system – an alien concept for the population of 5 million. To overcome that challenge, the government launched a Safeer-i-Baldiyat Programme under the Local Government, Elections and Rural Development Department. The programme was aimed at creating awareness among people about the local government system in the Merged Areas (MA), and educate them about its salient features and functioning. 120 youth ambassadors, 85 men and 35 women, were trained and deployed in the seven Merged Districts and six subdivisions in a face-to-face civic education campaign. The Merged Areas Governance Project (MAGP) of United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) established a Local Government Reforms Unit (LGRU) to provide technical assistance to the provincial Local Government Department.One of its tasks was to help the department designand implementthe project for promoting improved local governance in the districts and make an impact on the lives of the people living there.

Around 3,600 awareness sessions were held in mosques, hujras, and homes of notable people and elders of the area.

“Our biggest challenge was to persuade heads of the households to allow us to talk to the women,” says Ramsha Salarzai, a youth ambassador from Bajaurdistrict. “My partner and I would request people from our personal contacts such as members of our extended family, friends and colleagues to speak to the men in their area and convince them to allow us to speak to the women in their households.”

“Once that was done, we would organise a session with 15 to 20 women at the awareness centre,” says Salarzai. She says the women they spoke to were delighted to learn about the local governance system.

“For the first time in their lives, these women felt that they will have a say in important decisions that were previously imposed on them,” she says. One of the biggest issues that women raised, according to her, was the colonial-era collective punishment law. The law was repealed after the merger,but they said its remnants were still there in the local culture.

“They were happy to learn that the local government system provided them legal protection from the legacy of unjust repealed laws,” says Ramsha.

She is hopeful about the future. Prior to the merger, people seeking legal recourse had to go through a political agent of the respective tribal agency.

She believesthat inthe coming years, more women will feel empowered and seek legal recourse. “There is no political agent standing in their way any longer. Nobody can stop them from exercising their rights,” she says.

Gul Mohammad, who has been working closely with the Local Government Department as part of the Merged Areas Governance Project (MAGP) sees women’s participation in local governance as a landmark achievement.

“Women in the Merged Districts being able to vote, let alone contest in elections, is a significant milestone that has been achieved with the collaborative effort of the provincial government and the people of the region,” he says.

“We have the example of Nagina Afridi, a former local government ambassador,who is now a women councillor, elected unopposed, for Sarki Kamer village council, in Bara tehsil of Khyber district.”

After Afridi completed her tenure with the programme, he says,she decided to contest the election as she believed she could make an impact on the lives of women in her area.

The Provincial Election Commission (PEC) says 19,282 candidates are in the run for 2,359 general councillor seats. The number of women candidates stands at 3,905.

For election to seats reserved for women, 4,220 candidates filed nomination papers. Of those papers, 3,943 were accepted.

The local government election will be held across KP in two phases. In the first phase, polling will take place on December 19 in 17 districts including Bajaur, Khyber and Mohmand districts.Elections in the remaining 18 districts will take place on January 16.

The writer is a    freelance journalist who works in the social sector. She is currently based in Peshawar