Sesame Street's first AFGHAN character
makes her debut as TV bosses hope she will show 'that a little girl can do as
much as everybody else'
·
'Baghch-e-Simsin' is the Afghan spin-off of the hit
children's programme
·
Producers hope Zari, aged 6, will help inspire young
girls in the country
·
Women only recently allowed to go to school and face
endemic misogyny
·
Zari wears a headscarf in class but will generally appear
bare-headed
By RORY TINGLE FOR
MAILONLINE
PUBLISHED: 18:54 GMT, 9 April 2016 | UPDATED: 14:38 GMT, 10 April
2016
Afghanistan's first home-grown Sesame
Street Muppet, a six-year-old female called Zari, has made her on-screen
debut.
Producers hope the sassy, fun puppet girl
will help inspire young girls in a country where women were until recently
completely excluded from schooling.
Zari wears a headscarf with her school
uniform, which unlike that for most Afghan girls is not black but pale blue.
Otherwise she will appear mainly bare-headed.
+6
Afghan puppeteer, Mansoora Shirzad (right)
perfroms a segment with Sesame Street's new character, a 6-year-old Afghan girl
called Zari, during a recording session for her first appearance on the local
version of the show in Kabul, Afghanistan
Zari, whose name means 'shimmering' in
Afghanistan's two official languages, Dari and Pashtu - made her debut on the
Afghan version of the show, 'Baghch-e-Simsin', meaning 'Sesame
Garden', on Thursday.
She joined at the beginning of its fifth
season, alongside worldwide favourites such as Elmo and Big Bird.
With Sesame Street being the most-watched
children's programme in Afghanistan, she has a vital role to play.
Although many of the characters on the
show are non-gender specific, producers said they felt it was important to make
the character a girl to help overcome the country's endemic misogyny.
Clemence Quint, program manager for Lapis
Communications, the Afghan partner of the Sesame Street Workshop, said:
'Every Afghan can relate to Zari.
'Zari is a female because in Afghanistan
we thought it was really important to emphasize the fact that a little girl
could do as much as everybody else.'st Afghan Sesame Street Muppet, Zari,
makes TV debut
+6
Zari, whose name means 'shimmering' in
Afghanistan's two official languages, Dari and Pashtu - made her debut on the
Afghan version of the show, 'Baghch-e-Simsin', meaning 'Sesame Garden', on
Thursday. She is pictured here playing with a child on the set
+6
Clemence Quint, program manager for Lapis
Communications, said: 'Zari is a female because in Afghanistan we thought
it was really important to emphasize the fact that a little girl could do as
much as everybody else'
+6
Zari - who has purple skin, an orange nose
and multi-coloured hair, and an infectious giggle - was designed to be a
'universal' character for all Afghans
Zari - who has purple skin, an orange nose
and multi-coloured hair, as well as an infectious giggle - was designed to be a
'universal' character for all Afghans.
Her costumes incorporate fabrics and
designs from all the country's ethnic groups - predominantly Pashtoon, Tajik,
Uzbek and Hazara.
Also, her skin and hair were designed to
ensure that Zari cannot be identified with any specific ethnicity, but rather
with all of them.
Producers of the show also teamed up with
Afghanistan's Ministry of Education in a bid to reduce any cultural resistance
to the character.
Mansoora Shirzad, 20, who voices Zari,
said: 'I hope she will have a positive impact on our kids, will make the
program interesting, and will bring some new colour to it, enabling us to
convey the messages that our children need to know.'
+6
Zari's costumes incorporate fabrics and
designs from all the country's ethnic groups - predominantly Pashtoon, Tajik,
Uzbek and Hazara
+6
Sesame Street is Afghanistan's most
popular children's TV programme. It already has a multi-cultural line-up, which
includes Muppets in Bangladesh, Egypt and India who each do separate segments
on their own national programmes
Afghanistan now has about five million
children under the age of five, but about one-third of them are not in school.
Zari will be featured in segments about
health, exercise and well-being, and will interview a doctor and other
professionals to find out what she would need to do to become one herself.
She follows female Muppets like Chamki in
India and Kami in South Africa who play a key role in locally produced Sesame
Street co-productions around the world.
The themes of this year's Sesame Street,
which are decided by producers in New York, will be cultural identity and
female empowerment.
AFGHANISTAN: A COUNTRY MENDING ITSELF AFTER DECADES OF CONFLICT
Afghanistan has been at war for almost 40
years, since the 1979 Soviet invasion and the subsequent mujahedeen war that
lasted a decade.
That was followed by a devastating civil
war, in which warlords drew lines based on their ethnicity and killed tens of
thousands of people in Kabul alone.
The Taliban took over in 1996, and their
five year rule was one of brutal extremism in which they banned women from work
and girls from going to school, confining them to their homes.
The radical Taliban regime was forced from
power by the 2001 U.S. invasion that ushered in a democratic experiment and
billions of dollars in international aid to rebuild the country.
Part of that project was the creation of a
vibrant Afghan media sector, as well as repairing the education system and
getting girls back to school alongside boys.
The number of children in school grew from
900,000 in 2001 to 8.3 million in 2011, according to figures from the U.N.
assistance mission to Afghanistan.
UNAMA says girls account for 39 percent of
the total - up from near zero under the Taliban.
However, Afghanistan is still an
impoverished country, with only 60 percent of its children in primary or lower
secondary schooling, according to a January report by UNICEF on children living
in conflict zones.
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