As a girl, Fawzia Koofi often used to play with dolls with her friends and fly kites with her brother on their rooftop in Badakhshan, Afghanistan . But today her two young daughters — or for that matter any girl in her country — cannot go to the rooftop and play.“Life is still more restricted for women in Afghanistan than what it was when I was a little girl.” said Koofi, 42, a Parliamentarian and women’s right activist.This despite the country making significant progress with regard to women’s rights since the Taliban regime from 1996 to 2001 when women were not even regarded as human beings, Koofi said. A lot has changed since then and now women constitutionally have the right to participate in political affairs, have education, and go to work.“In fact, there is a positive discrimination in our constitution for women that ensures women’s participation in the national level and that is a great step forward, but fears still remain that Taliban might come back and situation will deteriorate again for women,” she told ET over the phone from Kabul.For her, in a war-torn Afghanistan, conservatism is as big — if not bigger — a concern as safety and security, because the society “still curbs the freedom of women and defines boundaries for women”.“The Afghanistan society is very divided and it is the people who are more conservative that form the dominant section,” Koofi said.Born in a traditional political family, Koofi’s father was a member of the Parliament who was killed by the Mujahideens at the end of the first Afghan war. Koofi was the only female in a polygamous family of 23 children.“My father had seven marriages and after his demise my mother had the sole responsibility to grow her children,” Koofi said. “Though my mother was illiterate she insisted on me going to school.”Koofi, the youngest child of her mother, wanted to become a doctor, but she had to stop going to school when Taliban took control of the country in 1996. “Taliban came and banned girls’ education,” she said. “It was a big setback for women. Not just me but the whole society of girls in Afghanistan was curbed from continuing their education and dreams.” said Koofi who studied political science from a university in Kabul after the end of Taliban regime and went on to become a lawyer by profession.It is the demand from the women community in Afghanistan that prompted her to change her career paths from medical to political and she was elected to the Parliament for the first time in 2005. The following year she was elected as the deputy speaker of the Parliament to become the first woman in Afghanistan’s history to hold that post. “It was a great success for women,” she said.Koofi has spent much of her political career focusing on women’s rights, a hot topic across the Middle East, which helped her get re-elected in 2010 and 2014.Koofi, who published her memoir ‘The Favoured Daughter: One Woman’s Fight to Lead Afghanistan into the Future’ in 2012, wanted to join the 2014 presidential race but could not as she did not yet meet the minimum age cutoff of 40.She is expected to contest the elections in 2019 though Koofi said it is too early to talk about it. “The nature of campaign in Afghanistan is different. There is no precampaign and decisions are taken last minute,” she said.“I am hoping a woman becomes the president of Afghanistan. Afghanistan should experience this. Though it is not easy,” she said. “I don’t think it is easy for women anywhere in the world. In Afghanistan, the challenges for women remain much more, of course, because of security.”Koofi got married in 1997. Her husband Hamid Ahmadi, a chemical engineer and a professor at a university, was imprisoned by Taliban and died in 2003 due to tuberculosis which he contracted in prison.Despite all her hardships and struggles Koofi never thought of leaving Afghanistan. “One thing that always kept me going was that I am needed more in my country than in any other country,” she said.