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Each year, UNICEF Germany has awarded the “UNICEF Photo of the Year Award” to photos and photo series that best depict the personality and living conditions of children worldwide in an outstanding manner. Here are the winners 2025. Text: Peter-Matthias Gaede, UNICEF.

Elise Blanchard, France

Afghanistan: Girlhood in Afghanistan

Since their takeover in August 2021, the radical Islamist Taliban has once again turned women in Afghanistan into “second-class citizens.” Although hunger and malnutrition run rampant and clinics and doctors are scarce in this already destitute country, it is especially girls who feel that fundamental human rights simply no longer apply to them. They are only allowed to attend school until 7th grade, after which they are denied any further education. French photojournalist Elise Blanchard has been one of the very few Western reporters in the country for the past seven years. She literally has gone to great lengths to document the living conditions of girls and young women: in Kabul and remote mountain villages, in sewing workshops and gemstone polishing factories as well as in hidden schools.

She met girls like ten-year-old Hajira, who has little time left in elementary school, tirelessly studies textbooks at home, and joyfully writes numbers on the walls of her house. She visited regions where droughts and the resulting poor harvests led to such poverty that families had to marry off girls as young as seven to older men. She could feel the hopelessness of a 13-year-old who combats her depression by helping younger girls from the neighborhood become familiar with the world of letters. And she has witnessed remarkable resilience, especially among girls. One of them is Hajira, who is growing up with her siblings in an extremely poor family in a remote village in Nangarhar province, east of Kabul. Elise Blanchard met her at a Terres des Hommes health center, where the girl was nursed back to health after several months of illness. The photographer accompanied her home, together with a translator, walking through a river and along rugged, exhausting paths. With her camera, she captured Hajira fetching water from a spring, washing clothes, or quietly studying at home outside the reach of the Koran schools run by the Taliban (mostly in rural areas) that increasingly restrict access to girls.

Photographer: Elise Blanchard, France

Elise Blanchard, born in 1991, holds degrees in journalism from Columbia University, New York, and from the prestigious Institut d’études politiques de Paris. In Afghanistan, she initially worked as a freelance photojournalist, then for two years as a staff correspondent for Agence France-Presse in Kabul during the Taliban’s advance. Since then, she has resumed her work as an independent photographer, including for the French section of Terres des Hommes and United Nations organizations. Her work has been published in almost all leading French and US newspapers, as well as in Die Zeit and the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. A book about Blanchard’s experiences over the past three years will be published in 2026.