Ziroat Mirziyoyeva

Ziroat Mirziyoyeva (née Hoshimova) was born on 4 December 1964 in Kokand, in the Fergana region of the Uzbek SSR. She studied at the Tashkent Institute of Irrigation and Melioration (now the Tashkent Institute of Irrigation and Agricultural Mechanization Engineers), where she met her future husband, Shavkat Mirziyoyev, who worked at the institute. In 1986 she graduated as an engineer-economist.

She is married to Shavkat Mirziyoyev; the couple have two daughters, Saida and Shahnoza, and a younger son. Both daughters work in public service: Saida Mirziyoyeva in the Presidential Administration, Shahnoza in the social protection system.

After her husband was elected president in December 2016, Ziroat Mirziyoyeva took on the informal status of the country’s first lady: she accompanies the head of state on foreign trips, meets the spouses of other leaders and takes part in ceremonial and charitable events. She holds no state office; the role is a public one.

In 2020 she became chair of the board of trustees of the Zamin International Public Foundation. The foundation runs charitable and social projects in four areas: environmental protection, social innovation, support for children with hearing impairments, and the creation of an accessible, inclusive environment. With its involvement, and together with the ministries of education and health, Uzbekistan’s first hospital school, “Mehrli maktab”, was set up; Mirziyoyeva visited it in May 2022.

Children with disabilities have become one of the central themes of her public work: in November 2021 Zamin and UNICEF held an international forum on including such children, and in December of that year, during a state visit to South Korea, she toured the National Rehabilitation Center in Seoul as part of the delegation.

In September 2025, on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York, she chaired a forum on children with cancer and other life-threatening diseases, organised by Uzbekistan, the World Health Organization, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and the Zamin Foundation; participants pledged to raise childhood cancer survival to 60% by 2030. In November 2025 the international platform OncoDaily included her in its list of the 100 most influential women in oncology.