International Save the Children Alliance
Afghanistan blogs
by Save the Children staff member Jiffer Bourguignon
. An introduction to 'Rewrite the Future' in Afghanistan December 2006
. 'It's just too cold to fight' January 2007
. The Shamali Valley March 2007
An introduction to 'Rewrite the Future' in Afghanistan
Nearly 30 years of conflict in Afghanistan have taken a drastic toll on the country’s education system. The well-documented Taliban expulsion of girls from government schools meant that girls risked their lives in clandestine underground schools or stayed at home.
Since 2001, a great deal of progress has been made regarding general, basic education in Afghanistan. In 2003, the right of all Afghan citizens to education was enshrined in the country’s new constitution. Due to efforts of the Afghan government, Afghan civil society and the international community, enrolment jumped from an estimated 774,000 children in school in 2001 to 5.2 million children – including girls – by 2005.
Despite this achievement, increasing insecurity throughout the country now threatens to reverse this progress; recent threats of kidnappings and school attacks have meant that all children, especially girls, are reluctant to return to school. Access to education is not the only casualty of insecurity; the quality of children’s education also suffers due to threats against teachers and administrators.
Save the Children in Afghanistan is part of the global “Rewrite the Future” initiative – known as “Better Education, Better Future” in Afghanistan – in order to give all Afghan children who have been affected by conflict an opportunity to fulfill their right to education in order to enable them to learn, develop and participate in the rebuilding of a peaceful and productive Afghanistan.
On a recent trip to one of our field offices in Jalalabad with the Director and Chair of “Rewrite the Future”, David Skinner from London and Tove Wang from Norway, we visited Tangi Khush and Khogiani villages in Nangarhar province near Jalalabad city.
What is always striking to anyone who visits Save the Children schools is the obvious and overwhelming desire of these children to learn. The first village we visited was a returnee community – a village that had fled across the border into Pakistan during intense fighting during the Soviet occupation that had recently returned - lured by what they hoped would be a period of peace ushered in by the Taliban’s fall. They returned with nothing except for a few essentials and quickly constructed homes from the same rocks and mud that their homes were built upon. UNICEF supplied tents and Save the Children provided teacher training, teaching and learning materials.
Sitting on the floor, cramped into a small space, sheltered from the summer heat and winter rains only by a tethered tent, these children WANT to learn. They have walked an hour and a half from home each way to be here. They fight for the teacher’s attention when a question is asked, each one of them wanting to be the one to answer it.
“I want to be a doctor,” one young girl replies when asked about her favorite subject, science. In fact the majority of the girls want to be doctors or teachers – to teach the children in their villages and take care of the ailing in their communities.
Statistics show that less than 4 percent of them will go on to do that. The dropout rate for girls after the 3rd grade skyrockets according to Ministry of Education data. This is due to a number of obstacles:
- There are not enough teachers – and there is an acute dearth of female teachers - in Afghanistan. And while parents might allow their daughters to be taught by a male teacher for a few years, they feel this is inappropriate when the girl approaches puberty and so she will then stay at home.
- There are not enough schools – often schools are too far away from the girls’ homes and their parents will not allow them to walk great distances to school.
- Families often require their daughters to stay and home and help with work in the house and in the fields.
- Girls generally marry very young, especially in the rural areas, and will not be allowed to continue their education after they are married.
Save the Children is working with these communities and school headmasters to ensure that proper facilities are in place, latrines and clean drinking water are accessible, books and teacher and student learning materials are available, teachers are trained in pedagogy and anti-corporal punishment measures, etc.