Connectivity for Change: Harnessing Tech to Bridge the Gender-Based Gap
in Education in Afghanistan
Service Project By Leila Zak, JSTEP Global High School Fellow (Victoria Shanghai Academy ’24) From Hong Kong SAR
Access to education is not a privilege, it is a fundamental human right.
While many strides have been taken over the past few decades to democratize access to education, there continue to be gaps and restrictions imposed on certain groups that impede their access to schooling on a systematic scale. Whether rooted in conflict, disaster, poverty, or public policy, the implication for these individuals remains the same. Without education, they are not only marginalized — they are silenced, and subjected to an endless cycle of suppression that only works to deepen existing divides.
A particularly pertinent case study is that of Afghanistan. Ever since August 2021, when the Taliban re-seized political power over the country, all Afghan girls have been prohibited, by law, from receiving secondary and tertiary education. They have been restricted from the most basic, universal right which is the right to learn, and consequently, to make change for themselves. As the President of the Asia-Pacific branch of Flowers for the Future, I have worked to set in motion a service project at the intersection of science, technology, ethics, and policy, in which we have employed technology to combat this inhumane, politically driven disparity.
Flowers for the Future: What It Is and What We Do
Flowers for the Future is a student-led initiative with the central mission of using tech to bridge the gender-based gap in education. Our work has manifested primarily through using Zoom video-conferencing technology to teach over 300 Afghan girls at Mawoud Academy, a clandestine learning center in Kabul, Afghanistan. We teach them interactive lessons in STEM, English, the arts, and the humanities on a weekly basis, as well as lead workshops and discussion sessions relating to culture, literature, and advancements in science and tech. At the learning center in Kabul, this all takes place through one computer screen, projected through a flatscreen television at the head of the room wherein the girls convene every week. The sound is amplified through a speaker and supported with live translation on-site from English to Dari Persian for the girls whose English isn’t as strong.
STEM Education and Curriculum Development: Many of the girls we teach are aspiring scientists. As such, on top of the regular lessons we teach in math and the sciences, our team has created a series of asynchronous video courses covering different vocational concepts within the realm of STEM, including medicinal biology, human anatomy, and computer science. These videos are played to groups of girls at a time through the same computer screen depending on their individual interests and aspirations.
In addition, our science lessons — both synchronous and asynchronous — are often accompanied by live labs and experiments that we conduct to support our instruction, like elephant toothpaste, enzyme-catalyzed reactions, skittle-water diffusion, and flower dissections. These lab experiments have helped us ensure that the girls’ learning is supported by both practical and theoretical understanding and that they are aware of how the knowledge they are acquiring applies to real life.
Our work has allowed these girls to continue learning and going to school in spite of the ban on education. Without technology, this intercultural connection would have never been possible. However, while tech has equipped us with an incredible platform to connect with these girls, it has also presented its own set of unique challenges. For example, it’s certainly more difficult for the girls to ask questions via Zoom than if we were in a classroom setting, especially given the numbers we accommodate in our larger lessons and art-sharing sessions.
To mitigate this challenge, we ensure we are allocating sufficient time in every live lesson to entertain as many individual questions as possible. We additionally ensure that we are constantly assessing the girls’ knowledge and understanding through assignments and diagnostic tests that we create and send to the director of the learning center, who prints them out for the girls to take, then scans their responses and sends them back to us. We use the data from these tests and assignments to adapt our teaching style and develop our curriculum for the girls according to their strengths and weaknesses.
Education For All — Using My Voice To Galvanize Action
While my team and I may have been able to make a difference in the lives of these 300 Afghan girls, there are still millions of girls and women in Afghanistan and across the globe who remain unheard, silenced and stripped of the right to all education. Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the world, with almost half of all families living below the poverty line as of 2020 — this has only been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, and with it, an already dwindling level of accessibility to technology, and consequently, education.
This is precisely why, on top of teaching these girls, I have initiated activities, assemblies, and guest speaker sessions within my local and global communities to educate the public about what’s happening and how we are using tech to spearhead positive change for these girls.
This way, we are not only addressing the problem of lack of education for girls in Afghanistan, but we’re also addressing — through our public advocacy — the socio-political policies in which it is rooted. Contemporary Afghan society is a perfect example of how the prioritization of political power in policy has compromised the rights of millions of girls and women in this country.
On March 10th, I was invited to speak at the Hong Kong Federation of Women’s Parallel Event at the 67th United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (UNCSW), which was broadcasted globally through Zoom on March 17th. I spoke to local and global policymakers about my experience as a female leader and advocate for women’s rights in the digital age, and how we can employ tech to break down international barriers in education for girls and women around the world.
Education is a human right, and we cannot stand idly by while institutionalized persecution against women is allowed to unfold before our eyes. It is our responsibility to harness the resources we have at our disposal — technology and the Internet constituting one of the most significant resources there are — to champion change in the policies governing women’s rights across the globe, both within and outside of the pedagogical sphere.
Why? Because this could be any one of us, had we been born in different skin, in a different place, at a different time.
