Assisting Out-of-School Girls Access to Education in Afghanistan

by IR Staff

Islamic Relief is working to increase access to education of school-age girls, including orphans, internally displaced persons (IDPs), and vulnerable children at the primary education level in the Balk and Kandahar provinces of Afghanistan. Schools will be fully staffed with female teachers, and staff will be trained in children’s rights protection.

Some of the projects highlights include:

• 52 qualified female teachers have been hired and trained to teach at government/community schools. Each teacher was provided with a Teacher Aid Kit including: teacher bag, white blank paper, pencils, sharpeners, notebooks, teachers books, calculators, geometry tools, highlighters, scissors, staplers, stamps, tape, markers, etc.
• Islamic Relief conducted social mobilization events including seminars, awareness sessions, etc. within the community on the importance of education for girls. To date, 1,000 duty bearers/caregivers, local authorities, community elders and civil society members have received training on girls’ education, child rights, and gender-based violence (GBV). This has also helped mobilize the number of girls that have been enrolled in local schools.

Since the implementation of the program, Islamic Relif has been able to help many school girls, like Fahima.

Fahima is a beneficiary of AGE project in Daman district of Kandahar province community based education (CBE) class.

Fahima’s family consists of five sisters and four brothers. Her father is a mechanic and her brothers are school students. Fahima is nine years old who belongs to a very conservative family who prevented girl’s education and possess an idea to avoid harassment of their daughter when she goes out of home. As per their family tradition, girls aren’t allowed to acquire education, they only have to stay at home because of cultural barriers and challenges girls face in this society.

Nonetheless, as a result of this exceptional opportunity, their family feels safe to allow and perceive her studies because of IR’s established CBE near their house and their daughter can go there without any fear.

Through this wonderful opportunity, she is currently studying in 2nd grade and able to write and read. She is outgoing plus and feels confident to be among a group of people.

Fahima was not even familiar with alphabets and numbers but recently she is able to write topics about various issues and she learned Pashto spelling as well.

Currently she is very confident about her studies and enough gratified from her teacher as well. Moreover, they are very thankful that IR have distributed stationary for their further education.

To find out how you can help girls like Fahima, visit irusa.org/education.