Making Education More Accessible in Post-Conflict Countries
From 13–21 August I will be joining 1000 young great minds of the world to tackle the most pressing and critical issues of the world. UNLEASH Lab-2017 will take place in Denmark and I thrilled to join the founding class of UNLEASH Lab. This year the program covers topics from seven SDGs which are: Education & ICT, Sustainable Production & Consumption, Urban Sustainability, Health, Water, Energy and Food.
Where I will be joining the Education & ICT Group.
Living in a country like Afghanistan makes it really difficult to point out that one problem or a major problem which can be tackled and counted as a step forward. Speak of security - it is worse, speak of corruption - the bureaucrats and institutions are corrupted, speak of education - most of the kids in the rural places don’t have access to education and the majority of girls are prohibited from going to school and may receive a very low-quality education, speak on the economy — the country yet, can’t finance its operational budget and remains a poor country with 40% of the population living below the poverty line and 35% of the workforce are unemployed and the list goes on. But, nonetheless, education can change the society. Education changes your mind, your thoughts, your understanding of the world, your economy and your society. In Afghanistan (mostly in all post-conflict countries) education is hardly accessible in the rural places, and half of the society (girls) are rarely given the chance of exploring their talents. To this end, I and a group of young, talented and innovative minds of the world will work on how to make education more accessible, how to integrate the local setups, informal education systems with the national schools and Universities.
To do this, some of the big problems stand in the way. Lack of infrastructure, lack of trained and qualified teacher, limited means to pay for the schools and teachers and war mind-sets against education and schools some of prominent one. Now, the job is to develop a module and create a solution, discuss it, critique it, review it, present it and receive words of education experts on it. The idea should offer innovative and scalable solutions for making quality education more accessible to the most deprived segments of the society, rural people and girls. All will take place at UNLEASH Lab 2017. I will follow the results of the discussions with another post after the program.
