Fast Track Education for Afghan Women and Girls

AIL recently received an update from Hafisa, a young woman that had taken classes at a Women’s Learning Center in rural Herat, Afghanistan. As a teenage girl, Hafisa began going to the WLC in her village where she became literate and learned to sew. In all of her classes, the teachers talked about human rights, peace, health and leadership, emphasizing that anyone can be a leader, even if in a small way. After graduating from the center, Hafisa was married and moved away. Hafisa’s sewing skills quickly made her popular in her new village with many people bringing her dresses for sewing. Soon, people in the village began asking her to open a center and teach other women to sew. Hafisa remembered the leadership lessons she learned at the AIL WLC in her village and knew that she could start a class. Starting a center to teach women to sew is a fairly novel concept. At first, her family ignored the requests, but due to community persistence, Hafisa’s family eventually allowed her to open a center in her home. Now she uses one room of her house to teach a sewing class and has 40 students. She collects a fee from the students, and this income has helped to change her family’s economic situation. She is respected in her community and her family is proud of her. Whenever she goes to her own village to see her parents, she visits the AIL center and thanks AIL for giving her the opportunity to be a useful person in her community. Not only did Hafisa learn to sew, she learned to be a leader and found that she could run a self-sufficient center.

During 2008 AIL educated 14,408 women and girls in Fast-Track classes in its Women’s Learning Centers (WLC) and schools. The girls that attend AIL classes range from school age girls looking for extra help and to gain new skills to older women attending literacy courses. Many of the older women begin coming to the center to learn a new skill, such as sewing, and end up also participating in AIL’s literacy courses.

We would like to share with you comments from three of the female beneficiaries of AIL’s programs. The three women range in age from 14 to 45 and lead very different lives, but all have found AIL programs to be invaluable to improving their quality of live.

The first story is that of a 45 year old widow who has 6 children. She says “My oldest son is 23 and he works during the day. It’s been very difficult for all 7 of us to live on the money my son earns. I heard from a neighbor that there is a center near our village, and I decided to join this center to help my family. I would like to thank AIL for establishing such a center for the poor people of my village.”

The second story is that of a 14 year old girl that was struggling with her classes in a regular school. She says, “I am 14 years old and studying chemistry at this center. I am very interested to learn English and science, but I have a great deal of problems in chemistry, so I decided to first solve my problems in chemistry, then I will join other classes. I would like to thank the AIL office.”

That last story is that of a married woman who has come to an AIL center to continue her education. She says, “I am studying in a literacy class. I went to a regular school until 5th grade, but because of my situation I did not finish school. After a long time, I got married and now I have 3 children and could not go back to school, so I have started coming to the center to receive an education and solve my problems.”