Advancing Girls' Education in Afghanistan 2.0

Following our previous report, Womanity has now activated the second pillar of its strategic work in Afghanistan:

• In September we launched online courses in computer literacy and coding languages for girls

Currently we are running 4 short term courses for approx. 100 students, and we are about to start two additional classes (for approx. 50). Subjects vary from computer literacy to basic and advanced coding languages.

• Community based education for children in primary school ~70% are girls. 

We are continuing our support tp 8 classes in Bagrami district with 240 children (67% girls). Children are in grade 2 and have just completed mid-term exam in August. We distributed books, teachers' and children's education material as well as hygiene kits. We also equipped the classes while rooms have been made available by the communities.

In April 2023,  Womanity concluded a partnership agreement with War Child Canada to take over 8 Community Based Education (CBE) classes in the Bagrami disctrict and got the approval from the Ministry of Education to continue operate in 2023.

These classes just concluded grade 1 and were supposed to stop hadn't Womanity taken over. But thanks to this agreement, 240 children (67% girls) are now continuing their education in grade 2 in a community that sees a huge need for community based education and where, with more funds, we are determined to expand our work.

We are now working on distributing all the necessary equipment and stationery and ensuring that the classrooms and the education environment is conducive for girls and boys to learn.

We are also negotiating ways to restart vocational training classes for secondary or post-secondary aged girls. This is resulting more complex as is directly affected by the current bans of the defacto authority on post-grade 6 education for girls. We are still hopeful that short term courses can be organised and are contacting possible partners to enable them.

Overall, during the year, there was a feeling of widespread arbitrariness in which despite an overall bleak situation, there were glimpses of hope and opportunities for NGOs and other groups to act. 

This little hope was dramatically hit with two edits announced by Taliban at the end of December 2022 and banning women from higher education and from working for national and international NGOs. 

These two bans did not affect our activities in 2022 as we had already completed our planned actions but have caused us to put activities on hold once again in 2023 with the necessity to re-think at our ways of working to remain relevant for women and girls.

The bans have de facto frozen a large part of aid delivery. The U.N. Women's Department said 86% of the 151 organizations surveyed have either stopped or are functioning partially. 

We are still unable to assess the consequences of these bans in full, but they will certainly cause a further deterioration of the already dire living conditions of the majority of Afghan people 

In 2022, at Womanity, we were able to negotiate an agreement with the TVET-Authority, an independent authority (with powers similar to the ones of a Ministry) that oversees the post-secondary vocational training in the entire country and that had expressed a positive view on girls´ education. Typically, TVET education requires two years of further education, grade 13^th and 14^th, in a series of subjects such as computer and technology, agriculture etc. 

Since June 2022, following the Memorandum of Understanding with TVET-A, we enrolled 111 students, with 78 completing the entire course and 18 still enrolled in a class that was expected to be concluded in March 2023 and it is now on hold. 

They were all female students in grade 13^th and 14^th of the Computer Technology Institute (CTI). While training them, we also conducted advanced training for 26 trainers of several TVET (technical vocation training) Institutes. 21 of them completed the course.

With the hope that the CTI could reopen for in person classes for girls in 2023, we also rehabilitated four computer labs so that they could be up and running for the next academic year. 

The relationship with CTI has been positive and we were already on track to renew our agreement and organise new training in January 2023 when the edits banning women from higher education and from working in NGOs were announced. After this announcement, we were told that the conversation with TVET could not continue for the time being. 

Early in the year 2022, we also supported 300 students with three months scholarship to pay tuition fees at the DEWA centre, the most well-known centre to prepare students for the Kankoor exam. The Kankoor exam is the national entry exam to enter University. 

Ironically the exam took place in October, just two months before university was banned for women. Of the students we supported, 191 passed the exam, 7 joined private universities, 8 did not take the exam and 94 were not eligible for the exam in 2022 and were planning to take it in 2023. We had a success rate of 64% out of 300 students or 93% if we consider only the ones who qualified for the exam in 2022.

Additionally, we scaled up our university scholarship program in the computer science faculties from 11 students supported in 2021, to 33 students in 2023. Of them, one left and 10 graduated by the end of 2022.  

Since June 2022, following the Memorandum of Understanding with TVET-A, we are training online 89 female students in grade 13^th and 14^th of the Computer Technology Institute (CTI) in coding languages. Students have high attendance rate and high marks to the different assignments taken in these three months of training.

 Early in the year, we also supported 300 students with three months scholarship to pay tuition fees at the DEWA centre, the most well-known centre to prepare students for the Kankoor exam. The Kankoor exam is the national entry exam to enter University, higher marks at the exam grant access to faculties such us medicine and engineering. The next Kankoor exam for boys and girls is expected to take place in the first half of October 2022. We are currently awaiting news from the field about it.

 Additionally, we scaled up our university scholarship program.  From 11 students supported in 2021, we are currently supporting 31 of them in their studies in the computer science faculty. 20 new students are selected within a partnership with Salam University, they join other 9 students who were already receiving a scholarship last year. Additional two students are continuing their studies in the Kabul University. 

22 had a performance of 70% or more (as average mark of exam results) with the majority having very high marks (around 80% or more). Two students graduated during the first semester.

While, we implement our 2022 program as agreed with the TVET-A, we are also conducting a landscape analysis to understand our longer-term opportunities in Afghanistan in the current reality and the value added associated to each of them.

“If I was not given this scholarship, I would have had to quit my studies in this semester and put an end to my dream. I am really thankful to all those, who contributed to this program and made many girls like me to continue their studies and support their families in the future.”

Z. student of Computer Science at the Salam University (8^th semester), who continued to study thanks to the scholarship program of the Womanity Foundation

Womanity was set to restart its activities in March 2022, when secondary schools for girls were due to reopen, but to the shock of the entire world, this decision was reversed at the very last-minute preventing us again from offering our services to students.

However, driven by our strong determination to continue to support girls´education in Afghanistan, we did not give up and we started to investigate other avenues to continue our work. We identified in the TVET-A authority a potential strong partner to implement our program.

TVET-A is an independent authority that supervises vocational training institutes for boys and girls in grade 13^th and 14^th across Afghanistan. Among their institutes, there is a technological centre in Kabul that offers classes in computer literacy, graphic design and coding. After several weeks of negotiation, we identified ways to complement their offer and support girls´ education, we also negotiated to host classes online for them while we wait that the centre is given authorisation to open for girls. More than 100 students expressed interest in joining our classes.

We are currently signing a Memorandum of Understanding to hopefully start activities by the end of June.

Meanwhile we expanded our university scholarship program for student in computer science in Salam University and identified 20 new students to join our current 11 scholarship holders and receive our financial support. 

In the first months of the year, we also support 300 girls to prepare for the Kankoor exam, granting them financial support to attend tutoring classes in a private well-known institute (the DEWA center).