“Ask me now about our work in Afghanistan and count how many times I mention the word community”

Joe Spikes, Fundraising Officer for Children in Crisis recalls a visit to Kabul:

In late October 2011 I enjoyed what can only be called the privilege of being able to visit Afghanistan, our sister office and our educational programmes within some of Kabul’s many districts.

I visited our Community Based Education Centres (CBECs) and experienced first-hand just how local, low-key but highly valued they are by the children and women that use them. In short, during what felt like an all too brief visit I got an insight into the incredible work that my Afghan colleagues in our Kabul office and Bethan Williams our London-based Programme manager have been developing and improving for several years now.

But what I also came to realise is that I’d only been seeing half the picture when it came to the work that we do in relation to CBECs and education within Kabul.

Lessons:

If I may I’d like to describe this half picture for you. At the last count, five million of the estimated 12 million school-aged children and youth in Afghanistan did not have access to education.

Our CBECs are based in some of Kabul’s poorest communities, those that we have identified as having particularly high numbers of children out of school. Girls are quite often over-represented within the CBECs, simply due to the fact that there are far more obstacles to them going to school than there are for boys.

One of the main purposes of our CBECs is to provide these children with accelerated learning. In one year we teach them grades one and two of the Afghan national curriculum, so that when they graduate from the centres, they are accepted into the state school system and can pursue educations which for most had been a distant and quite unlikely hope.

The amount of ground that these children cover in one year is really quite incredible. More than half of the students & graduates of accelerated learning that I interviewed told me that they could not read or write when they first came to the classes. You’ll find photos below of these same children now proudly showing off their exercise books, full of arithmetic and Dari homework, all written in handwriting, the neatness of which puts mine to shame.

In addition to the accelerated learning, the centres also provide literacy and tailoring classes to local women and coaching classes to children from within the local neighborhood. (The coaching classes are there to give extra support and tuition to children already attending state school, giving them help and advice with their studies which is sometimes difficult to come by at home. Many, if not most come from illiterate households).

Community:

Now for the other half of the picture that I was missing, which can be described in short by two words, community engagement. I guess the clue was probably in the name, Community Based Education Centre, but in all of my conversations with colleagues in the Kabul office or teaching staff at the CBECs I was struck by just how much emphasis they placed on the importance of the work that they do outside of the centres and within the communities.

This work is pretty much continuous, but essential to the success of our CBECs. Firstly, for us to open an education centre within a community takes a huge amount of work on the part of Marouf, the in-country manager of the CBECs. Marouf taught for many years in Afghanistan and has a true passion for delivering education to Kabul’s children that very quickly comes out in conversation with him. When we first go into communities with proposals to open a centre we firstly ensure that we have gained the support of local community leaders & mullahs. It is Marouf’s role to engage with these leaders and one that he obviously delivers with great skill and tact.

But that is just the beginning, even with the local leaders on board there is still a great deal of work to do in ensuring that the local out of school children attend the CBECs. Within each centre is a team leader, and before my visit to Kabul I was under the very wrong impression that theirs was purely a managerial role. The team leaders in fact spend a significant portion of their week outside of the CBEC, enrolling out of school children into accelerated learning classes, following up on absent pupils and greatly strengthening the CBEC’s ties with the community.

This is not easy work.

It is quite usual for the leaders to be speaking to parents who are illiterate and have never received an education themselves. Many don’t believe it possible that their children, particularly their daughters, could ever learn to read, write or attend school. Our team leaders now with years of experience to draw from, perform a great job in countering such views and convincing parents of just how different things could be for their children.

Without this hard work on the part of the team leaders our CBECs just couldn’t exist. The results of this engagement and the hard work of CBEC teachers and pupils alike can now be seen in the classrooms of Kabul’s schools. On my last day in Afghanistan I met graduates of our accelerated learning classes, all girls, who were now studying in local state school. One graduate, Uzra told me :

"in the past, my father said that I couldn't go because the school was too far away. But then the Children in Crisis centre opened up very near to our house and my father said that he was happy for me to go. And now my father has no problem, in the past time he wasn't sure if I was able to learn things or not. But now he trusts in me that I am able to get an education. Because of that he lets me go to state school"

I think that Uzra, in one sentence demonstrated just what Children in Crisis’ CBECs are about, a girl finally given a chance to shine and her father very much seeing it. All thanks to an education centre, just around the corner at the heart of her community.

Learn more about our work in Afghanistan. Click here

My thanks to Marouf, Timor, Soliman, Bethan, Karen and all of my colleagues in Kabul for their time, care & guidance.
 

Gallery of photos. Click on a thumbnail to enlarge: