With the Taliban’s ban on girls’ secondary education unabated, UNICEF has taken an alternative pathway to educate over half a million children across the country, most of them girls.
This UN agency has said in a recent report that in the past month, its education program through 17,856 community-based classes in 30 provinces has provided accelerated education to 573,388 children, more than half of them school-age girls.
This program also distributes teaching materials to teachers and textbooks for school children.
UNICEF has stated that it has supported 401,449, children, including girls, and teachers through the provision of teaching materials and textbooks in April.
“Currently 9 million textbooks have been distributed, an additional 6 million are pre-positioned in provincial warehouses, and the remaining 5 million will be distributed by the end of June.” Part of the statement reads.
UNICEF established its free-cost Community-based Education (CBE) program last year amid widespread protests against the Taliban on barring girls to attend classes beyond sixth grade.
The CBE has since then stretched across the remotest areas where children, particularly girls, hardly have access to schools despite progress in raising enrolment.
UNICEF has estimated that 3.7 million children are out-of-school in Afghanistan – 60 percent of them are girls.
Nevertheless, the CBE is now an alternative for these girls for whom the secondary school has turned into a distant dream under the repressive Taliban rule.
“We help identify alternative pathways to learning and increase educational opportunities for the hardest-to-reach children, primarily girls,” UNICEF said in a statement.
“The vision for the coming years is to enroll around 50 percent of the out-of-school children, which is around 1.7 million children by mobilizing support to the CBE Investment case.”
