Five years after the Taliban returned to power and barred girls from secondary education, Afghan educator Shabana Basij-Rasikh says online learning has become an essential lifeline but cannot substitute for restoring girls’ right to attend school.
“An online education can never replace in-person learning. It should never replace in-person learning. It should never excuse what is happening inside Afghanistan,” Basij-Rasikh told KabulNow.
Basij-Rasikh is the co-founder and president of the School of Leadership, Afghanistan, known as SOLA. Established in 2008 as a scholarship program, SOLA later became Afghanistan’s first boarding school for girls. It operated in Kabul until August 2021, when the Taliban seized the capital and the school evacuated its students and staff to Rwanda.
SOLA now educates Afghan girls at its boarding school in Rwanda and through SOLAx, a free, WhatsApp-based learning platform launched in March 2024. Basij-Rasikh said the platform has more than 40,000 learners, 85 percent of whom are inside Afghanistan.
SOLAx was designed around the limited and irregular access many Afghan families have to electricity, smartphones, and the internet. A chatbot sends lessons in small sections, including short videos, audio recordings, and documents, followed by questions. Learners can study whenever they have access to a phone and an internet connection.
“And then the students, they may have access to electricity once a week or once a day. Or they may have access to a phone once a week or once a day or once a month. So it really is self-paced. That’s what I mean when I say self-paced,” Basij-Rasikh said.
Afghanistan remains the only country in the world where girls and women are banned from formal education beyond sixth grade. According to UNESCO, an estimated 2.4 million girls have been excluded from secondary education since the Taliban returned to power.
Basij-Rasikh said online programs can help girls continue learning and preserve hope during the ban, much as underground schools did during the Taliban’s first period in power.
She was six years old when the Taliban seized power in 1996. Her family sent her and her sister to secret schools run by women in private homes. Although the students received no formal certificates, she said those schools allowed girls to continue learning and imagine a different future.
“What the brave girls of Afghanistan and their families are doing in the current situation where they’re finding opportunities for their daughters to study online, to get online, to access resources online. This is, as you mentioned, it’s an emergency situation because they’re denied their basic human right and their Islamic right to education,” she said.
Basij-Rasikh cautioned that remote education cannot provide the interaction with teachers and other students that children experience in a physical school. She also warned that prolonged restrictions are changing how a new generation understands the place of women in Afghan society.
“But the reality is that five years is a long time. It’s a long time for a country where young people are growing up and seeing girls silenced, seeing women silenced in their own country,” she said.
Young Afghans have spent the past five years seeing few women in politics, business, education, and other areas of public life, Basij-Rasikh said. The longer that situation continues, the greater the risk that their exclusion will come to be seen as normal.
“And that is really dangerous. It’s really dangerous for our young people, for our girls,” she said.
Basij-Rasikh said the crisis extends beyond education. Restrictions on women’s employment have reduced family incomes, while poverty and unemployment are pushing some boys out of school and into work.
“The problem in Afghanistan isn’t just the problem of education or lack of education or lack of access to education for girls and women. We know that our boys are suffering. We know that our men are suffering as well,” she said.
Before the Taliban takeover, SOLA had nearly 100 students from 28 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces. Basij-Rasikh described their evacuation to Rwanda as a success because it protected the students and allowed them to continue their education. But she said Afghanistan’s current crisis should not be understood only as a failure of the international community.
“Because at the end of the day, we cannot seek a future in which we give the leadership of the decisions that impact our day-to-day lives to the international community. We’re way past time to own those decisions ourselves in Afghanistan,” she said.
At its Rwanda campus, SOLA brings together students from different ethnic, religious, and linguistic backgrounds. Basij-Rasikh said their relationships are creating a national sisterhood that could eventually contribute to a more peaceful and inclusive Afghanistan.
She hopes that girls will again be able to attend schools and universities and that SOLA will one day return to Afghanistan. But she said such change cannot depend solely on outside intervention.
“We cannot wait for international community to come and save us. It’s just simply not going to happen,” she said.
Despite the restrictions and uncertainty, Basij-Rasikh believes SOLA’s students and graduates will eventually return and help rebuild the country.
“I wake up every single day fighting for that future for Afghanistan. I know that our students will play a significant role in that,” she said.
