Promoting Education in a Conflict Zone: A policy recommendation to address illiteracy in rural communities in Afghanistan

This picture captures Mustafa Rezaie's visit to a CBE class that was established for children in the remote village of Jamshidi, Faryab, Afghanistan by ACTED in 2020. In the image, two children can be seen volunteering to recite a Persian poem on the right.

By: Mustafa Rezaie

Peace and Education

Peace is the first and foremost need of the people in Afghanistan, and education is the key. Education is a missing building block in Afghanistan’s progress toward sustainable peace, conflict resolution, and economic development. The rural areas—due to lack of transportation, classrooms, and poor education—have the lowest literacy rate in Afghanistan. In addition, Afghanistan has the lowest literacy rate in the world at 43% (55.48% male, 29.81% female) (UNESCO, 2021).

Community-Based Education (CBE), combined with Accelerated Learning Programs (ALP), are more cost-effective, accessible, culturally acceptable, and affordable programs for hard-to-reach communities. ALP is designed to pace learning quicker than is typical, making it a good alternative in Afghanistan for those children who have been away from school due to conflict. CBE is designed to leverage local concepts and traditions. It creates a sense of mutual benefit for both the community and the organization. Research shows CBE can increase the overall rate of participation in school and a sense of responsibility and civic engagement for boys and girls (Carlisle, Gourd, Rajkhan, & Nitta, p.13,2017). Combining ALP and CBE creates a sense of connection and advances understanding to develop a range of intellectual skills while advancing literacy in rural communities.

Illiteracy

The main problem in Afghanistan is a high rate of illiteracy. Based on the literature and problem analysis, illiteracy leads to other problems including conflict, instability, poverty, poor development, violence, poor education, unskilled teachers, corruption, and the illegal trade of drugs. This is in line with UNESCO’s Director-General, Irina Bokova, statement “literacy is the cornerstone of peace and development” (UNAMA, 2013). An estimated 12 million people (7.2 million female, 4.8 million male age 15 and above) in Afghanistan are illiterate, including about 3.7 million school-age children, 60% of whom are girls, and the same number are estimated to be out of school (UNICEF, 2018),and (UNESCO, 2021,b). Both issues can be addressed by promoting CBE and providing awareness to parents to increase school participation, which is part of the long-term solution to illiteracy and building sustainable peace in Afghanistan.

Market and Government Failures: Identifying the Problems

The market failures in the education system in Afghanistan can be attributed to three main factors, namely asymmetry of information, inefficiency in production and allocation of education-related goods and services. Materials include textbooks, teaching materials, and teacher training and inequality in the provisioning of schooling infrastructure like schools, classrooms, and libraries in slum and rural areas.

The government failures are bureaucratic in the supply and under supply of schooling infrastructure. The government has not been able to provide adequate public school buildings, quality education, curriculum, a sufficient number of teachers, teacher training, school facilities, female teachers, and public transportation. According to Afghanistan's constitution, the government is responsible for providing equal opportunities for education to all citizens, without discrimination based on gender, tribe, or geographic location.

Moving Forward

There are two ways to implement CBE: through the government or through engaging community elders and Civil Society Organizations (CSOs). This paper recommends the latter. The Social Construct Framework approach is applied here to identify and create policy solutions through process understanding and addressing social change in rural communities. This approach uses an alternative philosophical assumption and knowledge production based on local context. Social construction perspectives have been found very useful in various fields such as education, health care, community work and conflict resolution (Borges, Celiane, & Emerson, 2013).

The primary generic solutions proposed are changes in the market mechanism and rules. Community elders and local CSOs, including young members of the community, should be allowed to engage in addressing the problems. The community elders and religious elders have the power and influence in the societal structure of Afghanistan, and CSOs have the technical expertise to implement this policy. First, they need to determine the needs of society and find out the number of school-going and out of school children. Then, community and religious elders are engaged through the provision of comprehensive incentives and awareness to the parents in rural areas. The community leaders’ words are effective in religious gatherings and in Mosques. The more educated and open-minded religious leaders are, the easier it will be to work with them. In addition, the more impactful they will be to engage their communities in this difficult situation in Afghanistan under the control of the Taliban.

Therefore, to bring sustainable peace and mitigate conflict, Community elders (CLs) and CSOs should be engaged in promoting education in the community. This can be done by lobbying and raising funds from UNICEF and INGOs who have more interest in CBE. UNICEF is the main partner of the Ministry of Education in educating out-of-school children. By 2020, UNICEF had supported more than 4,351 CBE classes throughout Afghanistan. INGOs are receiving funds from UNICEF and implementing CBE in hard-to-reach rural and mountainous villages (UNICEF, 2020). In addition, CLs and CSOs can encourage and push the government to address the issues of bureaucratic supply and advocate for schooling infrastructure and the right of girls to be educated particularly in hard-to-reach rural areas in Afghanistan.

Mustafa Rezaie is a Rotary Peace Fellow and a student of the Master of International Development Policy program at Duke University. He has over 10 years of experience working to improve local economic development, education access for women, contributing to financial management reforms, and establishing monitoring and evaluation (M&E) systems in conflict zones.