The need for sola

SOLA and the Boarding School Model.

In this time of extraordinary change, we present an overview of the challenges that have traditionally confronted Afghan girls and their families who seek the opportunity to learn, and demonstrate how SOLA's model has long met these challenges by delivering an education unlike any other in Afghanistan.

The pre-2021 numbers are stark, and they are only where the story begins.

Nearly 3 million girls out of school. A 63% illiteracy rate. 33% of girls married before their 18th birthdays. More than 40% of Afghan schools operating with no buildings more permanent than tents. An underqualified female teaching force. Girls at risk of violent assault — with fists, with weapons, even with acid — as they walk to and from school.

Even prior to the Taliban’s return in August 2021, these were the statistics and the reality facing girls seeking education in Afghanistan: a reality driven by fragile security conditions, high poverty rates, a lack of well-trained female teachers, and persistent cultural norms that inhibited women's visibility in public life.

While public backing for girls’ education trended consistently upward in the years between the Taliban regimes — in 2019, for instance, a nationwide survey revealed that nearly 87% of Afghans supported educational opportunities for women — many families, particularly in rural areas where the percentage of female students would be as low as 15%, faced struggles against the continued strength of traditional family practices celebrating early motherhood and child-rearing.

In many cases historically, a girl who wanted to attend school needed permission from her male relatives: her father and brothers, and also extended family members like uncles and grandfathers. A girl (or a father) who chose to ignore a relative's prohibition against education ran very real risks: SOLA has direct experience with a student whose father was warned by his own brother — our student’s uncle — that his life would be in danger if his daughter continued her education.

The nature and qualifications of Afghanistan's female teaching force were another significant impediment to equal educational opportunity — one with profound and long-term consequences. Seven of Afghanistan's 34 provinces had less than 10% female teachers; in 17 provinces, less than 20% of the teachers were women. With these numbers in mind, consider the reality that many families (particularly in rural areas) would only permit their daughters to be educated by women once their daughters entered their teenage years. If there were no female teachers, these families would often choose to withdraw their girls from school.

Afghanistan's small female teaching force was often extremely inexperienced, with many teachers having only completed a primary education. Classes were also often conducted in far less than ideal conditions: 41% of Afghan government schools had no buildings, with classes held in tents or completely outdoors. 60% of schools had no toilets or sanitation facilities, effectively making them off-limits to girls, particularly teenage girls.

Assuming an Afghan girl received permission to attend school, and assuming she could find one with quality infrastructure and qualified teachers, she would still be at risk of physical harm during her travels to and from her classes, with cases of physical and sexual harassment in city streets being well-documented. There was also the very real danger of acid attacks: dozens of girls have been severely disfigured or even blinded by men or boys throwing acid into their faces, as a warning to other girls against pursuing their educations.

SOLA's boarding school model: safe, unique, and effective. 

SOLA’s boarding school model has been specifically and intentionally structured to overcome the barriers to girls' education identified above.

Our students boarded on our campus in Kabul throughout the March to December academic year, thus mitigating the risks inherent in traveling to and from school daily. Our residential faculty, then and now, provide round-the-clock guidance and supervision, and our intensive training program for our teaching staff ensures that each student learns from qualified teachers throughout her academic career.

SOLA’s decision to begin the boarding school experience in adolescence is a strategic one: early adolescence is a time of profound cognitive, physical, and social development, and a girl who remains in school throughout adolescence is much more likely to marry and have children at a later age. By giving a student the opportunity to focus on her studies, rather than on managing a household, we increase the chances that she will successfully complete her schooling.

Our students came to us from 28 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces. This diversity in our student body also reflects a strategic choice to address the ethnic and religious tensions which contribute significantly to Afghanistan’s political instability, and our boarding program allows for student recruitment across all ethnicities, regions, and cultures.

We intend that, when the day comes when our students can safely return home to their families and their birthplaces, they will be empowered to begin to break down the barriers to women’s visibility that exist within Afghanistan. We also intend that, in the long term, our students will graduate SOLA and attend regional universities where they will continue to develop their leadership and life skills. We instill in them the belief that they can impact their country; it is our hope that, once their educational careers are complete, they will return to lead Afghanistan into a prosperous and peaceful future.

In the Pashto language, the word "sola" means "peace". 

In 2016, our first year as a boarding school, SOLA received 70 applications from Afghan girls and their families. In 2021, our final year in Afghanistan, we received more than 260 applications.

The steady, year-to-year broadening of our applicant pool inspires us: it demonstrates our successful growth, but it does much more than that — it documents a desire within Afghanistan to create a new path for a new generation. It documents a desire to let girls learn.

We see this desire in the faces of each student who steps onto SOLA's campus for the first time. We see it in our older students who welcome their young classmates like sisters. We see it in our teachers and staff who devote hours to rigorous training so that they can provide an extraordinary educational experience. We see it in the mothers who put their children in our care, and in the fathers who accept personal risk so that their daughters may have the chance to grow.

SOLA no longer operates within Afghanistan. As our founder Shabana Basij-Rasikh has written, 2021 was a year of transformation, of loss — and of hope. In 2021, SOLA departed Afghanistan for Rwanda, and in Rwanda we have resumed our operations. Our 2022 academic year is one in which we are enrolling new students drawn from the Afghan refugee diaspora. It is a year unlike any in our history, and yet while so much has changed, so much has not.

"I will use my education to teach other girls how to be brave, and that they are very important in society. Today, I am here, I am brave, tomorrow another girl will be here and she will be brave like me." These are the words of one of our students, and she speaks for every girl at SOLA, now and in the years to come. They are the ones whose bravery has the power to change the world. We hope you will join them, their families, and us as we work toward "sola" in Afghanistan — as we work toward peace.