November will be a month of uncertainty for so many of us. It’s silly to pretend otherwise. One of the few certain things is that, in Afghanistan, new ways will be found to silence women, to stifle women’s voices.

This too is certain: everyone at SOLA will continue to innovate ways to elevate those voices.

We do it through education. Schools are where hope’s seeds are planted, and this is true not just at SOLA, but with our online academy SOLAx – and I’m using this post today to share some beautiful news.

Many of you will remember that we launched SOLAx back at the end of March. Our mission was, and is, to bring online education to Afghan students who want and need it – girls primarily, but not girls exclusively. No expensive technology is necessary to join SOLAx. The only things students need are a smartphone and basic internet to access our coursework via WhatsApp, completely free of charge.

We launched in March, and we anticipated reaching 10,000 learners by March 2025, after one full year in operation.

Take a look at the screenshot I’ve attached from the SOLAx website, which I definitely encourage you to visit: www.solax.org.

As October ended, after 7 months in operation, we were at 14,000+ learners and counting.

Who are these learners? Close to 10,000 of them are female – and more than 4,000 are male. It’s roughly a 67% female/33% male split. And that’s good. Our focus is girls, but our outcome with SOLAx is hope: hope for Afghanistan’s future, and in order to create that hopeful future, Afghanistan needs the best educated women and girls and men and boys who’ll be immediately ready to drive change.

The majority of our students are between the ages of 11 and 30, but we have nearly 200 students under the age of 10, and nearly 300 students over the age of 50.

Our students are in 70+ nations. They’re in every single province of Afghanistan. Every single one.

When we say that SOLAx is for every Afghan girl and every Afghan family everywhere, we mean exactly that. Every girl. Every family. Everywhere.

What do we offer with SOLAx? You’ll see in the graphic that when we launched in March, we went live with 8 ESL courses and 3 Storytelling for Impact courses, with multiple daily lessons provided in each course.

At the end of September, we scaled up our offerings and scaled them up dramatically: SOLAx now provides a 7th grade online curriculum with 9 courses, each offered in Dari and Pashto – 18 courses in all.

In Afghanistan today, a girl’s education ends at 6th grade. Beyond that, opportunity disappears in the darkness.

And that’s why, with SOLAx, we say to all Afghan girls: 7th grade classes are waiting for you.

And there’s more to come. Much more to come. 8th grade, 9th grade, we’ll keep going.

This is who our students are. These 14,000+ learners have, as of today, completed just over 105,000 lessons on SOLAx. We’ve issued nearly 400 course completion certificates, and I’ve seen photos on social media of proud students with their certificates, showing their families and the world that despite any obstacle, they will never stop learning.

All this happens because of the extraordinary SOLAx team: our engineers, our subject matter experts and teachers, our contributors around the world, and leading it all is Mati Amin, the innovator of the SOLAx model. Thank you to all of you. Thank you, endlessly.

SOLAx doesn’t replace in-person learning. It can’t. But what it creates is access to education for students whose access is denied. Across borders, across time zones, and around the world. The need is there. We will meet it.

Our outcome is hope. The hope that grows from classrooms, online and in-person, and creates the future. This is what we do, and we’re only getting started.