Building a Future for Afghan Refugee Children

	Najiba with her daughter, Mahjooba. The IRC has a proud history of educating Afghan refugees in Pakistan, with a special focus on teaching girls.

As a result of two decades of conflict, nearly an entire generation of Afghan children, especially girls, lacks the literacy, numeric and vocational skills they need to thrive. 

Since the early 1980s, the IRC has been working to remedy this situation for Afghan refugee children in Pakistan— the only place during the time of Taliban rule in Afghanistan, that many Afghan girls were able to attend school. 

As of May 2002, the IRC’s education program enrolls nearly 25,000 Afghan children (71% are girls) in 5 schools in Peshawar and 36 schools in outlying villages. The student population includes refugees recently displaced by fighting in northern Afghanistan and refugees who came to Pakistan in the 1980s and 1990s.

During the height of the crisis in 2001, enrollment in IRC schools increased by 10-15%.  IRC staff reported that the new children were ‘invisibles’ who had traveled into Pakistan over unmanned border crossings and were therefore not legally registered as refugees, with all the rights that this distinction affords under international law.  Many arrived unaccompanied by their parents; showed signs of acute depression, anxiety and hopelessness; and had been out of school for nearly 5 years.  The IRC addressed their needs with emergency educational initiatives, including recreational activities and accelerated learning courses in literacy and math.  Liaising with community health educators, the IRC also worked to identify and help students suffering from malnutrition, violence-related injuries and severe psychological trauma. 

The IRC currently trains and employs more than 1,000 Afghan and Pakistani teachers and school administrators — many of whom are refugees themselves.  Recruiting and training local teachers is vital to the success of all IRC emergency education interventions.   Many of the Afghan teachers have expressed their desire to ‘take their schools home’ to Afghanistan as soon as possible.  The IRC is now intensifying its efforts to equip teachers with the skills and resources they will need to create schools ‘from scratch’ in their areas of origin. 

Najiba Ahad, a young mother from northern Afghanistan, is typical of the Afghan women who we meet in Pakistan. They are filled with anxiety about the future of their daughters. Najiba's family was forced to flee because of the fighting. Eventually they moved to a refugee settlement in Peshawar, where she and her husband are struggling to make a living. Najiba couldn't bear the idea of her daughter being illiterate, but as a refugee, she couldn't afford to pay for the expensive schools in Peshawar. One day last year, Najiba met a fellow refugee who teaches at an IRC school for refugee girls in a less than a day she enrolled her eight-year-old daughter, Mahjooba. We recently received a note from Najiba. It said:

"In spite of all my problems as a refugee, I am happy here because my children can sleep without fear of rockets and fighting. And I'm especially proud that I have a daughter attending school. It was impossible under the Taliban, and I never imagined it as a refugee. Without the IRC, poor families like mine could never place books in the hands of our children."

Help send an Afghan child to school, click here.