In a four-year multi-annual programme Lifes2good Foundation is working with Catholic Relief Services (CRS) as part of a broader initiative to increase access to education across three rural provinces in Afghanistan.
Decades of war and extreme poverty have prevented many of Afghanistan’s children from accessing education, especially in remote areas of the country. Approximately 40 percent of Afghanistan’s school-aged children are out of school. In mountainous and isolated communities, these numbers are even lower. Girls in Afghanistan are especially disadvantaged and struggle with educational barriers like gender discrimination and child marriage – an estimated one out of three girls are married by age 18 and around 60 percent of Afghanistan’s out-of-school children are girls.
In the villages where Lifes2good Foundation has established schools, there is no other educational provider. The model provides one classroom multi-grade teaching and incorporates sustained engagement with the government, advocating for the government to take over the running of these schools after Lifes2good four-year engagement. Fifty percent of the pupils in the Lifes2good Foundation schools are girls.
It would not be culturally appropriate to run girls only schools in rural Afghanistan, but 50% of the pupils in the schools supported by Lifes2good Foundation are girls, and this is seen as an achievement in the context.
Cover Photo: Maurice McQuillan, CEO Lifes2good Foundation, visits a classroom, in a Lifes2good Foundation school, in the mountainous village of Mindiyak in Bamiyan province in Afghanistan.
In 2020 schools closed for many months in Afghanistan due to Covid-19. Lifes2good Foundation partner, CRS, continued to deliver hard copy education packages into the remote mountainous villages so that some form of learning could continue. Lifes2good Foundation also agreed with CRS to divert some budget lines to allow vital hygiene messages to be developed for, and delivered to, the same remote communities. The same message was as important in the mountains of Afghanistan, as it was in Ireland ….. “Wash your hands”!
