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NGO Community Based Education in Afghanistan.
Community Based Education is sometimes referred to as ‘informal education’ as it takes place outside of formal government schools. In Afghanistan many different charities and NGO’s have involved themselves in Community education and Home-based schools in recent decades. Programs such as UNICEF's 'let us learn and DFID (Department for International Development's) ‘Girls Education Challenge’ have set up schools in houses and other community buildings, often supplying learning materials and providing teacher training. Community/Home Based Schooling is an approach taken by NGOs to increase access to education for all children but is especially important for the most marginalised girls.

These NGO funded schools aim to reach areas government schools cannot. They are generally designed to be integrated into the government system once there is the economic capacity to do so. This integration has tended to happen in two ways, either the students and teachers stay in the same place and the school changes status or the Community based school closes and the students transfer to government schools when possible. Community Based schools which are run by organisations such as the International Rescue Fund have tended to support integration by following the government curriculum and teaching in one of Afghanistan’s Primary languages: Dari or Pashtun depending on the location of the school.

Examples of Community Based Education: The Healing Classrooms Initiative supporting Teachers.
The International Rescue Committee is a humanitarian aid agency who works with communities in emergencies and protracted crises.The organisation specifically focuses on saving institutions such as education. Community Based Education allows the organisation to be flexible and responsive in the creation of its programs. In 2004 IRC set up its ‘Healing Classrooms Initiative’ (HCI) in order to better the teacher development within the communities they worked in. The classes themselves were held in various make-shift environments, including under trees, in teachers homes and in mosques. All classes which were part of the initiative followed the Ministry of Education curriculum.

Aid organisations such as IRC recognise that teachers in community or home based schools are often unqualified, and need to be provided with the skills they need to adequately teach. International rescue Committee provide training to home based schooling teachers, through pedagogy courses, lesson planning instruction and different teaching strategies. They follow up on the progress of teachers by making classroom visits. Despite the initiative being teacher focused, the teachers receive no payment from International Rescue Committee, and any payments they recieve from students are usually not substantial.

Girls Education Challenge
Additional examples of Community Based Education are the programs funded by the Girls Education Challenge. The program was launched in 2012, and consisted of two projects. The first project was ‘Steps Towards Afghan Girls’ Education Success’ (STAGES). It focused on management of pre-existing formal schools, renovation of school buildings and supporting students struggling with additional learning needs. STAGES focused on working with communities to identify and barriers to education faced by Afghan Girls. Th project recognised that for girls especially, poverty was not the only barrier to learning, and subsequently focused on making accessing education safer by building schools close to villages and training more female teachers. In 2018, GEC stated that it was important to them that the environment they provided for learning was a supportive one. In addition to this, the project helped support Primary and lower secondary CBE classes in hard to reach communities. The first phase of implementation for this program was completed in June 2021.

The second GEC funded project, started in April 2017 and running until March 2025 is the ‘Community-based education for the Marginalised Girls in Afghanistan’. Again working with communities, the aim is to increase the capacity that parents, and local education departments have and empower them to support the education of girls in the area. This project recognises that children in Afghanistan face multiple barriers to education, and it funds the education of 6000 children who have dropped out of school and meet the extreme poverty criteria. The project is aiming to provide 49,150 girls with a community-based primary education for two years across 1,670 community based girls schools, with the view to then go on and support them in accessing a secondary education. Furthermore, the Community Based Schools provide the opportunity for girls from government schools to receive teacher training, through which they can better their own prospects and support the learning of their peers.

How Community Based Education Removes Barriers
In times of peace in Afghanistan, distance from government schools and lack of transport to nearby towns is one of the biggest barriers faced by rural Afghan children. For over 60 years, Community and Home based schools have been used by NGOs as a way to bring education to hard to reach children rural areas, without the need for infrastructure. Poor rural children often have to assist with their families work and informal community schools can be more flexible with their scheduling, with shorter days to allow for such out of work commitments. This removes not only the geographical barrier, but some of the opportunity costs associated with sending children to school.

Community based education can decrease ‘cultural distance’ which affects marginalised girls in particular, when schools are in the teachers homes or community buildings, it creates a safe place where learning is more culturally and geographically accessible.

Conflict as a Barrier to Education
Decades of Conflict in Afghanistan have made education consistently difficult. Visibility of government schools means they can become targets in areas affected by conflict and unrest. Armed groups have been known to attack both teachers and students. Teachers are also reluctant to work in dangerous provinces. During times of Taliban regime, girls schools have been especially targeted. The Taliban have tried to close girls’ school by attacking them, poisoning their drinking water and even releasing gas into the air. Teachers, governmental employees and communities have been pushed to close girls’ schools after receiving threatening “Night Letters” from the Taliban. For these reasons, community based schools are often the safer option during unstable times and go some way to reduce risk for both students and teachers.

Why community Based Education? The international interest in educating Afghanistan
The international community has shown great interest in Afghan education over recent decades. Education became a key point of focus for US engagement with Afghan politics in the early 2000s, and formed part of the mission to reconstruct a ‘stable, effective and ideological state’. The Bonn Agreement of 2001 saw the Afghanistan Compact Programme set up, which provided a 5 year plan with benchmarks to cover different aspects of Afghan National Affairs. Education made up part of the pillar of ‘economic and social development’. During this time, Emergency education policies were put in place, and documents were produced by such organisations as Asian Development Bank (ADB), the Afghanistan Assistance Coordination Authority (AACA), the Independent High Commission on Education for Afghanistan (IHCEA) and the Academic Council on Education (ACE).’

Post 2001, after the fall of the Taliban, the empowerment and liberation of women became an increasingly popular topic. Education as a means to liberate women and girls was central to US discourse on Afghan issues. This discourse placed importance on education as a primary way to break cycles of poverty. Despite the framework for new education system being established in 2003-2004, the policy level support and aims often differed from the educational engagement of women girls at the local level. Aid institutions working in Afghanistan started to make women’s issues a top priority. Agencies had to decide which types of education programme they should support. In the ever changing environment, where the threat of violence was still present, community based schools were often thought to work better.

There has been some critisicm amongst scholars on the idea of female liberation as a justification for US involvement in the region. Many felt there was the implicit assumption that the US was the perfect embodiment of gender equality and women's human rights, and that the media representation of Afghan women in Western was Orientalist in its nature. Scholars such as Russo have subsequently challenged the US on their failure to take any accountability for consequences of their own military involvement in Afghanistan in their attempts to establish gender equality in the region. Some scholars have also argued that formal schooling policies created by the international community post 2001 ‘extracted women from their social, historical, and political realities, and employed the discourse of vulnerability on Afghan women to justify a particular kind of aid intervention’. Despite their aim to improve life for Afghans and rebuild a stable society, the Governments focus on ‘back to school’ programs was not as beneficial for girls due to the lack of female teachers amongst other issues. Even with the strong focus on womens rights and liberation, the government’s expectations for attainment were not met, and education was still overwhelmingly ‘impeded by lack of available schools, security concerns, poverty, and discrimination and gender inequality in customary practices’. These failures provided another reason to advocate for community based education in Afghanistan.

Funding for Community Based Education in Afghanistan
Funding for Community Based Education is often provided by international developmental institutes. The £344 million Girls Education Challenge Fund is an example of this, and is managed under the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO). The GEC fund is the UK’s main contribution to MDG 3: the Goal of eliminating gender disparity in primary, secondary and tertiary education. The GEC has Fund managers, who’s job is to decide how to best support the many different projects going on at any given time. Fund managers for GEC also create criteria for assessing the projects at different stages, measuring how close a project is to its target.

The GEC projects in Afghanistan have three separate funding windows. The Step Change Window (SCW), the Innovation Window (IW) and the Strategic Partnerships Window (SPW). The fund was evaluated at each window and assessed against a ‘control group’. In 2012, initial evaluation found that at the window level, non-formal education (CBE’s/HBS’s) were the most cost effective of their interventions.

Funding by Results
GEC’s approach to funding is unusual for a development program as it functions the basis of Payment by Results. In order for the funding, (10-20% of the project budget) to be released, at the midline, depended on the projects ‘treatment group’ reaching a pre determined target. A contested feature of PbR is how the results needed to reach this target are achieved is at the discretion of the intended recipient of the fund. Many of the GEC projects did not reach this target target.

EGRA
The system of evaluation used by Girls Education Challenge to measure the success of their projects was called the ‘Early Grade Reading Assesment’ (EGRA). EGRA focuses on five skills of reading acquisition: ‘letter sound identification, invented word reading, ORF: listening and reading comprehension.’ The use of the test for the purpose of GEC was controversial because it was designed with the intention of being used for improving education systems generally and not for Payment by Results. The RTI has clear guidelines for the use of EGRA and these are well known amongst education administrators. The (2016) guidelines state that it is not to be used as a ‘high stakes accountability measure for governments or agencies to arrive at funding decisions’. Critics such as Miske and Joglekar argue that the evaluation of students for the release of funds was a misuse of EGRA.

The nature of the GEC projects was holistic, and concerned with the overall wellbeing of the girls and women. It involved different actors, from governement committees and school management to mothers groups within the community. Aims of projects were varied and included raising awareness of gender based violence and women's rights. EGRA could only provide an insight into very isolated aspects of reading and mathematics, and it is worth noting that the evaluation itself is under scrutiny. EGRA isolates single components of reading development and fails to acknowledge how different aspects of learning work together. In addition to this, the one minute limit for completing the ORF subtest is challenged as it does not allow slower readers the time to adequately show their ability.

Madrasah education
There is a long history of non government schooling Afghanistan and Madrasah's are Islamic religious schools which have been a central learning institution in Afghanistan for centuries. Madrasa h's were at one time instruments of the state and Evans (2006, p.10) in Medieval times, the religious schools were not community based but were in fact funded by and catered to the Muslim elite. More recently, Madrasah schools have focused on providing education in areas not reached by government funding. Often these religious schools are the only opportunity village children have to learn how to read and write. They differ from other types of Community Based Education provided by NGOs due to the fact they are often privately run and have a de-centralised curriculum which transmits ‘Islamic principles…maintaining religious norms within the community’. In some cases, the Madrasa curriculum is purely religious contains no secular subjects at all. Madrasas have been described as the most ‘widespread educational institution in Afghanistan.

Criticisms of Madrasahs:
Since the event of 9/11, and the involvement of the UK and America in Afghanistan, Western media have blamed Madrasa s for ‘many ills’. Madrasa schools have been treated suspiciously by Western scholars and media, due to some Madrasas on the Pakistani-Afghan border having linkages relating to the training of Taliban officials and faciliting a flow of ‘hardline ideologies’. Critics have also expressed concern over the funding for these schools, which has been known to sometimes come overseas from radical Islamists in the Gulf regions.

These links may be true of extremist Islamist Madrasahs which originated in Pakistan in the 1990s but this has been contested by scholars who highlight that recruits to Islamic militancy generally received their education in secular schools and universities. Borchgrevink states that much media representation of Madrasas has been based on myth rather than fact. Other scholars argue that despite their negative connotations, Madrasahs play an extremely important role, and are potentially the only chance rural children have to learn how to read and write. Evans states that western policy should engage with them for this reason. In terms of Afghan cultural history, Madrasahs are an important part of ‘South Asian tradition’ and many were founded as an Islamic alternative to the colonial education system. It is worth noting that the modern education system at this time was not completely secular, Islamic religion played an important an important role and many teachers came directly to the colonial schools from Madrasa's.

Madrasa's have always catered to a male population, which leaves even more of an educational gap for the most marginalised Afghan girls. Rural women and girls have therfore continuously suffered from a lack of eduction even with the existence of Madrasas. The Community Based Schools supported by NGOs and funded by the international aid community are a potential solution for this.

Achievements of CBE
The International Rescue Committee is a humanitarian aid NGO which funded by government donors as well as institutions like Department for International Development, UK aid, SIDA, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, trusts foundations and corporate partners. Research into IRC education projects found that Community Based Education was a worthwhile allocation of funding for many reasons. It not only supports education in areas without formal schools, but also provides a culturally relevent environment in which ‘learning in all senses’ can happen. Both male and female students from rural communities expressed how they found the schooling valuable for making friends. Teachers and students being from the same community allows learning to happen in a way that is relevant to local culture and beliefs. The Afghan concept of 'Tarbia' concerns good moral character and manners, and something that the students in the 2008 study associated with attending the home based schools. Despite the informality of the schools, students made the distinction between being a good person who attended school and had Tarbia, and being ‘bad’ and hanging out on the street. Informal schools were compared favourably to government ones and parents, teachers and students all reported feeling that they were ‘real schools’.

Limitations of CBE
The same group of students did point out some negative aspects of CBE. They highlighted that lack of a school buildings meant that learning often took place in the home of the teacher with children and other members of their families present. Students said they understood that babies sometimes had to be attended to during lessons which was disruptive. Students expressed concern over the precariousness of informal schools and teacher availability. Teachers are also likely to be untrained, with no real desire to teach but have the role thrust upon them by other members of the community. Some IRC teachers were actually older students, tasked with teaching younger children as part of their training. Whilst a positive way to improve the opportunities for young women in the community, this meant that the role of a teacher in Afghan community schools was very different to what is understood of teaching in the Global North.