Focus on Afghan refugee education

As hundreds of thousands of Afghans return to rebuild their homes and communities from the ashes of 23 years of conflict, most come poorly equipped with little or no education to assist them. According to the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 87 percent of the 1.6 million Afghans returning from Pakistan to their country last year had no education. Shakila Jan, a bright-eyed seven-year-old Afghan refugee schoolgirl at the mud-built school of Maskeenabad Afghan refugee informal settlement near Pakistan’s sprawling capital, Islamabad, knows a little about the country she has never seen, but that's about all. "I want to read and I want to learn sewing and embroidery," she told IRIN. Jan and another 570 children in the slums now have access to a few grades of education in the two schools established by the UN Educational Cultural and Scientific Organisation (UNESCO). Their rudimentary school building has no electricity, and the pupils squat on the ground, but they are the lucky few among the 15,000 children of school age among the 80,000 Afghans living there. Jan’s ageing father is ill, and her three bothers – all young boys - are the family’s breadwinners. They work long hours in the nearby fruit market. Unlike the 1.5 million Afghan refugees living in UNHCR-assisted refugee camps all over the country, the Afghans living in the Maskeenabad settlement, like hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees living in Pakistani cities, receive very little assistance compared to the Afghans in the camps who have some access to health care, education and sanitation. "Over the years, enough attention was not paid to the professional aspects of education such as training and curriculum development," Ingeborg Breines, UNESCO’s director in Islamabad, told IRIN. Experts maintain that the shortage of common teaching materials, the inability to maintain school infrastructure and a lack of community participation in education were some of the major reasons for the fact that many Afghan refugees living in Pakistan for decades have remained illiterate. According to the refugee agency, 20 to 25 percent of the 1.8 to two million Afghans refugees living in Pakistani refugee villages and cities are school-age children. Half of this number are estimated to live in camps. The agency caters for some 170,000 pupils in almost 500 schools with some 5,000 teachers. However, only three to four percent of Afghan refugee children make it beyond six years of basic schooling to secondary and further levels of education. It is estimated that less then 30 percent of the pupils are girls. While primary education exists in many camps, many Afghans in Pakistani urban centres cannot access any educational services, which explains the high percentage of returnees to Afghanistan last year being illiterate. Some 82 percent of the 1.6 million Afghans going back last year left Pakistani cities, with a minority hailing from the camps. Although many Afghans have established private or self-help schools in the cities, these are often beyond the means of many, and a large number closed after Afghans started returning to their country following the fall of the hardline Taliban regime in 2001. Those that remain continue to teach decades-old curricula. "Education is very important for refugees, because it’s the only baggage that they can take back to their country," Somoratne Ekanayke, a refugee-education expert with the German government’s project, Basic Education for Afghan Refugees (BEFAR), told IRIN from the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar. He added that providing education to a socially and culturally diverse group such as Afghan refugees was challenging, because they were scattered in large numbers in different locations. "It becomes still more complex when one has to plan out systems that would answer their futuristic needs, taking into consideration the diverse socioeconomic and stressful backgrounds," he said. With the ongoing repatriation of Afghan refugees from Pakistan, donor interest in their education is diminishing. "It is clear that donors' interest in the Afghan refugees in Pakistan is going down," Breines maintained. She added that the Afghan government was eager to receive skilled people who can contribute to the ongoing reconstruction of their country. "We must keep in mind that the situation in the host country [Pakistan] is not better either," she maintained. With only half of its 140 million people literate, Pakistan is struggling to improve access to and the quality of primary education for its own citizens, quite apart from the millions of refugees the country still hosts. This, experts believe, partially explains the sad state of education for Afghan refugee children in the country. Most of the Afghan refugees in the Maskeenabad schools have never seen a computer, while their curriculum would barely match that of any modern educational system around the world. But the issue is not just confined to lack of resources. In the 1980s, the Afghan mujahidin designed a curriculum for Afghan refugee schools which had a largely theological content, and with an overwhelmingly anti-communist thrust. Although the curriculum was revised in the 1990s, and again early last year after the fall of the Taliban, it has a long way to go to come anywhere near modern standards. The system feeds extremism, say some observers. They argue that the Taliban were the products of the networks of Islamic religious seminaries, or madrasas, which mushroomed when the international community failed to provide good-quality secular education to Afghan refugees in Pakistan. Cultural attitudes also play a part in keeping Afghan refugee children ignorant. According to Shahnaz Akhter, a field director with the British NGO Ockenden International, traditional and conservative attitudes of parents and other such notions prevent many students from attending schools. "They think that education is the state’s responsibility, and they do not need to invest in it," she told IRIN. She suggested that, given declining international assistance, Afghan refugees in the country should have access to the primary education services available to Pakistani citizens. "Teacher training is another such area which needs lots of improvement," Akhter said. UNESCO and BEFAR are developing a database of Afghan teachers that would help address the need to source more teachers. Meanwhile, in the mud-walled school in Maskeenabad, 12-year-old Zabihullah reads a poem about his country from his book. "We have books and pencils, but we should have football and cricket at school," he told IRIN. With most of the children from the squalid camp working as scavengers of garbage in Islamabad, and an uncertain future in Afghanistan, Zabihullah’s thirst for a decent education look a long way off.