Female education continues despite threats

Attending a literacy course being held in a tiny classroom, Qandigul tells everyone that she has learned to count up to 100 and can write the word "Afghanistan". "My husband did not let me go to a literacy course, because he thought a 45-year-old person was too old to learn," the mother of 10 told IRIN in the southeastern city of Ghazni. Qandigul is one of the 200 women, most of them housewives, attending literacy classes at the government’s newly established women’s affairs department. According to officials, illiteracy rates are high among both sexes in Ghazni. But women have the additional burden of a culture which discourages education for females. "In the beginning, it was too difficult to convince men to let their female family members attend literacy courses," Safiyah Andar, the director of the women’s affairs department in Ghazni, told IRIN. Andar and two female colleagues operate the department unaided. "The task is huge, while there is almost no funding or technical support," the 40-year-old teacher said. "People are becoming a bit more open to women's issues compared to the first days of our work a few months ago," Andar observed, adding that her department had originally launched the literacy course for seven students with neither teacher nor equipment. "Fortunately we now have a few volunteer female teachers and over 200 students, and the numbers are increasing every week," she said. But traditional values in this region are still impacting on the education of girls. Late last year, a group of unidentified men burned down a girls' school in Ghazni. This was followed by the distribution of leaflets in some districts of the province threatening families who sent their daughters to school. However, Ghazni authorities told IRIN that school attendance by girls was generally increasing. "There are now 56,000 female students out of 200,000 students in the whole province," said Mohammad Gul Kochi, the director for education in Ghazni. He noted, however, that of a total of 326 schools in the province, only 92 were accommodated in buildings with classrooms, the rest having to operate in the open or under trees. Despite Kochi’s optimism, just 25 km from the centre of Ghazni, the provincial capital, is Andar District, where, according to Shah Wali Hutak, the headmaster of the district’s main secondary school, education for girls remains a great problem. "There is no school for girls, and females are seriously forbidden to leave their homes to acquire learning," he told IRIN, asserting that parents had even been threatened by gunmen for sending their sons, let alone daughters, to school.