UNICEF provides education opportunity for out-of-school girls

The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), together with the Afghan Education Ministry, has started a community-based schools programme in remote areas of the country. The programme will provide learning opportunities for those girls who cannot attend formal schools. "Community-based schools will be an important method of bringing education closer to girls who currently live too far away from a formal school," Edward Carwardine, a spokesman for UNICEF, told IRIN in the Afghan capital Kabul on Thursday. The children's agency knew that this was one of the main barriers to girls' education in Afghanistan, and so the community-based school approach would help to provide an important opportunity for learning that was currently being denied to many girls across the country, he added. Afghanistan has seen a steady increase in the number of children attending school since the fall of the Taliban in 2001. More than four million children are now enrolled in schools - a third of them girls. Despite these successes, several key obstacles remain. More than a million girls of primary school age are still not attending classes, for various reasons: the distance between home and the schoolroom; inadequate facilities in those schools that do exist; and a perception that education has no value for some families. Carwardine said that UNICEF and the Ministry of Education were working to develop the programme of community-based schools; using existing community facilities such as mosques and private homes in villages without a formal school; and providing rapid basic training to women from the community to serve as teachers; along with providing standard books, stationery and teaching materials, as well as water and sanitation points. He noted that UNICEF's aim was to reach up to 500,000 girls who were currently not enrolled in formal schools. This could take up to a year to achieve and he explained that it was important to recognise that this was a long-term programme that would develop over a period of time, not immediately. The programme had already started in some of the eastern and central provinces of the country and they hoped to expand it to all parts of the country in coming months, subject to funds being made available by donors, the UNICEF official added. UNICEF was also assisting with improvements to facilities at existing schools, providing safe water points and latrines to more than 500 primary schools to date in 2004, while working with United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS) to construct 149 new primary schools so far this year, he pointed out.