UNICEF helps bring the classroom to tens of thousands of school-less Afghans

If the children cannot get to the schools, bring the schools to the children. Such is the philosophy behind a new Afghan initiative launched with United Nations support that already serves nearly 50,000 youngsters, and which it is hoped will reach up to 500,000 children by mid-2005.

"These are communities where there is physically no formal school and the distance from the community to the nearest formal school is simply too far for children to travel safely," UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) spokesman Edward Cawardine told a news briefing today in Kabul, the Afghan capital, of the programme under which classrooms are established in buildings provided for the purpose by the community itself.

These include mosques and private homes, and the community identifies a suitable person to act as the students' teacher and provides incentives for their services. The programme is being led by the Afghan Ministry of Education with UNICEF support and financial contributions from Swedish SIDA, Denmark, UNICEF Germany and the Siemens Corporation, at a total cost so far of $1.4 million.

In a recent study, UNICEF found that more than 37 per cent of Afghan families cited long distances from home to classroom as being the main reason for not sending youngsters to school, with parents fearing for their children's safety in a country torn by decades of civil war, where rebel and criminal groups still hold wide sway.

"What we are trying to do to is bring education closer to those communities through community based schools," Mr. Cawardine said. "It is not supposed to be a long-term measure in the sense that we hope that in time, formal schools will be built in those communities, but we know this will take several years probably."

This is the first time these children have a chance to get a basic level primary education, particularly for girls who were not allowed to attend regular schools under the Taliban regime which was ousted by United States-led forces in 2001 after the Al-Qaida terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.

Mr. Cawardine estimated that at the primary school level there are now over 1.5 million girls not attending school, mainly due to the difficulty of getting to the nearest formal school.