Education key to Afghanistan’s future

August 24, 2011

VANCOUVER, BC, Aug. 24, 2011/ Troy Media/ – When I first visited Afghanistan, not long after the fall of the Taliban, the physical signs of war were everywhere. Here was a country utterly decimated. Kabul’s buildings, the same beige dust colour as the surrounding mountains, were often roofless, pockmarked with bullet holes, the windows long ago shattered, and the frames leaning precariously.

The roads were in ruins and many major cities were poorly connected. City power came for on only a couple of hours a night, and to this day Kabul remains perhaps the largest city in the world still largely using an open-air sewage system. Even within the city limits, piles of red spray painted stones served as ominous warnings of landmines, the piles becoming more frequent as you drive to the outskirts and into the provinces.

The signs of war

These are the visible signs of war. Less visible is the destruction of human capital. The wealthy and the educated are often the first to get out when violent conflict starts, and Afghanistan saw one exodus after another in each successive chapter of its long-running conflict. Eventually, the country’s intelligentsia had been decimated, and its artists, planners, engineers and entrepreneurs exiled. Included, too, in the flight have been the vast majority of trained, experienced teachers. This void has perhaps been one of the most detrimental to Afghanistan’s rebuilding effort.

To fill the gap, the Ministry of Education desperately recruited new teachers, many of whom have no post-secondary education, not to mention any training as teachers. Some of the country’s 170,000 teachers have not even completed high school themselves. Yet they may be the only people in a community willing to teach, a profession that pays a mere $120 per month; that is, when teachers are actually paid on time. It’s not uncommon for salaries to be delayed three, four or even six months. Unsurprisingly, many teachers hold down second jobs and there is a high rate of absenteeism among Afghan teachers. With these conditions, it’s hardly an occupation attracting the country’s best and brightest young minds.

And yet investing in Afghanistan’s teachers could have been one of the cheapest, quickest ways to reinvigorate the country’s human capital, and ultimately to ensure a better chance at permanent peace. And rebuilding its human capital is far, far more important than rebuilding its physical infrastructure. This is because an educated, skilled society will be able to rebuild its own physical infrastructure over time, drawing on the population’s skills locally, rather than the much more expensive alternative of importing specialists to undertake skilled labour tasks.

An official at the Afghan Ministry of Education once told me that, in his view, Afghanistan should have focused foremost on its human resources, through investing above all else in basic education, vocational training and advanced studies. He pointed to the example of South Korea, which in 1953 was one of the poorest countries in the world, and today is among the wealthiest and best-educated countries on account of government investments in education, training and technology in the post-war rebuilding period. The same official also told me that he would never dream of sending his own children to a public school in Afghanistan. They are enrolled in a private school, where they have a passing chance of university entrance.

In May of this year, during the Global Week of Action on Education, my Afghan colleagues in Kabul decided to organize a panel discussion to be broadcast on a popular radio station, Radio Amuzgar. The topic was education as a human right. Teacher trainers joined with district education officials in a vibrant discussion over issues such as how to improve the quality of education and make access more equitable between boys and girls. The panel guests enthusiastically debated the main challenges facing the education sector and shared their recommendations for action.

The show echoed discussions that take place in families all over Afghanistan every day. Education is central in the minds of a people who were long denied the right to literacy, and who know all too well the consequences of the ignorance that breeds extremism and violence so efficiently. The drive Afghans have for education in the post-Taliban period is so intense, I refer to it as The Education Obsession – parents’ constant planning and analyzing their children’s education, their desperate desire to secure a future for the young of the country through the pen rather than the gun. It’s an inescapable conversation in the living rooms and streets of urban Afghanistan, a society yearning for the modernization that has only ever started in fits and spurts throughout the last century before being derailed by political upheaval and war.

Putting Afghanistan on the path to peace

Yet it’s not a dialogue that seems to be occurring with the same energy or intensity at the decision-making level among donor countries to Afghanistan like Canada or within the ranks of the Afghan government executive. Education is just one sector among many needing attention in the humanitarian and development effort in Afghanistan. It’s given no special priority and its potential for radically transforming a nation perpetually at war and chronically mired in poverty has largely been lost from the strategy of peacebuilding in Afghanistan.

But if we in Canada can find some of the enthusiasm that Afghans have for the possibilities that education can breathe into a country desperate for change, we can carry the dialogue taking place among ordinary Afghans forward to our own leaders. We too can actively discuss the challenges and the best practices, and push for education to be at the fore of rebuilding a war-torn society. Canada has invested precious human lives and billions of dollars into Afghanistan. What greater legacy could we leave than to advocate for, and invest generously in a robust public education system that could finally put Afghanistan on the path to peace?

Lauryn Oates is a Canadian aid worker managing education projects in Afghanistan. She is projects director at Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan.

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