Girls' Primary Education

Current phase: 2006-2010
Project budget: $15.5 million

Building Resources Across Communities in Afghanistan (BRAC Afghanistan) has implemented this project in collaboration with the Ministry of Education. The project is aimed at establishing up to 4,000 community-based schools, to create after-school learning programs for students and skills development programs for adolescents, and to provide training for up to 8,000 schoolteachers, at least 4,000 of whom will be women. Approximately 120,000 schoolchildren (85 percent of them girls) in 11 provinces (including the province of Kandahar) will benefit from this project.

Establishing community-based schools is supplementing the efforts of the Ministry of Education to increase enrolment of girls, promote female teachers in primary education, and develop the capacity of the teachers in government-run formal schools through training. BRAC Afghanistan is establishing two types of one-room schools: community-based feeder schools and community -based accelerated learning schools. At the end of the project, many of these schools will be handed over to the Ministry of Education for integration into the formal (government-run) school system.