Afghan girls go online to study
Every other day, Sofia logs in from her Kabul home for an online English course run by one of a growing number of educational institutes trying to reach Afghanistan's girls and women who can't go to school and continue their education due to the Taliban administration's restrictions on women.
Taliban officials, citing what they call problems including issues related to Islamic dress, have closed girls' high schools, barred their access to universities and stopped most women from working.
Girls and women desperate to get an education have since flooded online schools like Sofia's online school, Rumi Academy, with applications. The school says it has seen its enrolment of mostly women rise from about 50 students to more than 500 after the Taliban took over in 2021.
But many are not as fortunate as 22-year-old Sofia.
The school says they've had to turn away hundreds more applicants. With 97 % of the country living below the poverty line, few can afford laptops, internet packages and other necessities for online classes.
The school can't expand much more either because they don't have the funds to put more teachers on the payroll and provide them with adequate online infrastructure to enable them to teach.
Virtually no one had access to the internet when the Taliban were forced from power in the weeks after Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. But after nearly two decades of Western-led intervention and engagement with the world, 18% of the population had internet access, according to the most recent World Bank data collected before the Taliban takeover in August 2021.
The Taliban has not moved to ban the internet and its officials are regulars on social media, making announcements. They have also allowed girls to study at home.
But like anyone else in Afghanistan who uses the internet, online students are hampered by power cuts and cripplingly slow internet speeds. Seattle-based Ookla, which compiles global internet speeds, put Afghanistan's mobile internet as the slowest of 137 countries and its fixed internet as the second slowest of 180 countries.
"The major concern I have regarding our activity is power outages and an internet connection, if one day power or the internet is being completely disconnected in Afghanistan, it would create a serious problem for us," said Anita Sherzad, Rumi's founder who is based in Turkey.
Despite the challenges, Sofia says Afghan women have become resilient to problems after years of hardship and civil war and they were prepared to make the most of the situation, no matter how bad it is.
“We must be hopeful...we don’t lose our belief, our hopes and must be strong in this situation.”
Reuters
