30 years of conflict and political unrest have destroyed the Afghan education system. In 2001, after the fall of the Taliban, the net enrollment rate for boys was estimated at 43 percent and at 3 percent for girls. There were approximately 21,000 (largely under-educated) teachers for a school age population estimated at 5 million. Females had been forbidden to either attend school or to teach in the five years of Taliban rule.
To accommodate Afghanistan's fragile and fluid situation, the project had broad objectives underpinned by principles of participation, coordination among donors and with government agencies, and a focus on females. At project outset, there was great resistance to the concepts of using NGOs to deliver educational services and to the empowerment of communities, which were perceived as incapable of managing their own schools. The project objective was to selectively support Afghanistan in its efforts to reconstruct and develop the education sector, by:
- increasing access to education opportunities in the formal and non-formal systems for under-served groups, especially women and girls;
- supporting the development of a policy framework and the reform of education management at all levels, in partnership with civil society, NGOs and the private sector; and
- introducing modern information technologies for communications in the Ministries and distance learning for building the capacity of civil servants.
Enrollment of children in Grades 1-12 increased across the country from 3.1 million to just over 5 million (of which 1.75 million are girls). And tertiary enrollments increased from about 23,000 to almost 40,000 (including 8,000 females).
Highlights:
- Enrollments for females in Grades 1-12, increased from just under 839,000 to 1.75 million, and for males, from 2.25 million to 3.25 million. These increases in enrollments were higher than even in pre-Taliban times.
- 18 public tertiary-level institutions were able to open their doors after years of conflict. By 2005, tertiary level had increased from 23,000 in 2002 to almost 40,000. Female enrollment amounted to 8,000 or 22 percent of this total, after an almost-five-year year ban on girls education.
- Faculty members in tertiary level institutions, increased by 25 percent to 1,978 during the same period.
- 58 schools (mainly for girls) were rehabilitated and/or constructed in under-served areas of Afghanistan.
- The block grants to all 18 public higher education institutions helped to open the doors and jump start their operations.
- The first Education Management Information System (EMIS) was developed under the project for the Ministry of Education.
- For the first time in Afghanistan's history, the Ministry of Education formed direct partnerships with NGOs for the delivery of educational services. Government is now encouraging decentralized school management through provincial, district and communities and soliciting other donor resources to support scaling up of the follow-up Education Quality Improvement Program (EQUIP) Project in all 34 provinces of the country.
- Community participation and ownership increased through the establishment of School Management Committees (SMC) which contributed up to 20 percent in kind or cash towards school infrastructure activities.
- US$17.4 million post-conflict grant covered project costs.
- Introduced two innovations: contracting out to NGOs to deliver education services and empower the community in four provinces; and empowering the Provincial and District education officials in one province to directly disburse money to communities to rehabilitate their own schools and buy their own teaching learning materials.
- Catalyzed change in the attitudes of government, communities and education officials regarding what can work in the Afghan context.
The ongoing follow-up project (EQUIP) covers the entire education sector from primary to tertiary and scale up the interventions tried and tested in the Emergency Education project. The mechanism of giving grants to communities was scaled up to cover 10 provinces and in the next three to five years should cover the entire nation. The greatest risk to the rollout of the program is the deteriorating security situation in the southern provinces. Implementation of EQUIP there has become more difficult each day with increased numbers of murders of teachers and school officials. This makes it difficult to access communities and especially female teachers and girl students for both primary and secondary schools.
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