“If you educate a boy, you educate an individual;
if you educate a girl, you educate a community.”
African proverb
GIRLS’ EDUCATION:
WE’VE COME FAR, BUT THERE IS A LONG WAY TO GO
BY GREG MORTENSON
I
n the late 1990s, Khalida Darwar, a girl in
Hussaini — a farming village in Pakistan’s
Hunza Valley — put on a freshly ironed
and spotless school uniform for the first time.
Then, in the shadow of snow-covered Shispar
Peak, the excited 5-year-old girl skipped and
ran down the steep trail for her first day of
school.
Little did Khalida know that she was a
pioneer, or that her enrollment in school
made her one of the lucky ones. At the time,
UNICEF estimated 131 million children in
the world were unable to attend school due
to gender bias, exploitation, slavery, and
human trafficking, among other things. Yet
there she was, high in the fabled Hindu Kush
Mountains, on her way to becoming the
first-ever female agricultural scientist in her
remote and impoverished village.
She unwittingly had become part of the
unstoppable revolution in girls’ education.
As CAI celebrates nearly two decades of
service to the rural communities of Pakistan,
Afghanistan, and Tajikistan through literacy
and education, I am convinced now more
than ever that the most powerful force of
change in the world is girls’ education.
Girls’ education is, in military parlance,
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the ultimate ‘force multiplier,’ which yields
huge dividends in all categories: socio-economics, health, population, sustainable food
production, delaying marriage and ‘childbride’ practices, political awareness, and
much more.
Most important, girls’ education gives
women a voice and moves them out of a
subjugated world of illiteracy, isolation, and
ignorance to connect them with a global society. Educated women have the awareness
and power to make their own decisions and
choices.
The first wave of women educated in CAIsupported schools went into teaching and
nursing. More recently — thanks to greater exposure, awareness, and role models
— CAI female scholarship students have
pursued a host of subjects including law,
medicine, computer technology, engineering, psychology, economics, accounting,
journalism, politics, Islamic studies, foreign
languages, business, literature, art, music,
and education specialties such as special education, administration, and early childhood
development (ECD). Some have aspirations
to serve in the military, be police officers,
and one young woman from Waziristan in
Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa tribal areas
is determined to be a jet pilot.
THE THIRST FOR EDUCATION IS
PALPABLE
“I was nothing, just the refugee daughter of
a poor widow, in a country that did not want
me, and from an Afghan home where many
people were killed,” Farishta, a CAI scholarship student in Kapisa province, Afghanistan
told me this summer. “The only freedom I
had was education, and my heart is happy every time I study, and inshallah (God willing),
someday I will be a university professor of
English.”
JOURNEY OF HOPE | 15