IDP Girls Empowerment Program

The Problem: Afghanistan has ten million illiterate people, with women being the primary casualties of a lack of public infrastructure for education. Even today, the literacy rate for Afghan men stands at 55 per cent; for women, it is only 29.8 per cent. This severely limits the ability of Afghan women to contribute financially to their households and reinforces dependence on their immediate families.

Because of the intransigent poverty, many conflict affected families often resort to encouraging the early marriage of their daughters in return for money, without considering their consent or legal age.  This attitude toward girls reduces the status of girls in many Afghan communities, particularly in those areas of Afghanistan most affected by war and poverty. With no possibility of education, girls are forced to stay at home, depriving them of their basic rights and making them entirely dependent on male family members. A deprived and uneducated girl in a backward community has to obey the decisions made by others regarding her future life. Such a girl, often married at fourteen years of age, often faces difficulty in an endless cycle of giving birth and caring for children; in addition, she is more likely to become a primary victim of family violence.

The Project: The objective of this project is to enact positive social change and poverty alleviation in marginalized conflict-affected and IDP communities primarily through the empowerment of girls. This project aims to raise the status of girls affected by ongoing civil conflict in poor families and communities through teaching them to read and write and equipping them with skills necessary to run their own businesses, to become economically independent, and to contribute to poverty alleviation in their families.

This project is based on Occam’s Razor: or the simplest solution is the best one, and focuses on providing literacy skills and tailoring skills development for conflict affected girls. Considering cultural sensitivity against the education of girls by male educators in extremely conservative families, this solution focuses on hiring Afghan female teachers and trainers to deliver the program. Combining literacy with tailoring skills for girls and hiring female teachers and trainers have several advantages. The first advantage is that this culturally responsive approach helps in reducing resistance against girls’ education. Secondly, this approach encourages families to enroll girls in the program by promising them that their daughters will acquire a high demand skill and will be able to generate income. Third, it paves the way for girls’ education and economic empowerment simultaneously and provides income for the Afghan women who are the trainers in the program.

This solution empowers girls with literacy and tailoring skills to enact the envisioned positive social change and poverty alleviation through transferring these skills to others in their families and community and generating income for their families.