A tale of two Kabul schools

Walking towards the house in Karteh Sakhi that serves as a school and training centre for at-risk youth, Mustafa Sahibzada is greeted enthusiastically by a group of schoolboys. The 250 children currently enrolled at the three-year-old Support Children and Afghan Women in Need Organisation (SCAWNO), once spent their days on the streets of the Afghan capital. "They used to wash cars, work as shop assistants, collect trash. Anything to make money and pass the time," says Sahibzada, the organisation's deputy director. For the children at SCAWNO, their time as some of the 60,000-70,000 Afghan youths on Kabul's streets has meant they have fallen behind in theireducation. "We find the kids who douse cars with incense or wash tyres all day and ask their parents to enroll them in our programmes so they can one day return to school, rather than begging all day," says Ahmmad Shikib Masoudi, SCAWNO director. "One month we have the money and the next we don't. Many times a lack of funds has made us consider closing the doors, but then we look at the children's faces," says Sahibzada, a doctor by trade. Many of the central Asian nation's 6,000 public schools are based in rented property. The $600 per month lease on its building near Kabul University is SCAWNO's "greatest single financial difficulty", says Sahibzada. So difficult was this burden, that Arif Sultani, the former director of SCAWNO, who recently lost his battle to cancer, would use his medication money to pay the rent. SCAWNO receives little by way of foreign aid, but the organisation's struggle to meet its monthly budget needs of $4,400 resonates with warnings issued by major donors and aid organisations ahead of this month's conference in Tokyo. Prior to the meeting in the Japanese capital, where donors pledged an additional $16b in civilian aid through 2015, donors and aid organisations said the advances made in education and health in the past ten years were at great risk without coninued financial commitments. Parnian Nazary, programme officer for the Afghanistan Regional Project (ARP) at the Centre on International Co-operation (CIC) at New York University, says a commitment to organisations such as SCAWNO and the Afghan Institute of Lear ing - beyond the projected 2014 international troop withdrawal - are important because "investing in education is one of the key factors in brining peace and stability to Afghanistan in the long run". Like many other local NGOs, however, SCAWNO officials say they have seen little of the nearly $1.9bn earmarked for education in the past decade. "We are creating a future for these children so they don't become thieves or addicts, yet our greatest concern remains money", says Masoudi. Sakena Yacoobi, executive director of the Afghan Institute of Learning, another non-state education programme, says civil society organisations, "didn't get the billions" that were promised. End.