How We Help
In Canada, our CW4WAfghan members have ongoing education and fundraising activities. These activities include organizing public events; supplying expert speakers and making presentations to adult and youth groups; participating in local fundraising initiatives; and networking with social justice groups around the world (see WHAT YOU CAN DO for furthering information). As well, we have worked to advance global citizenship among Canadians of all ages, including through our affiliated network, the Little Women for Little Women in Afghanistan, a youth group who advocate for human rights for their counterparts, young women and girls, in Afghanistan.
In Afghanistan, we have approximately fifteen on-going education projects funded on an annual basis from our donors in Canada. Since our founding in 1996, CW4WAfghan has contributed to women’s empowerment through a variety of sectors including education, healthcare, rights awareness, and economic development. Over the years, the evidence emerged that education was the most strategically important area in which we could invest, where funds raised could travel the furthest and leave an impact in present and future generations. Access to quality education, from adult literacy classes to having trained teachers in public schools, could contribute to every other social, economic, and political development objective of Afghanistan. We therefore gradually streamlined our activities to come within the thematic area of education, with the goal of helping to build Afghanistan’s human capital.
We interpret education broadly. We’re advancing education through community libraries, literacy classes for women and men of all ages, training teachers, furbishing schools with science laboratory materials, and helping teachers get access to resources like lesson plans, textbooks and visual aides. We pay teachers’ salaries and rent for school buildings, we have provided wells, school bags, and mini libraries. We work closely with our partner organizations to assist them to manage education projects effectively and efficiently through our capacity-building support. For example, CW4WAfghan partners attend free workshops in good organizational governance, results-based project management tools, and performance measurement; and we work with them to design promising projects.
Education is a basic, universal human right. The people of Afghanistan have demonstrated an intense demand for education, for both girls and boys, since this right once again fell within their grasp following the end of the Taliban regime in late 2001. We are pleased to respond to this demand with a focus on access to quality education. We also recognize the link between quality education and peacebuilding, and believe that a literate population with access to viable education and economic opportunities will be Afghanistan’s greatest stabilizing force and its best hope for a lasting peace.
Click on the links on the side panel for full details on our programs and the individual projects funded by our Canadian network.
