A new report is warning that hard-won progress in girls' education in Afghanistan, heralded as one of few success stories of the last nine years, is increasingly under threat as international interest in reconstruction efforts ebbs away.
The High Stakes report, released on Thursday by 16 aid agencies including Oxfam and Care International, says that the hard-won and expensive gains in girls' education are at risk of being destroyed as the international community turns away from development to focus on national security agendas and the timetable for troop withdrawal.
Education has long been held up as a shining example of reconstruction in Afghanistan. Donors have ploughed approximately $1.9bn into rebuilding the Afghan education system since 2001. The Back to School campaign, launched in 2002 as a joint Afghan government/UN Initiative, was labelled an "inspiration" and the flagship of reconstruction and development efforts in Afghanistan.
The achievements of the Back to School campaign were undeniably impressive. In just the past two years, 2,281 schools have been built across the country. Around 5,000 Afghan girls were enrolled in school in 2001. Now there are 2.4 million, a staggering 480-fold increase.
Now, according to the report, Afghanistan's education system is sliding backwards and becoming crippled by poverty, increasing insecurity and a lack of investment in infrastructure and trained staff.
Underneath the impressive figures, there lies a significant gap between enrolment and attendance. The report's research claims that far fewer of the 2.4 million girls enrolled in school are actually in the classroom. In 2009 approximately 22% – around 446,682 – of female students were considered long-term absentees.
While 2,281 schools have been built in the past two years, data from the Afghan Ministry of Education shows that 47% still have no actual building. A lack of investment in female teachers is proving a significant obstacle to girls attending school.
Uneven distribution of resources has been blamed on poor planning and the centralised structure of the Ministry of Education. Corruption also inevitably plays a part – 11% of Afghans interviewed said corruption blocked access to primary and secondary education.
Poverty and increasing insecurity is also chipping away at the advances made in education since 2002.
In the past years schools and girl students have been targeted by anti-government forces or other extremist groups, prompting teachers to leave their jobs and parents to keep their children out the classroom. In 2009 there were 50 attacks on schools across Afghanistan every month.
According to Ministry of Education figures, 61% of schools in the province of Zabul remain closed due to insecurity.
The role of Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRT's), the policy of using military teams to deliver reconstruction projects, comes under particular criticism in the report. Shaheen Chughtai, policy advisor on Oxfam's humanitarian and security issues team, called the role of PRTs in rebuilding Afghanistan's education system "expensive, inefficient and often very ill-advised".
"It simply doesn't work when soldiers are visibly involved in the building of schools as they inevitably becomes symbols to be attacked. The army is not designed to be implementing these programmes and their involvement has to stop," he says. "There is a war going on and they are one party in a conflict."
Although there is no conclusive data that determines this link, a 2009 survey backed by the World Bank and the Ministry of Education found that communities believed schools were more likely to be targeted for attack if they had been built by a PRT.
Another 2010 report by the Feinstein International Center on security and aid in the relatively secure Balkh Province found that children were not attending local schools because they had been built by the "wrong" people.
One of the report's recommendations is that future education efforts must address local dynamics and, where possible, involve community members in the building and operating of schools in order to make local families feel schools were safe and not visible symbols of the conflict.
According to Oxfam's Chugtai the solution is not to simply pump more money into education.
With security deteriorating and a troop withdrawal scheduled, gains that have been made, and which have cost millions in aid, are being compromised because the focus and energy that has been put behind Back to Schools programme is diminishing and hearts and minds put on the backburner.
It's not about funds, it's a question of how Afghanistan has been developed," he says. "Actions have been geared not towards Afghan needs but to political interests and security needs. The problems we are seeing now are directly linked to this."
Last year secretary of state for defence Liam Fox signalled a startling shift in rhetoric away from development and onto national security, stating that "We are not a global policeman. We are not in Afghanistan for the sake of the education policy in a broken 13th-century country. We are there so the people of Britain and our global interests are not threatened."
Now there is a real fear that reconstruction funds to Afghanistan will be cut when troops are pulled out. The report points out that donor countries continue to spend much of their aid budgets in areas where troops are based. For example approximately 20% of UK aid is allocated to the Helmand province, despite this being home to around 3% of the Afghan population.
Just how successful the report will be at pulling the world's attention back onto the issue of education in Afghanistan remains to be seen. It is clear that the NGOs involved believe they are fast running out of time and that the international community is at risk of throwing away the promises it made to millions of Afghan girls.
