The Hindu : `Back to school' gets good response

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Dec 22, 2003

National

National

`Back to school' gets good response

By Our Staff Correspondent

NEW DELHI Dec. 21. The ``Back to School'' campaign, initiated in Afghanistan in 2002 after the fall of the Taliban regime, has evoked tremendous response. Virtually starved of education during the years of conflict, particularly under the Taliban regime, the Afghan children's hunger for a chance to go to school is overwhelming, according to the United Nation's Children Fund (UNICEF) report on `The State of the World's Children 2004.' The UNICEF equipped them with educational materials under emergency conditions.

At the end of 2001, the Interim Administration, with the support of the UNICEF, undertook to help rebuild the country's education system, focussing first on enabling 1.5 million children to go to school at the end of March 2002. Learning materials for 700,000 children were procured in the region and the rest had to be flown in from the main UNICEF warehouse in Denmark.

A new packing operation was created from scratch just over the border in Pakistan, and 180 local staff was employed to work in two shifts. In less than two months this operation produced 50,000 education kits at the rate of two boxes per minute, while smaller packing operations in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan produced over 10,000 kits, 400 recreational and 600 school tents. Around 7,000 tonnes of educational supplies were distributed around the country by education and health officers.

On March 23, 2002 about 3,000 schools across Afghanistan opened their doors to millions of children. By September 2002, many more children in the south of the country — along with refugees returning from Pakistan, Iran and other surrounding countries, and internally displaced children leaving camps and returning home — went back to school, taking the total to three million enrolled in the course of the year. Around 30 per cent of these were girls.

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

National