BBC NewsBorrowing was £17.4bn last month, the second highest October figure since monthly records began in 1993.
Baroness D’Souza
What one doesn’t realise is how avid girls are for education. What we do at Marefat is to make sure that every now and then we have a Zoom meeting with our pupils in Afghanistan. We run empowerment sessions which are run by Aziz Royesh from Washington and the girls crowd into their rooms.
Recently we had the girls speak about what a difference being able to access education has made to them. It was emotional and heart-warming. These are girls aged 14 and 15, and they said things like: “We thought our lives were finished and we were going to be married off.” Now they have hope – and they know that hope is tied to education.
Our goal is to get these girls educated at secondary level and then put them up for scholarships, some of which is funded by Lord Dennis Stevenson. The goal of Marefat is to educate a whole cohort of women so that they can come back and be in the major professions: Afghanistan needs journalists, lawyers and surveyors. In fact, quite a lot of them want to do engineering too.
Since the Taleban came back we’ve been teaching in cells – or cluster education as it’s called. That’s quite difficult – and it’s especially difficult to teach science. The girls gather at abandoned schools. It’s very cost-effective because we don’t have expensive school buildings to maintain but we do need textbooks and to pay the teachers. Our budget for the four year period is £8 million – and we need to meet salaries for teachers.
But we keep going because education is the magic bullet of development. If you can educate girls, you get development in terms of later marriage, and fewer children. Wherever you see education beyond the primary school level of girls you see significant change in that society.
Of course, the events of 2022 were devastating for these girls. But all is not lost. What some of these girls are doing is teaching their parents or their younger siblings how to read. If you educate a child, you educate a village.
More broadly, if you help someone, you don’t just help that one person: you help that entire ecosystem. We should be enjoining development agencies to support those strategies which people employ in vulnerable societies at times of hardship: these are typically highly intelligent and based on attuned survival instincts.
Often what we see in these societies is diversification of income. A woman I’m aware of makes beer, grows crops and makes baskets for the market. She sends her children off to work and builds transactional relationships with relatives in nearby towns. This creative thinking and pluckiness serves them in good stead.
We need to have respect for what works. We understand that it’s very important in these countries to teach the practicalities of life. What first attracted me to Marefat was its vocational training: there has always been this emphasis on mechanics and electrical engineering as there were some who didn’t go onto academic careers.
It’s important that we learn the lessons domestically. In the wider world, we should all be supportive of apprenticeships. We must ask ourselves what the point is of our children going to a minor university and doing a degree in media studies. The experience of university might be useful, and it may teach you how to think. But it’s so much better to be an apprentice.
It really gladdens one’s heart to see children being able to take pride in creating things, and making things. We don’t have enough emphasis on this. Fashioning a ceramic pot is useful and non-useful. One thinks of the beauty of some pots – the attention to detail and the way the clay is treated. It is exciting to think about all there is to learn.
I sometimes think about how we teach beauty. Sometimes you see something and it’s complete and beautiful: everything’s in its right place. The world isn’t like that, as we know – but my passion is to do what I can to make it better.
