BBC education show in Afghanistan helps children banned from school – BBC News

Now the new

school

year began last week in Afghanistan, but for the second year in a row a Taliban ban is keeping teenage girls out of

school

. So what are the options for Afghans who want to continue studying even if their classes are closed? Well, Shaziah reports on one. The BBC World Service offers a new solution across Afghanistan. The girls' classrooms are empty. They have told the BBC how they feel. I find it very painful that we are not allowed to go to our schools. This decision goes against Islam for the last two years every morning.

I go to the roof of our house to watch the elementary school girls go to school. I stay there until noon when they finish and I cry. I miss learning new things. BBC lessons for your kids to access remotely during the UK's coronavirus lockdown, we think. They might be useful somewhere else. This is where journalists and producers from the BBC's Afghan service come together to work on a very different task to what we normally do when working on an

education

al program for young Afghans. This is Stars, which means listen in Darby and Pashto. the two most spoken languages ​​in Afghanistan, the program will help people learn English and science, as well as have a little fun, Where is Afghanistan?

Yes, that the presenters, all journalists from Afghanistan, have a personal project. My father was a teacher and he. He was murdered in a suicide attack 16 years ago. At that time I felt that I wanted to be a teacher because my father was a teacher but I became a journalist but now by presenting this program I think I have become a teacher and I have fulfilled my dream and also the dream. from my father in Afghanistan for those who cannot go to school, now they will be able to see them at home. BBCNews. Well, Shazia is with me in the studio and she is also with us, Marian, a producer on the series.

Welcome to Congratulations to you both, firstly this is a hugely valuable project, but it must also have been some sort of Helter skill to come up with because you haven't had much time to do this, not really, so I think you've passed eight weeks, eight. weeks we've been working on this project and yesterday we recorded our first episode and today we released it which has been a pleasure and it's been a wonderful eight week journey. A relentless amount of work has gone into it and yes, we are very happy to be at the stage we are at.

Mario, you left Afghanistan about 20 years ago, at a time when the prospect of

education

for girls was disappearing and obviously in recent years we have had the opportunity to briefly open Ask again what it meant to you to have opportunities educational opportunities outside of Afghanistan and how frustrating it was when you thought your family was still at home. To be honest, this has been going on for over two generations and although Shazia is quite young and she is from the post-Taliban era. I am from the generation where the Taliban's first reign in power was there and I just became a teenager when the Taliban had their first run.

I ran away from my family and here I am living a good life having all the privileges that I have here, but my cousins ​​couldn't, so a teenage cousin of mine got married then and yes, in the late 90s, she now has daughters of this age who I used to have in the first round. from 121 arrived, so this cycle of misery and lost hope and Lost Dreams continues to be so essential that you hope to break the cycle because presumably you don't, I mean, Chelsea only thinks back home, you know, we, oh, many of our Focus International.

It's in Kabul because that's where a lot of people lived and people saw a lot of couples, but Afghanistan is a huge country, with a lot of rural areas. Do you hope to reach even some of the kids who never would? They have had the opportunity to go to school either because their family because there is no school like I am from a park there is a province so my cousins ​​came back here packed now they are not allowed to go to school but but I know that on Thursday they are really desperate to get some education and through that, through our programme, at least you can watch it, you can listen to this programme, you can get some education on the BBC social media platforms, through television, through from our satellite. channel and yes, I am sure that I believe that this program only will not reach the audience in Kabul in big cities, but yes, even in rural areas of Afghanistan, as well as in small towns and villages, because we will broadcast this program not only on the Saturday channel on our social media platforms on the radio as well, yeah, so we have a good audience on the radio as well, so we're very happy for that radio, yeah, for both Dairy and Pastor, um, that BBC broadcast for that country has magnificent wide reach in that country we hope that through radio we reach the most remote part of the country and by satellite and through Persian television and social networks we want to reach most of the cities and other places.

The big focus has been on girls in particular. and for both of us, I understand that it must be very personal. What about the kind of lost opportunity for the country and the fact that the educational opportunities are limited, they are limited by poverty and the employment opportunities, the location of the places where they are? It is also limited by the decisions that leaders make and now do you think that is something that is possible? With an initiative like that, little by little we can begin to change some of these attitudes that perhaps see education as something that is not for girls, but for us.

I hope this is the first um small but really really um really with I don't know with very good intentions and with and obviously they are all boys, girls and boys, yes, with a lot of love with which this program is being made. It is a purely academic program, it has been done to reduce all the material that was published during the pandemic, it is a great educational initiative for the United Kingdom, yes, we are collecting it, we have collected it, we have put together a truly purely academic program where we intend to reach a lot of all these

children

in the Afghan world, for some reason, they were

banned

from formal education, but in terms of the whole country, as I said, when I was in Afghanistan as a teenager, we didn't have climate change as a big problem. photo as it stands right now we have poverty, climate change and a new political order that is not ideal at best, yes, if I put it lightly, ideal, but there are things that are out of our control, but there are things that As a BBC journalist and as people who were born in that country, we can do it and this is one of them and we hope that there are other forces that also do similar things and that we can bring about a small but significant change.

I ask you one last quick question, how do you get your family to react well? My mother, my mother just sent me a voice message and she just watched the

show

and she was very happy and she told me that she was looking for, read. You're looking, she was very happy and I'm sure she feels proud to help me and I feel proud to be a part of this program. Yes, definitely, good luck with this and Maria.