When the Taliban Banned Girls From School, SOLA Kept Teaching

Five years ago, the Taliban banned girls from the classroom. One school refused to stop teaching.

In August 2021, as the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan, the staff and students of SOLA, the country’s first and only boarding school for Afghan girls, managed to escape to Rwanda, where they established a temporary campus to continue classes.

Meet Shabana Basij-Rasikh, co-founder of SOLA, and our very first guest on this podcast when we launched in 2023. Five years since the Taliban takeover, Shabana returns to reflect on what has happened since: from Afghan women running secret schools and girls rationing internet data to keep learning to what has become of SOLA’s first cohort and what it means to create a place where Afghan girls have the freedom to simply be  “girls who go to school.”

In this episode:

Why Afghan women are continuing a generations-long tradition of secret schoolsHow the internet has become a lifeline for girls and women inside AfghanistanWhat happened to the first cohort of SOLA girls How SOLA built a permanent new home for Afghan girls in RwandaThe importance of giving girls the safety to be normal teenagersWhat five years of exile, education and resistance can teach us Why Shabana’s message to the world is simple: “Don’t look away.”

Help keep the doors open for Afghan girls:

👉 Learn more about SOLA

👉 Donate to SOLA

👉 Explore SOLAx

Timestamps:

00:54 Introducing the School of Leadership Afghanistan (SOLA)

03:10 What hope means to Shabana Basij-Rasikh