SCHOOL OF LEADERSHIP-AFGHANISTAN INC

The School of Leadership, Afghanistan (SOLA) was founded to give young Afghan girls the opportunity to receive a quality education and is the first and only private boarding school for girls in the nation. Our mission is to provide our students with a rigorous educational experience that promotes critical thinking, a sense of purpose, and respect for self and others.

Our intent is to provide Afghan girls with an environment where they can focus on their education and potential in a way that is unprecedented in Afghanistan. Our staff of female Afghan teachers, all of whom have participated in a rich training program led remotely by experienced international instructors, provide our students a safe and nurturing space in which to learn. Our students go from believing that their role in society is to raise a family to becoming critical thinkers who understand that they have the power to shape their nation's future.

We intend that our students will be empowered to begin to break down the barriers to women's visibility that exist within Afghanistan and the broader world. We also intend that, in the long term, our students will graduate from SOLA and attend international universities where they will continue to develop their leadership and life skills. We instill in them the belief that they can impact their country; it is our hope that, once their educational careers are complete, they will lead Afghanistan into a prosperous and peaceful future.

SOLA, at its inception in 2008, offered instruction to four students inside a rented house in Kabul. Our students study with a team of Afghan and international instructors, and from the time of our inception as a boarding school in 2016 through mid-August 2021, all students boarded at our campus in Kabul, earning an educational and residential experience that was unparalleled in Afghanistan.

The Taliban’s seizure of power in August 2021 placed our students at immediate risk. Our girls came to Kabul from 28 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces; with the city fallen, and with no way to guarantee safe travel on roads in and out of the city, we accelerated our pre-existing plans to evacuate our students from Afghanistan for a study abroad program.

On August 20th, 2021, our founder Shabana Basij-Rasikh made international news when she revealed on Twitter that she was burning our students’ records to keep our girls and their families safe. Just days later, she followed that message with another, revealing that nearly 250 members of the SOLA community were en route to the nation of Rwanda to begin our study abroad.

This entire community – students, staff, and family members – arrived safely at our new campus in Kigali, Rwanda where our students will continue their studies.

SOLA's boarding school model, unique in Afghanistan, is key to our present success and our future growth. Our students board on our campus in Kabul throughout the March to December academic year, thus mitigating the risks inherent in traveling to and from school daily while also giving each girl the opportunity to live with, and learn from, a diverse community of classmates hailing from 25 of Afghanistan's 34 provinces. A residential faculty provides round-the-clock guidance and supervision, and our students are exposed to rich extracurricular and leadership opportunities that are unavailable at home. Furthermore, our intensive training program for our all-female teaching staff ensures that each student learns from qualified teachers throughout her academic career.

SOLA begins the boarding school experience in 6th grade. This is a strategic decision on our part: not only is early adolescence a time of profound cognitive, physical, and social development, but a girl who remains in school throughout adolescence is much more likely to marry and have children at a later age. By giving each student the opportunity to focus on her studies, rather than managing a household for her parents and siblings, we increase the chances that she will successfully complete her schooling.

Our diverse student body also reflects a strategic choice: addressing ethnic and religious tensions which contribute significantly to Afghanistan's political instability. Our boarding program allows for student recruitment across all ethnicities, regions, and cultures. Our student body includes members of all of Afghanistan's major ethnic groups and religions, and our intent is to enroll students from all 34 of the country's provinces.

We welcomed our first class of 6th-grade students in 2016, and currently have grades 6-10 represented on our campus. Students in these grades follow the Afghan national curriculum with significant supplementary enrichment coursework. All our students receive remote English instruction via teleconferencing with experienced US-based English teachers, and our older students participate in SOLA's e-tutoring program that matches them with international tutors who meet weekly for academic support and mentoring. Additionally, SOLA runs a robust virtual exchange program that connects our students with schools and institutions around the world; since its inception, this cross-cultural exchange has occurred with nearly two dozen organizations. All these interactions broaden our students' worldview while fostering a sense of global citizenship.

SOLA is intentionally structured as an organization of Afghans working for the future of their own country. While SOLA draws support for its mission from volunteers and donors all around the world, our Kabul campus is entirely staffed by Afghans and has a senior leadership team consisting only of women (with the exception of the chief of security position). We are rightly perceived as a school that is led and managed by Afghan citizens, which affords us invaluable legitimacy within Afghan society and promotes our capacity for growth.

SOLA couples our organizational strength with support from the highest levels of the Afghan government: our mission is known to, and embraced by, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, First Lady Rula Ghani, and the Ministry of Education.

Furthermore, SOLA has worked towards building a network of contacts throughout Afghanistan's provinces which enables us to reach more prospective students. With the Ministry of Educations's assistance, SOLA has built a network of contacts, mostly using school principals and families of current students as access points. Through recruitment trips to these provinces, SOLA has successfully begun to engage families in exploring why a daughter's education, particularly at a girls' boarding school, creates opportunities for the entire family – and by extension the community, and ultimately the larger society – that are unparalleled in the current conventional educational system. SOLA has also successfully engaged the larger community by inviting speakers to campus and taking students on numerous field trips around Kabul, thereby fostering collaboration between the school and influential actors. Collectively, these interactions give SOLA unprecedented access to Afghans across all sectors of society.

SOLA, at its inception in 2008, offered instruction to four students inside a rented house in Kabul. Today, we enroll nearly 80 students from 25 provinces and employ more than 30 faculty and staff, offering a formal academic and residential curriculum for girls in Grades 6-10.

SOLA intends to add a new 6th-grade class each year, with the goal of operating an internationally recognized boarding school of as many as 175 students in Grades 6-12, representing all 34 provinces of Afghanistan, by 2022. Our growth plan over these next three years includes: securing funds for the construction of a permanent Kabul campus; establishing student recruitment infrastructure throughout the country; obtaining international accreditation; and continuing to develop and refine our robust security measures that ensure the safety of all SOLA students and staff.