Free, Quality Education for Every Afghan Child

[27 November 2006] - Half of the children in Afghanistan still do not go to school despite a 500 per cent increase in enrolments in the last six years. With the establishment of democracy, the main symbol of national regeneration lay in the dream of educating every child – boy and girl.

However, there remain many obstacles to achieving this dream. Household contributions to education are steep and deter new entrants. Those in schools are faced with inadequate educational materials, textbooks, and teachers. Budget allocation and spending in the education sector by various stakeholders remain largely unco-ordinated and opaque.

A new Oxfam briefing paper outlines some of the key concerns, and proposes a plan for not only increased funding, but also reforming budget allocation and planning within the Ministry of Education and amongst other actors in the education sector.

Education is the right of all citizens of Afghanistan, which shall be provided up to secondary level, free of charge by the State. (Article 43(1), Constitution of the Islamic
Republic of Afghanistan, Adopted 11th July 2006).

As a nation emerging from 23 years of conflict, the challenges facing Afghanistan’s education system are undoubtedly unique. The destroyed education infrastructure needs to be rebuilt and in the face of growing threats to schools, demand for education needs to be bolstered.

Expanding the scale of education provision is as important as ensuring its quality. The majority of children out of school need to be supported not only to enter the formal school system but also to remain in it. This provision of compulsory, free, good quality education is the shared dream of citizens of Afghanistan.

This briefing paper analyses the scale of the challenge facing education in Afghanistan, and the budgetary implications of that challenge.

Afghanistan needs to be able to cope with the unprecedented expansion of enrolment and simultaneously generate demand for further enrolment, especially amongst girls who continue to remain out of school. The focus of this report is on grades 1 to 12 (i.e. on the financing of primary, secondary, and high school).

The paper begins by mapping the multiple stakeholders in education service delivery in Afghanistan. In section 2 the demand and supply side constraints are analysed in detail with an eye to unearthing the key policy priorities for education financing. Section 3 describes the multi-dimensional process of education financing across varied stakeholders in Afghanistan, in order to clarify the key areas of intervention needed to make a large impact on the reduction of procedural and structural inefficiencies.

Further information

• UN expert voices outrage as number of attacks on Afghan schools leaps (9 August 2006)
• Human Rights Watch: Lessons in Terror - Attacks on Education in Afghanistan (July 2006)
• CRIN's information page on Afghanistan