Recently, I interviewed Dr. Sakena Yacoobi, founder and executive director of the Afghan Institute of Learning, which was created in 1995 as the Taliban came to power and the Afghan refugee crisis worsened. Six million Afghan refugees lived on the Pakistan border and the Taliban prohibited the education of girls. Sakena’s goal was to empower poor women and children by providing them access to education and health services through an organization designed and run by Afghan women. Over the past 12 years, often at great risk, Sakena has pioneered innovative and creative ways to deliver these critical services. Since the overthrow of the Taliban, AIL has played a major role in reconstructing Afghan society.
Today, AIL reaches 350,000 women and children annually through its 42 program sites, including four health clinics and 38 education learning centers in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Of the 400 Afghans that AIL employs, over 70% are women.
Sakena is the recipient of several distinguished international awards, including the 2006 Ashoka Senior Fellow. In 2005, she was among the 1,000 women nominated to jointly receive the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize. Together with AIL, she received the 2005 Democracy Award of the National Endowment for Democracy and the 2004 Women’s Rights Prize from the Peter Gruber Foundation. In 2002, Sakena was awarded the Peacemakers in Action Award from the Tanenbaum Center for Inter-religious Understanding.
Rahim Kanani: Describe a little bit about the motivation and founding behind the Afghan Institute of Learning more than 15 years ago.
Sakena Yacoobi: When I returned to the Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan in 1992, I saw the plight of the Afghan women living in the camps—they were desperate and depressed. I felt that what Afghan women needed most was education and good health. I knew that Afghan women were strong but most were uneducated and unhealthy. Because they were uneducated and unhealthy, they were not able to think of different ways to solve their problems. So, I founded the Afghan Institute of Learning to give Afghan women and girls the same opportunity that I had to be educated. Education changed my life and I knew that with education, they could change their lives, have choices, have power and accomplish a lot.
Rahim Kanani: What kinds of services do you offer, and to whom?
Sakena Yacoobi: Since its inception, AIL has worked toward providing Afghans with two basic human rights; health care and education. Its holistic approach to these issues–by teaching students through methods that promote critical thinking, the value of human rights, the importance of women’s rights, and problem solving techniques–has provided the basis of moving the culture to the next steps of self-reliance and leadership. We work in partnership with communities in 8 provinces of Afghanistan and the refugee camps of Pakistan, focusing on those communities which do not have access to education and health. AIL works with women, men and children and, because of the trust that Afghan communities have in AIL, more than 70% of our beneficiaries are female.
Listening to the community members, we offer what they ask for. Over the years, that has meant that we are offering many different kinds of services. We offer schools for children; educational learning centers for women and children which offer many types of classes including literacy, tailoring, beauty shop management, carpet weaving, calligraphy, miniature painting, computer, English , Arabic and many more subjects; health services and health education in our clinics; and training in such topics as pedagogy, leadership, human rights, gender issues, management, women’s health and many other specific health topics, peace, self-immolation and democracy.
We publish a magazine on education and health, support a public library in Herat and recently began promoting the revival of culture in Herat by publishing a book of historical places and holding classes of traditional classes in the restored Citadel. We have held conferences that bring Afghans from diverse backgrounds together to discuss important issues facing Afghanistan.
In the past two years, AIL has helped to facilitate the growth of two Emerging Leaders groups of young Afghan female and male leaders ; these young people meet regularly to discuss the problems facing Afghanistan and possible solutions; as volunteers, they have implemented many projects in their own communities that are designed to solve problems facing those communities.
Rahim Kanani: Fast-forwarding to today, how has AIL evolved in terms of reach,
resources and results?
Sakena Yacoobi: When we began, AIL had very few human resources (female trainers, teachers, health personnel, accountants, administrators, etc.) to draw upon. Today we have highly trained staff in every area, including support staff. The result is that we are able to accomplish so much more with trained people than we could when we started. Many of these people were trained within AIL or were sent for training by AIL; they then moved on to staff positions. Because we believe in finding new ways to do things and involving everyone in that process, the result is that we have a very imaginative, resourceful staff that is good at finding solutions to difficult problems.
More of the people AIL serves are now moving beyond the basics. They are not just literate, they are learning job and leadership skills; they are going on to finish high school and university. Young people are meeting in groups to discuss what they want for Afghanistan and then are starting projects on their own. They have led workshops, started a community-based loan fund for women, become involved in the political process, and much more!!
Financially, we started with a $30,000 budget in 1996 and now have a budget of $1.4 million. If you consider the donations of facilities and security provided by the communities where AIL works, it is really larger. Even with these limited resources, AIL has reached 8.8 million people.
Because of the way that AIL works—listening to the people and getting their ideas, and helping them to solve their own problems—our job gets easier every day. The people that we work with are learning how to solve their own problems and do things for themselves; they are becoming leaders and taking the ways of thinking and skills that they have learned into their communities and helping them to solve their own problems.
Rahim Kanani: What role does religion play in the context of your own motivation
to empower and educate?
Sakena Yacoobi: I have a deep faith and my faith gives me strength to go forward and reach out for others and believe that justice will be achieved. My faith helps me to have clear objectives that are aligned with my faith. My faith teaches me about helping others and justice and human rights. Using this as a basis, I can help others know about their rights in the context of their religion. Then they are empowered to know that they have a right to education, to health, to justice, to peace, to knowledge, to fairness and to many other human rights.
Rahim Kanani: It is difficult for many of us to imagine the kinds of conditions and circumstances in which you lead the Institute on the ground in Afghanistan given the conflict. Therefore, How would you describe, or analogize, the context in which AIL operates?
Sakena Yacoobi: There is great insecurity in Afghanistan. In some places it is worse than others, but because AIL works at the grassroots with communities of people who have requested our services, because we listen and share with the people that we work with, because we honor the culture and religion of those we work with, because we have high values, AIL and its staff are trusted. And, we trust the people that we work with. Because we trust each other and work together, we are all protected and we can say our work is easy and rewarding despite the circumstances.
Rahim Kanani: If the work of AIL rests upon one core philosophy about the way in
which the world works, what is that philosophy?
Sakena Yacoobi: If you involve people, listen to them, honor and respect who they are, trust will grow and, working together, individuals and communities can be transformed to be peaceful, happy , fair, just and prosperous.