Newsroom

Global Partnership for Education ( GPE) will provide 55.7 million U.S. dollars for the Afghan government to promote education quality in the war-torn country.

Global Partnership for Education (GPE) is an international consortium of countries working to provide financial and technical assistance to education programs in conflict, post-conflict and developing countries.

"It is a significant grant to the Afghan Ministry for Education to receive a grant of 55.7 million U.S. dollars to promote education quality around the country," Afghan Education Minister Farooq Wardak told reporters after inking a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the United Nations Children's Fund ( UNICEF) representative in the country Peter Crowley, on Tuesday.

The GPE was established in 2002. Afghanistan joined the entity in 2011, Wardak said. He also added that the grant will be provided to the Ministry for Education within the next three years begins from the current year.

"The GPE program will be directly implemented by the Ministry of Education and would especially focus on 13 provinces mostly in the south and east, with the UNICEF to serve as the supervising body," Wardak said.

He said the strategy devised by the Ministry of Education will cover a range of initiatives, with focus on accelerating girls' attendance to school by working with community leaders, recruiting and training additional female teachers, providing alternative pathways to formal education and ensuring that schools are protected through the efforts of communities themselves.

Wardak also confirmed that more than 400 schools had remained closed due to conflicts and security problems and thus over 200, 000 students have been deprived from getting education.

Schools especially girls' ones have been closed down due to security reasons mostly in the southern provinces where Taliban militants are active over the past few years.

"When a girl is educated, she is empowered with confidence and with access to information on how better to care of herself and her children and more effectively to contribute to the well being of her family and community," said Crowley at the same press briefing.

"Education saves life when a woman is educated, she is less likely to die during childbirth, more likely to send her children to school and is able fully to contribute to the development of her community and of her country," the UNICEF representative added.

Around 8.4 million Afghan children with over 35 percent of them girls go to school at present while the Ministry for Education has been endeavoring to increase the number to 12 million within the next three years, according to Wardak.

Original source