Help Empower Afghan Girls through Sports

CPD is cordially thankful to all the prestigious donors for their continuous support to the project “Help Empower Afghan Girls through Sports” especially in the difficult times of coronavirus and now, during the socio-political power shift in Afghanistan. During this challenging period of time, we had been concerned of the future of our social development and empowerment programs and were regularly observing the situation. Unfortunately, nothing has changed so far in terms of the project thematic issue of "girls' access to public spaces, recreation, edutainment and assembly" in Afghanistan.

The project was designed in a way to make synergy with existing initiatives in order for achieving augmented results. That is why, the CPD mainstreamed its “empowerment through sports” initiative in the government-led similar programs playing a vital role as a technical and financial partner. Sponsorship of sport tournaments of Kabul Department of Education (DoE) for a period of almost a decade was a bold example of this partnership. During this period, numerous girls and boys tournaments were jointly organized by Kabul DoE and the CPD. From mid-2016 to early 2020, a number of these sport events were financed through generous support of our donors facilitated by the GlobalGiving crowd-funding platform.

Considering the current context of Afghanistan including restrictions made on women and girls, initially planned project activities have been no longer relevant and the CPD’s focus was shifted to ensure sustainability of nurtured organizational human resources and systems and established network of volunteers, who were effectively engaged in social development and empowerment programs for years. At the moment, CPD aims to support the institutional hub and community volunteers to the extent possible in order to smoothly reorganize it, once the socio-political situation gets improved.

CPD decision is to keep the project active and have the alternative of redirecting project implementation strategy. If restriction on women and girls continue, a possible amendment could be complete focus on boys’ sports. We had organized many sport tournament among boy teams including boy Futsal tournaments under the theme #HeForShe in the past years.

We, the team CPD, are looking forward to your generous support during these critical times. Afghans suffer extreme financial problems due to severe shortfall in economic activities and financial restrictions enforced on Afghanistan by the international community. Financial restriction and freezing reserve funds of Afghanistan have directly affected the people and contributed to nation-wide food insecurity and paralyzing public service delivery throughout the country. All these have unfortunately deprioritized social change development programs including our project aimed at girls’ access to public spaces, recreation, edutainment and assembly. As we reported earlier, COVID-19 and insecurity incidents by IS-KP were also preventing implementation of social change programs; the latter is still a main threat. Please refer to our past reports for details.

In such a scenario, priority comes to survive the organization and the minimum level of its operations until the situation gets improved. Taking all these challenges into account, CPD has prioritized supporting its team members and volunteers to overcome such unprecedented situation through cash aid, and distribution of food packages and COVID-19 prevention kits. We will continue this intervention until the problems get solved and it is not possible without your generosity to financially supporting our cause. 

Links:

• CPD's official Facebook page

Since the previous reports were published, unfortunately, nothing has changed in terms of the project thematic issue of "girls' access to public spaces, recreation, edutainment and assembly" in Afghanistan, but more restrictions were made recently banning Afghan women from visiting parks, gyms, and public baths. This new restriction on Afghan women is in addition to the already established ban on travel without a male escort, and the ban on access to secondary education.

CPD would like to thank all prestigious donors again for their continuous support to the project especially in the difficult times of coronavirus and now, during the socio-political power shift in Afghanistan. We have been concerned of the future of our social empowerment programs and are regularly observing the situation. We had very impactful professional girl sport tournaments under this crowd-funding project in close coordination with line government departments especially Ministry of Education and hoping to continue supporting Afghan girls to practice their human right of accessing public spaces, recreation, edutainment and assembly.

As shared in the past, our decision is to keep the project active and have the alternative of project amendment in need. If restriction on women and girls continue, a possible amendment could be focusing on boys’ sports under the theme of supporting women and girls’ access to public spaces, recreation, edutainment and assembly. We had boy Futsal tournaments under the theme #HeForShe in the past years. Worth to mention that the theme may not be used so publically due to its sensitivity to the IEA (Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan) and the threat of harming our staff and volunteers.

We, the team CPD, are looking forward to your generous support during these critical times. Afghans suffer extreme financial problems due to severe shortfall in economic activities and financial restrictions enforced on Afghanistan by the international community. Financial restriction and freezing reserve funds of Afghanistan have directly affected the people and contributed to nation-wide food insecurity and paralyzing public service delivery throughout the country. All these have unfortunately deprioritized social change development programs including our project aimed at girls’ access to public spaces, recreation, edutainment and assembly. As we reported earlier, COVID-19 and insecurity incidents by IS-KP were also preventing implementation of social change programs; the latter is still a main threat. Please refer to our past reports for details.

In such a scenario, priority comes to survive the organization and the minimum level of its operations until the situation gets improved. Taking all these challenges into account, CPD has prioritized supporting its team members and volunteers to overcome such unprecedented situation through cash aid, and distribution of food packages and COVID-19 prevention kits. We will continue this intervention until the problems get solved and it is not possible without your generosity to financially supporting our cause. 

Links:

• Official Facebook page of the CPD