Education for Children with Disabilities in Kabul

Dear Friends and Supporters,

With this note I am informing you about the change of the name for our organisation. Previously known as Bakhtar Development Network Global, we have changed to Action for Development. This change was supported by our board and members for better visibility and organisational development. I invite you to kindly “like” and “connect” to our facebook, and tweeter accounts, as well as our new website: www.action-for-development.org

The year 2015 was a busy period for our school of disabled children in Kabul. The schooling year in Afghanistan – which was started in March - is ending, and thus the students of the school are busy with final exams.

The students have studied hard during the year in order to be able to be upgraded to the next level. Having the support and numerous donations from kind hearted friends as you, we were able to sustain provision of lunch for the school students throughout the year, on daily basis, as well as additional support with stationary and school supplies.

During this year we focused on strengthening our curriculum and training aspects for the students. During the year, three trainings were conducted for the teachers, with specific focus on psychological aspect of disabled children, and orienting them about pedagogical techniques of approaching a disabled child.

Our community volunteers have paved a way to further integrating the disabled children into the society. Recently, our students were encouraged to participate in social gatherings, and were given a right of being privileged while travelling within the city. They were provided – special – priority disability cards, with which they could be exempted from paying fees while using the city transport and governmental airlines.

Our future plans would include:

1. Play Ground: Constructing a playground for the children will be one of the priorities during the school break. The necessary initial need assessment is conducted and we are working on assemble necessary elements and funds for the construction of the playground.
2. Clean drinking water: The school is located in the area where underground water is salty and could not be used. Even the trees that we planted could not be sustained with the water which is fetched from underground in this location. The school is purchasing drinking water for the students use on weekly basis, using a tanker. Seeking opportunities to bring clean drinking water to the school is one of our priorities. Initial discussions are going on with some representatives interested in this issue in Geneva, and we hope that this project could be finalised and started to be utilisable by April 2016.
3. Training to teachers: during the winter holidays we are planning to conduct special training to the teachers as well as managing team of the school, on the issues related to management, English language, computer skills. These aspects will help our school students to connect with the world through enabling them communicate through net and email using English language.

Ending our report at this note, we wish you, happy New Year 2016, and enjoyable holidays. Please keep us in mind and your thoughts, and support us to be able to further integrate and assist the disabled children in Afghanistan when the school will reopen in March 2016.

Kind regards, 

Links:

• our website has changed