By Lucy Ferriss | President of the Board
We were fortunate to raise $15,000 on GlobalGiving in late 2024 for our Give the Gift of Data project. This success means specific, measurable benefits for our 800 students in Afghanistan, with implications for AFSO's abililty to grow in the near future.
What does $15,000 in data represent? With all education in Afghanistan banned for girls and women past 6th grade, 99% of our students access their English and university courses on their phones, because they have neither computers nor wireless conectivity. To give them sufficient access to attend classes and do assignments, we send each student approximately $20 worth of mobile phone data each month, directly from outside Afghanistan to their phone numbers. Our GlobalGiving project raised enough for almost all our students in need to securely access classes for a full month. As a result, many were also able to submit applications for scholarships and admissions at universities outside Afghanistan, and 6 have received news of such scholarhips just in January 2025.
As one student put it in her course evaluation, "Wonderful teaching method, great instructors and so useful and helpful classes and assignments. But the best thing about AFSO is they give us data so we can be in courses and do assignments. And now I have big dreams."
Of course, one month is only 1/10 of a students annual curriculum. So the work goes on, including the work of raising funds for meet the data needs of students during the rest of their academic year. If we can continue and enlarge the capacity of this project, we can meet all our students' needs and begin to admit some of the 3,500 students on our waiting list. We have the volunteer capacity--more than 150 educators around the world--and we have the platform. All that's missing, still is more data. Especially with the effects of discontinued international funding from the U.S. government, we hope folks will step forward and keep supporting this very practical, direct measure to help university women in Afghanistan.
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