The School of Leadership, Afghanistan (SOLA), has opened a permanent campus in Rwanda to continue providing education to Afghan girls forced to leave their country following the Taliban’s return to power. The new campus represents a major step in the school’s effort to provide a safe and stable learning environment for Afghan girls whose access to education has been severely restricted at home.
SOLA was founded by Shabana Basij-Rasikh as a boarding school in Kabul in 2016. Following the Taliban’s return to power in 2021 and the subsequent restrictions on girls’ education, Basij-Rasikh led the evacuation of the school community to Rwanda after receiving an invitation from the Rwandan government. Classes resumed just four days after their arrival, initially from a hotel that served as a temporary school.
The permanent campus, whose exact location is being kept confidential for security reasons, will accommodate 122 Afghan girls. The school is expected to begin classes at the new facility this month, with the new campus allowing SOLA to roughly double its enrolment. However, the school says thousands of Afghan girls apply each year, meaning the majority of applicants will still be unable to secure places.
To reach girls who cannot attend the Rwanda campus, SOLA has also developed SOLAx, an online learning platform offering Afghan curriculum-aligned lessons for students in Grades 6 to 12 through smartphones and WhatsApp. The platform, which launched in 2024, now serves about 41,000 students, primarily in Afghanistan but also across dozens of other countries.
The development comes amid continuing restrictions on girls’ education in Afghanistan. According to figures cited by the Associated Press from a United Nations report, about 2.4 million Afghan girls are currently excluded from secondary education.
For SOLA, the new Rwanda campus is therefore more than a school building; it is an attempt to preserve educational opportunities for Afghan girls and prepare them to contribute to the future of their country.
EduTimes Africa, a product of Education Times Africa, is a magazine publication that aims to lend its support to close the yawning gap in Africa's educational development.