BBC Tech Tent

On December 3, 2021, the BBC’s Jane Wakefield spoke to UoPeople President Shai Reshef and one of our female students in Afghanistan about the experience of studying online under Taliban rule. A transcript of the conversation is below. Click here to listen to the BBC radio broadcast, the story begins 12:10 into the show.

Jane Wakefield: When the Taliban took back control of the country earlier this year, girls and women who had been able to go to school for much of the last two decades were sent home. It’s not clear if they will ever be allowed back in the classrooms, but that doesn’t mean that girls and women have given up on their futures. We spoke to one woman who is still studying. Now we did hope to speak to her directly, but her internet connection was not very good, so she sent us an audio diary.

Z: Before the Taliban took control of Afghanistan, girls were allowed to attend schools and join universities. Everything was very good, but now everything has changed.

Jane: This student who we won’t name was studying business administration in Kabul until the Taliban started closing in on the Afghan capital in August. She told us what that was like.

Z: I was as usual attending my university, my class. Everything was normal, as usual, as the day before. Everything was good, but just suddenly, one of our university members, a guy, knocked on the door and came in the class and said that the Taliban is coming forward, you don’t have time, you must escape. All the students, you know, girls and boys and teachers, they became afraid, and we stood up and just started escaping. We were frightened. Maybe one of them come in front of us right now. We didn’t consider what would happen next. What would they do with us? We were so frightened and afraid.

Jane: She went home and hasn’t been allowed back on campus since. Instead, she has become one of the hundreds of students who have turned to online universities, giving females a chance to keep studying at home and in secret.

Z: I had no other choice, no other option, no other way to continue my education, so I decided to study at this university. I’m just finding a way not to give up, to continue my way, to just reach my goals and I hope that I can get what I was planning for.

Jane: Shai Reshef is the president of University of the People and he told me not just about the decision to offer help in Afghanistan, but also about how all his students differ from those at traditional universities.

Shai: We decided that we wanted to offer the opportunity for women in Afghanistan to continue their studies. The beauty of studying with us is they can stay at home. They don’t need to go outside and if they don’t want people to know they are studying, they can do it from home without anyone knowing that. We had a challenge. We weren’t sure how we were going to spread the word into Afghanistan, so we went to Facebook or other groups where Afghan expats were spending time and started spreading the word. And in a couple of weeks, we have 4,000 women applying. Six hundred of them have already started two weeks ago studying with us. The word is out there way more than we expected. We are trying to raise more money to enable all of them to study with us and they can do it anywhere with any internet connection.

Jane: You’ve had some interesting students through the door, through the virtual door, I should say. Give us a sort of flavor of how many students you have and what walks of life those students are from.

Shai: We have 117,000 students coming from 200 countries and territories. They are not the typical kind of students. We have survivors of the genocide in Rwanda, the earthquake in Haiti. We have homeless in the U.S., undocumented in the U.S. We have over 10,000 refugees, among them a lot of Syrians, Libyans, Iraqis, and many Africans. One example would be a student in the U.S. who was homeless and a single mom, who raised two kids without a place to live. She studied with us, she received her MBA, and now she’s a manager with Amazon. We have people in Africa who came to us after selling fruit on the streets and made it all the way to working with amazing companies. We have, by the way, graduates who work at Amazon, Apple, IBM, Google, and many other successful companies. And refugees who come to us because we are the only opportunity to build a future for themselves.

Jane: Shai Reshef there. Now Shiona, this isn’t the only example of online education in these very difficult circumstances, is it? There are lots of others doing the same.

Shiona: Yes, there are many. As you can imagine, there’s a huge demand for women across Afghanistan to have access to educational resources. One is called the Online Herat School, which just started on Instagram with a call out to volunteer teachers. They had nearly 400 of them joining the program, who deliver workshops and lessons on both Telegram and Skype. They offer things like cooking, maths, painting, and music, so the full spectrum. Of course, online learning has become really popular because of the pandemic and in places where access to education just isn’t there. So how do they manage it without reliable internet?

Jane: I mean that is something that University of the People is absolutely aware of and has to cater to people with very, very slow bandwidth, so it does things, for example, like not really using too much video and replacing that with text, for example. But I think this whole issue of online education is fascinating and it really brings into focus the lack of internet connectivity and how much connectivity plays a part in education.