Amid an impotent Western response to the Taliban’s increasing human rights violations against Afghan women, one Afghan woman is helping her compatriots regain the agency they lost during decades of conflict. In Last to Eat, Last to Learn, Pashtana Durrani writes with humor, heart, and a smattering of sarcasm about her fight to bring education to girls left behind by traditional schooling through her nongovernmental organization LEARN Afghanistan.
Last to Eat, Last to Learn is a vital read for those who continue the drumbeat against the Taliban’s gender apartheid, but its messages are equally vital for the Western leaders who blame their lack of progress during 20 years in Afghanistan on government corruption and Afghan cultural norms. Durrani’s unprecedented success has been a result of dogged determination and working within, not against, the culture she loves. In addition to educating hundreds of girls through LEARN, Durrani herself is a sign of cultural progress. At just 22 years old, Durrani was selected by local powerbrokers to become khan, or leader, of her large Barakzai Pashtun tribe over her male relatives after her father’s passing.
Aside from its incredible importance as a signpost for what women in Afghanistan can achieve, Last to Eat, Last to Learn is a poetic tribute to the regrowth of a people set back by endless conflict. The Soviet invasion spawned “decades of war that ground to a halt any efforts to continue with education,” Durrani writes. In the Pakistani refugee camps where Durrani was raised, oppression of women “started innocently enough, as men trying to protect the women in their household … Education was forgotten. Soon we forgot how we used to live.”
From the girls’ school that Durrani’s father ran inside the family home, Durrani saw how poverty and abuse affected the women and girls around her. At the age of nine, one of Durrani’s classmates stopped attending school after the girl’s father sold her off to a widower with two children. In her schoolmate’s honor, Durrani focused harder on her own education, eventually receiving a scholarship to attend the preparatory program at Oxford University.
During a trip across the border to her tribe’s native Kandahar province, Durrani was shocked to meet smart, driven young girls who ostensibly had access to school, but were not being educated. “Women in Kabul were suddenly heading ministries and representing districts,” Durrani writes. But “the fighting sent Taliban running for the hills [and] those hills are where I’m from, where my tribe is from. None of those splendid Kabul victories ever reached the girls there.” With the Taliban blowing schools up soon after they were built, the Afghan government also ran “an entire shadow economy around schools,” funding their construction but never truly supporting their use as a tool for spreading knowledge.
Spurred by her desire to help, Durrani turned down Oxford and moved to Afghanistan with the seemingly impossible plan to educate girls without access to electricity, internet, or a brick-and-mortar school. Durrani’s program took shape when she was introduced to Rumie, a Canadian NGO that helped her source solar-charging plastic tablets that could be pre-loaded with lesson plans.
Obtaining buy-in for LEARN Afghanistan was another uphill battle. Tribal leaders in southern Kandahar province were reluctant to educate girls. They acquiesced after Durrani argued that Islam required all Muslims to be lifelong learners and that educated women could more safely care for their families while bringing up educated children. Within the halls of government, Durrani also fought to get bureaucrats to support her ideas, especially her nontraditional system of delivering lessons on a schedule that accommodated working children.
Durrani argues that breaking the poverty cycle in Afghanistan requires taking a clear-eyed view of child labor. She writes:
“The vast majority of children [in Afghanistan] needed to work during the day[;] the hours [of schooling] automatically excluded millions of Afghan children too poor to choose education over income. You can rage, and you should, over child labor, but if you condition education on attendance on your terms, you’re simply excluding children that need it the most. Legally banning child labor doesn’t get the five-year-old off the streets and into schools. Ability to feed yourself does that. It was a vicious circle that we kept trying to break off at the wrong point; you needed to be well-off enough to go to school, and without school, you could never rise from abject poverty.”
None of Durrani’s hard-won government approvals mattered when the Taliban took power in Afghanistan in August 2021. LEARN, however, had been built to survive in austere environments. As Durrani made the difficult choice to leave Afghanistan, she delivered a large shipment of tablets so that students affected by future Taliban bans on women’s mobility and educational pursuits could continue to learn in her absence.
Though Durrani closes Last to Eat, Last to Learn as she leaves the country she loves, the entrepreneur spoke with the Washington Examiner from her post at the Wellesley Centers for Women about LEARN Afghanistan’s progress over the past two and a half years. Durrani said LEARN now has schools reaching 314 students and contains initiatives for emergency relief and pre- and post-natal healthcare programming.
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Durrani said that she hopes international pressure will force the Taliban to confront human rights violations against women and “at least start a conversation on lifting bans.” Her other hopes are more ambitious, that “in the next five to eight years, we have a generation that has healed the trauma of war and can get the ball rolling on rebuilding [Afghanistan].”
As her beautiful and heart-rending stories of women on fire for change prove, Durrani and the women she has educated will be up for the task.
Beth Bailey (@BWBailey85) is a freelance contributor to Fox News Digital and the co-host of The Afghanistan Project, which takes a deep dive into the tragedy wrought in the wake of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.