Our mission endures.

From Afghanistan to Rwanda: The SOLA Story.

In the spring of 2016, 24 Afghan girls made history.

On a March morning in Kabul, two dozen girls walked onto SOLA’s campus for the first time. These girls, our inaugural class of 6th graders, had chosen a path that under the Taliban’s regime just 15 years earlier would have been unthinkable. They had chosen to attend Afghanistan’s first and only all-girls boarding school.

They had chosen to lead the way.

Where they led, others followed. SOLA’s story started in Kabul and continues in Rwanda, and at its heart, it is a story of the bravery of our students, of their families, and of the people of Afghanistan.

2016-2021: Rewriting the rules of what Afghan girls can do.

SOLA in Kabul was a boarding school for Afghan girls, the only one of its kind.

We weren’t just an exception to the rules — we were a place where the rules could be rewritten.

The background

Afghanistan had made extraordinary strides in getting girls back in school since the Taliban’s fall in 2001. Nonetheless, traditional views of women’s roles in society were deeply entrenched, and Afghanistan remained a place where the illiteracy rate for teenage girls was 63% (versus 34% for teenage boys), and roughly 1/3 of Afghan girls were married before their 18th birthdays.

A girl who wanted to attend school took risks every time she left the house. She might be shouted at in the street. She might be physically or sexually harassed. She might have acid thrown at her. She might evade those who wanted to hurt her only to arrive at a school building with no running water or sanitation. She might find her classroom led by a desperately underqualified teacher. She might find it led by a qualified teacher who was a man — and in rural areas especially, this could mean an immediate end to her schooling.

Why? Many families who supported their daughters’ educations would not permit them to be educated by anyone other than women once their daughters became teenagers. And in 17 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces, less than 20% of the teachers were women. In these provinces, no female teachers could very well mean no more opportunity to learn.

These were only some of the barriers that stood between an Afghan girl and her dream of receiving her education, and they had been built high. But girls persisted, unafraid. With their families’ support, they fought the odds.

And in 2016, 24 of these girls found their way to a school that had been specifically designed to overcome each of these barriers: a safe environment where girls could learn from educated women and could build bonds of sisterhood.

They’d arrived at SOLA.

fearless families, fearless girls

Those 24 girls hailed from the 14 provinces you see in the map on this page. Traveling to Kabul was rarely simple and at times openly unsafe: even then, the Taliban were far from powerless.

And yet these girls, these 6th grade girls — they came. And SOLA grew. We enrolled a new class of 6th graders annually. By 2021, nearly 100 girls were on our campus, coming from 28 provinces: we were a school of girls in 6th through 11th grades, with a small number of pre-6th graders — girls not yet ready for 6th grade but who showed great academic promise — joining us as well.

Alongside all these boarding school students in our early years were older Afghan girls who lived on campus but who studied at high schools in Kabul instead of taking classes at SOLA. These boarding school and residential life programs differed, but regardless of which one she was in, every girl called SOLA home.

Their families supported them: their mothers, their siblings, and most importantly in the Afghan cultural setting, their fathers. The courage of these men, some of whom received threats to their lives for educating their daughters, must never be ignored.

Coursework at SOLA was rigorous. Our Afghan female teaching staff worked alongside a global team of expert tutors joining us remotely. Students studied art, math, and science. They learned to read English, and they learned to read Quran.

These girls from different provinces and different ethnic groups and different familial and economic backgrounds learned that they were sisters. Here they learned that they could be the leaders who’d change their nation’s future.

SOLA grew. We thrived. We saw ever-increasing numbers of girls apply for spots in 6th grade, from 70 in 2016 to 264 in 2021. Even in the darkest days of 2020 as COVID spread across Afghanistan, we mixed remote and in-person education in order to maintain continuity of learning for our students.

Then came 2021.

2021: The fall of Kabul and SOLA’s departure from Afghanistan.

The images above show a scene of quiet amid the chaos at Kabul International Airport in August 2021. A scene of hope, and of extraordinary sadness.

These are images of our people, our SOLA community, leaving home behind.

On August 15, a summer of relentless violence culminated in the fall of Kabul and the Taliban’s return to power.

On that day, our founder Shabana Basij-Rasikh closed and locked SOLA’s gates for the last time, after posting on Twitter the video you see below.

This is video of our students’ academic records, burning. Shabana and our Afghan staff set this fire to destroy the traces of our students’ presence at SOLA.

They did this to protect the identities of our students and their families, because where many of our students were going, their families could not follow.

The story of SOLA’s effort to evacuate Afghanistan is one that was told to a worldwide audience on 60 Minutes on CBS. Here, it’s enough to say that on August 25, nearly 250 members of the SOLA community (including our entire student body of boarding students as well as several graduates of our residential life program, totaling more than 100 girls) arrived in Rwanda.

Four days later, on August 29, our classes resumed. They continue to this day.

We had seen the threat clearly, and had spent months in 2021 laying the groundwork for a study abroad program. Shabana has written about it and spoken about it, but as she’s said: “I never imagined Afghanistan would fall as fast as it did. No one imagined it.”

Our school, our girls, our people: all of us entered exile, the way so many thousands of Afghans did. Rwanda welcomed us. Here in this nation that once suffered so much and has since risen from darkness to become a recognized pillar of stability in Africa, a nation that is no stranger to the needs and hopes of refugees — here is where we are setting down roots.

The day will come when we return to Afghanistan. Now the moment has arrived for us to grow SOLA the school, and to expand SOLA the mission.

2021-today: SOLA the school, and SOLA the mission. 

SOLA’s goals haven’t changed. What’s changed is how we’ll achieve them.

Our ambition in Kabul was to be a school of girls in grades 6-12, drawing students to our campus from every province of Afghanistan, and with our first class of 12th graders — those same girls who made history as 6th graders back in 2016 — graduating in 2022 and going on to attend universities in Afghanistan and worldwide.

The events of 2021 altered those plans. Those 12th graders are now among several dozen of our oldest girls who came with us out of Afghanistan to Rwanda, and who are now pursuing their educations as students enrolled at top international boarding schools beyond Rwanda’s borders.

Our younger students, girls in pre-6th through 10th grade, remain with us in Rwanda — and they’re being joined by Afghan girls from around the world.

In 2022, we launched our first-ever fully online admissions season, targeted specifically at girls in the Afghan diaspora, particularly those forced out of Afghanistan by the Taliban’s return. We did the same in a record-setting 2023, and will do so in every year to come. These new students will join us in Rwanda, and we will grow to finally become a boarding school for grades 6-12.

The SOLA mission is to educate Afghan girls: to create a leadership generation of women who will one day return home to Afghanistan and rebuild all that the Taliban have destroyed. What began in Kabul continues now in Rwanda.

Educated girls are the difference makers. They are the ones who move society to a safer, healthier, more equitable place. We intend for SOLA to always be a home for Afghan girls, and to always be a place of opportunity for the young women who will change the world.