Anniversaries dark and light.

What is one girl worth?

It’s a question I hope you’ll think about as one year ends and another begins, as we look back on the paths we’ve walked together since January.

These paths have taken us to the groundbreaking for SOLA’s new campus in Rwanda. They’ve led us through a record-setting admissions season: more than 5,400 applications received from Afghan girls worldwide. They’ve taken us to extraordinary heights with SOLAx, which isn’t even two years old and already counts more than 25,000 users who’ve completed more than 370,000 lessons.

Paths lit by the brightest light. We’ve walked them together.

And we’ve walked them in Afghanistan, where girls still don’t attend school past 6th grade.

Where, with a two-day disruption of internet access in September, the Taliban showed they have the ability to take an entire nation offline if they choose.

Where women were left to die this summer beneath earthquake rubble because male rescue crews wouldn’t help them: these women, trapped in the ruins of their homes, were not the men’s blood relatives, and the Taliban would have punished the men for touching the women’s bodies to pull them to safety. So the men didn’t. And the women died.

Paths through darkness. We’ve walked them together too.

I talk to girls in Afghanistan and in the diaspora. I talk to women there. My team and I listen to them and learn from them. We take our priorities from them. We innovate, we explore, we do not look away – and there is so much more to do.

Resilience. Sacrifice. Joy. Anguish. Loss. Victory.

This was 2025, and the paths we walked together, dark and light.

And now New Year’s Eve brings us to the edge of anniversaries.

2026 marks five years since the fall of Kabul. Five years of lives lived under the shadow.

2026 marks ten years since SOLA opened our doors as something Afghanistan had never seen: a boarding school created exclusively for Afghan girls.

10 years of SOLA. First in Afghanistan, now in Rwanda, 10 years of educating the young Afghan women who are the heart of a global sisterhood of change.

10 years of, every day, answering the question I hope you’ll think about.

What is one girl worth?

I know my answer. It has never changed.

She is worth everything.

And she can do anything.