Afghan women learn through mobiles
14 November, 2012
KABUL: Afghanistan has launched a new literacy programme that enables Afghan women deprived of a basic education during decades of war to learn to read and write using a mobile phone. The phone is called Ustad Mobile (Mobile Teacher) and provides national curriculum courses in both national languages, Dari and Pashto, as well as mathematics. All the lessons are audio-video, with writing, pronunciation and phrases installed in Ustad Mobile phones -- and they are distributed free to students. Sat on a carpet in a small Kabul classroom with a handful of women learning to read and write, 18-year-old Muzhgan Nazari said the Taliban, who banned schooling for girls during their rule, were in power when she should have started her education. "I could not go to school because the Taliban took control of Kabul city", she told adding that her father had also opposed his daughters attending school. "Since I heard about this literacy training centre for women, I convinced my father and he allowed me to attend on a daily basis," she said. Nazari is delighted with the programme, which is being rolled out by a commercial provider and the ministry of education with financial backing from the United States. The Mobile Teacher software was developed by Paiwastoon, an Afghan IT company, with $80,000 dollars in US aid and is designed to tackle one of the worst illiteracy rates in the world by riding the growing wave of mobile phone use. Despite millions of girls now attending school, Afghanistan's literacy rate among women remains at just 12.5 percent, compared to 39.3 percent for Afghan men, according to United Nations figures. End.
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