Share Literacy AfghanistanWe have formed partnerships to provide children in Afghanistan with desperately needed books for distribution to schools, orphanages and libraries throughout the country. As always, we are dependent on your generous support for the success of these projects. With your help we can donate books to thousands of deserving children at low cost through non-profit literacy partners. Why so much in Afghanistan depends on literacy, and literacy depends on you? Afghan society endured heavy losses while fighting the Soviets after their invasion in 1979 and in the civil war that broke out after the Soviets withdrew in 1989. Subsequently, under Taliban rule, the economy and educational system was destroyed. As a result, more than an entire generation has never known peace and has had little opportunity for education or participation in a normal society. In the current climate of upheaval, another generation of Afghan children now faces a future of poverty and illiteracy. The situation in Afghanistan is desperate. The literacy needs of Afghan children are crucial to the future of their country, and thus to the stability and fruitfulness of the region. We are almost at the end of the United Nations Literacy Decade (2003-2012), yet in Afghanistan the general literacy rate is only 29%. Only 33% of the girls are even in school. As in every country, literacy is central to developing the many skills that the younger generation requires to survive and contribute in the modern world. This is all the more true when a country and its populace have been decimated. After decades of war, 43% of the Afghan population is under 15 years of age – in Canada, the corresponding figure is 17% – and this is combined with an infant mortality rate 30 times that of Canada. The future of their country rests on this generation of Afghan children, in dire need and facing almost insurmountable odds… Introducing Share Literacy Afghanistan
Children at Kabul Orphan Care hold up copies of The Clever
Boy and the Terrible, Dangerous Animal. ICE has partnered with the Institute for the Study of Human Knowledge (ISHK) to address this literacy crisis. ISHK is a U.S.-based charity and non-profit publisher of Hoopoe Books. Collected by Afghan author Idries Shah each book presents a remarkable Teaching-Story that has been told by campfire and candlelight in Afghanistan for more than 1,000 years. ISHK has received official permission from the Ministry of Education in Kabul to provide Hoopoe titles in bilingual Dari and Pashto for distribution to schools, orphanages and libraries throughout Afghanistan. And ICE has acquired from ISHK the rights to publish and distribute translations of one of these books, The Clever Boy and the Terrible, Dangerous Animal. Our aim is to provide as many children as possible with their very own books. For at least 95% of Afghan children these will certainly be the first books they own – and they may well be tales that their grandparents recognize from their own childhood. We hope that repatriating these stories in book form will be a comforting bridge to literacy and a legacy for young Afghans and their future. Why Canadians need to help Share Literacy Afghanistan?
The Dari/Pashto translation of The
Boy Without a Name by Idries Shah
Our Afghanistan PartnersKhatiz Organization for Rehabilitation (KOR) |