Donate to SOLA: A Brighter Future for Afghan Girls

Harvard-Westlake’s Middle Eastern & North African Student Association (MENASA) is aiming to raise money to support the School of Leadership Afghanistan and their mission of educating Afghan girls and building a generation of compassionate and confident young women with the leadership skills to rebuild Afghanistan and guide their homeland into a better future.

In America, we see education as a human right - in Afghanistan, schools are lackluster and girls have become outright forbidden from receiving an education under the Taliban. This is why Shabana Basij-Rasikh decided not to stand by idly, and she co-founded the all-girls school SOLA, also known as the School of Leadership Afghanistan. At first, the school started in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, but as the Taliban was encroaching on the city in 2021, the whole school made a harrowing escape from Kabul Airport since the over 250 members of the school community were not safe in their homeland anymore.

They left behind their family, and after the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, the school relocated to the African country of Rwanda. They were still an Afghan girls’ boarding school, but now the students had to leave behind their family and travel to another continent simply to receive an education.

Unfortunately, thousands of students apply, but they only have room for a few of them. In the 2023-2024 school year, 5,240 girls applied, yet only 61 got accepted; that’s a 1% acceptance rate. Recently, SOLA has expanded and is currently working on constructing a new campus in addition to launching SOLAx, an online learning platform that can reach girls in Afghanistan. Although it doesn’t serve as a replacement for in-person learning, it has been described as “a light of hope and an initial step on a path that leads back to the classroom.”

Furthermore, last year, the co-founder, Shabana Basij-Rasikh, came to speak at a mandatory assembly at the Harvard Westlake Middle School. This year, MENASA and the school’s Girls Club, in collaboration with the Saffron & Rose Ice Cream store, raised funds to support SOLA’s new campus and online learning hub.

With your help donating, we hope to increase SOLA’s capacity and make a quality education accessible to more Afghan girls.