THE image of Afghan women throwing off their veils and embracing education is “clever media hype”, warns the Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan (RAWA).

Huge swathes of Afghanistan are still run by Taliban sympathisers and attitudes towards girls’ education are not going to change overnight. The TES campaign, run jointly with the United Nations Children’s Fund, hopes to make education a priority for women by funding adult literacy programmes.

RAWA, which is based in Pakistan, worked underground during the Taliban regime, sending teachers into Afghanistan to run literacy and health courses. It encouraged the women who followed the curriculum for a year to start teaching themselves.

Carol Mann, who works on educational projects with RAWA, claims that, despite the overthrow of the Taliban, nothing has changed for women in Afghanistan.

The dominant ethnic group in Afghanistan is Pashtun which observes the most conservative form of Islam in the world.

The idea that women should not be educated is not a Taliban invention, but a deeply-held religious belief.

Ms Mann, who is the founder of FemAid which has links with women’s associations across the world, said: “Women are still routinely beaten, girls are underfed, baby girls disappear from the statistics at birth. Nobody in the region thinks this is abnormal as women themselves have internalised these values.”

When Taliban fundamentalists officially barred women from education, members of RAWA risked their lives by providing home-based classes for girls and women.

Ms Mann says: “They would get a bunch of girls and women together in secret and tell them to start sewing. They would do their handicrafts and hide their books underneath.

“It was very dangerous as the area where they operated was full of Taliban. Even now whole areas are dominated by Taliban sympathisers. A lot of the girls who attend the home-based classes are the daughters of widows, because these women are often a bit more open-minded once the husband has gone.”

Ms Mann believes education is very important for these women: “It gives them something positive and increases their self-esteem. For them, it is a way of staying sane.

“Basic education is about empowerment. Even putting some democratic notions in these women’s lives is revolutionary.”

Women from RAWA do their best to teach reading, writing, history, basic skills and elementary health education.

During the time of the Taliban, some teachers braved huge dangers and went to the most distant parts of Afghanistan, and many were forced to leave their daughters in RAWA schools in Pakistan. Many of the daughters then went over to do stints in Afghanistan, teaching in remote rural areas.

Ms Mann reckons the TES campaign is vital and wants to see it extended into Pakistan where schools are not free and families educate their sons in preference to daughters.

She said: “These literacy programmes are vital. With literacy skills, women can get hold ofinformation and pass it on to their children.

“The relationship between education, malnutrition, disease, and mortality is obvious. Education remains very much a priority for these women.”

More information about the work of RAWA and FemAid can be found at www.RAWA.org and www.femaid.org

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