Social and Emotional Learning in Afghanistan

The country of Afghanistan currently faces major, major challenges.

Decades of conflict have left a legacy of economic and sociopolitical turmoil. Covid 19 and political turnover have worsened the situation to the point where famine now looms.

And although issues of this enormity require investment from multiple players at all levels, we at SIL LEAD believe that one of the best ways to heal Afghanistan’s wounds in a sustainable and long-term way is through education. We are grateful for the opportunity to be involved in such a beautiful country and to work with such beautiful people, and are happy to be collaborating with some of the very best experts in multilingual education to help Afghani’s meet their goals for their own country – using the languages they use most and best understand.

From Ninara on Flickr

Dr. Agatha Van Ginkel has been working with SIL LEAD for almost a decade, providing expertise in multilingual education for our projects all over the world—from Kampala to Kathmandu to, most recently, Kabul. One of the areas Dr. van Ginkel’s has worked on is how Social and Emotional Learning (SEL), can be embedded in the language and literacy learning process to help produce more holistically healthy students and, ultimately, world citizens.

Recently, the journal of the Inter-agency Network for Education in Emergencies (INEE), published a paper that Agatha co-authored. INEE is an open, global network of members working together within a humanitarian and development framework to ensure that all individuals have the right to a quality, safe, relevant, and equitable education. Through their journal they publish papers on how to help children in Crisis. The last issues of the journal included the paper “Embedding Social and Emotional Learning in Literacy and Teacher Training in Afghanistan,” written by Agatha, Dr. Janet Shriberg an SEL expert and Creative Associates’s Senior Technical Advisor, Child Protection and Well-Being, Susan Ayari (the Director of the Middle Ease & Asia Portfolio in the Education for Development Division, and the director of the Afghan Children Read Project) and two support staff of Creative Associates Sarah Manientes and Benjamin Gauley. 

In the conclusion of the paper, it says that their project had “showed how national experts, in collaboration with international experts, succeed in developing an early grade reading method and approach that has integrated SEL values and activities aligned with Afghanistan’s cultural and religious values.”

This alignment with local cultural and religious values is key not just so that the project will be adopted by the community, but also so that its SEL content will be incorporated by the community in a way that will help them face their challenges over time.

In Afghanistan, with all its complex history, useful implementation requires a very deft touch. It is difficult… but certainly not impossible.

As Dr. van Ginkel puts it, “What we found was that SEL includes a skill set that can be practiced in different ways. Initially, the easiest thing to do is to provide the activities that the experts are familiar with and used to from other contexts. In some of the activities there is some language that Afghan communities might find harder to accept. [One example] was that for some activities, the children needed to jump and walk around in more active ways. By some this was not considered appropriate for girls, and certainly not in mixed gender classes. [So] … we sat with the materials writers and explained the purpose of the exercise… and a culturally appropriate exercise was developed to work on the skills.”

With careful, sensitive presentation, the team found that the ideas behind the project were readily adopted by the community, in ways that we believe will have a lasting impact.

We encourage you to read the article for yourself. 

We are grateful to Dr. van Ginkel and the Creative team and what they were able to accomplish together in this beautiful country.