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A life-long servant to the cause of education for refugee girls in Pakistan, Aqeela Asifi has been awarded the 2015 UNHCR Nansen Refugee Award.
“Asifi is a courageous woman who has created hope for many young girls in desperate circumstances”, said Secretary General of the Norwegian Refugee Council, Jan Egeland.
Aqeela Asifi, 49, is recognised for her brave and tireless dedication to providing education to Afghan refugee girls in the Kot Chandana refugee village in Mianwali, Pakistan.
“Sending girls to school is the best investment in the future we can make. Asifi has been championing the right to education and persuaded her own community to send their girls to school,” said Egeland.
Asifi is a former teacher who fled from Kabul with her family in 1992. The family found safety in the remote Afghan refugee settlement of Kot Chandana, Pakistan.
Approximately 80 per cent of the around 750,000 Afghan refugee children in Pakistan are currently out of school, and girls are overrepresented in the statistics. Asifi also discovered early on that cultural traditions kept most girls in her settlement at home.
Slowly, but surely, she convinced the community to let her teach the girls in the village. What started with a handful of pupils in a makeshift school tent has expanded to cover a thousand children in nine permanent schools.
“People like Aqeela Asifi understand that today’s refugee children will determine the future of their countries, and the future of our world,” said UN High Commissioner for Refugees, António Guterres.
Afghanistan is one of the largest, most protracted refugee crises in the world. Over 2.6 million
Afghans currently live in exile and over half of them are children.
“While Europe is working to find a solution to the refugee crisis on our own continent, we must not forget that the majority of the world’s displaced live in developing countries. In these countries and outside the spotlights of international media, unsung heroes like Ageela Asifi work tirelessly to support the most vulnerable,” said Egeland.
“When you have mothers who are educated, you will almost certainly have future generations who are educated,” said Asifi. “So if you educate girls, you educate generations. I wish for the day when people will remember Afghanistan not for war, but for its standard of education.”
Asifi will receive the award at a ceremony in Geneva on October 5, hosted by UNHCR, the Norwegian Refugee Council, Swiss and Norwegian authorities.
Report
For more facts, see the new NRC/UNHCR report "Breaking the cycle: Education and the future for Afghan refugees", which outlines the challenges that children, especially refugee girls, face in accessing education in Pakistan
Read more at www.nrc.no
