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Good practice Imported

SOLAx — SOLA's WhatsApp AI Curriculum Academy for Banned Afghan Girls

Afghanistan · Kabul · See the Afghanistan profile · See the Kabul profile

Evidence: Descriptive / self-reported Top 56% 47/100 · Ask Evidence Copilot about this practice

SOLA, the Kabul-founded school led by Shabana Basij-Rasikh, uses generative AI to digitize Afghanistan's curriculum and deliver it free via WhatsApp to 20,000+ girls in 75+ countries and every Afghan province, after the Taliban barred girls from school.

20,000 students
Students reached (cumulative to date)
75 countries
Countries reached (cumulative to date)

Details

Maturity
Scaling
Promoter
School of Leadership, Afghanistan (SOLA)
Period
SOLA founded 2016; SOLAx since the 2021 Taliban ban (ongoing)
Keywords
girls' education access, generative AI curriculum, WhatsApp learning, crisis education

Context

Following the Taliban's 2021 ban on girls attending secondary school, SOLA (School of Leadership, Afghanistan, founded 2016 in Kabul) launched SOLAx, a WhatsApp-based online academy that delivers the Afghan curriculum via generative AI in English, Dari, and Pashto to girls barred from formal secondary education.

Objectives

SOLAx is explicitly framed as a temporary emergency measure — "not a replacement for...in-classroom education" — intended to keep excluded girls learning during the ban, starting with ESL and storytelling courses and expanding into a full 7th-grade, 9-subject curriculum.

Activities

The platform delivers courses over WhatsApp using Meta's API, with content-development support from the National Geographic Society, funded in part by a $200,000 restricted grant from the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation as part of its $73.5 million "AI for Humanity" initiative.

Results

SOLAx reports reaching more than 20,000 students across 75+ countries and every Afghan province, having expanded from initial ESL/storytelling courses to a 7th-grade curriculum of 9 subjects, with 8th-grade content in development; no independent evaluation of learning outcomes has been published.

Implementation
Indicative cost
Low (< €50k)
Time to results
Short (< 1 year)
Staffing & skills
SOLA (School of Leadership, Afghanistan)

Conditions for success

  • WhatsApp/Meta API access for low-bandwidth delivery
  • Multilingual content (English, Dari, Pashto)
  • External content-development partnerships (e.g. National Geographic Society)
  • Philanthropic grant funding (Patrick J. McGovern Foundation)

Common failure modes

  • No public safeguarding/data-protection policy documented, a transparency gap for a vulnerable population

Where it fits

Governance type
NGO-run emergency education
Scale
multi-country diaspora/remote delivery
Income level
low-income (crisis context)

Commonly funded by

Philanthropic / foundation funding

Indicative funding routes for practices of this type — always check each programme's current calls and eligibility rules.

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Data sources

Where this practice's information was retrieved from, and when.

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