Afghanistan · Kabul · See the Afghanistan profile
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.
Since the Taliban barred girls from secondary education in 2021, formal schooling has been almost entirely unavailable to Afghan girls inside the country. SOLA (School of Leadership, Afghanistan), founded in Kabul in 2016 by Shabana Basij-Rasikh, relocated its boarding school abroad but built SOLAx to reach girls who could not leave.
SOLAx is a WhatsApp-based academy offering instruction in English, Dari and Pashto. Generative AI is used to digitize the Afghan curriculum and disseminate it, starting with 8 ESL and 3 storytelling courses and now a 7th-grade curriculum of 9 courses, with an 8th-grade curriculum in development toward an eventual grades 7-12 offering; the founders plan a future AI 'digital helper' for personalised student support.
The Patrick J. McGovern Foundation gave SOLA a $200,000 restricted grant as part of its $73.5 million 'AI for Humanity' commitment. SOLAx reports reaching 20,000+ students in 75+ countries with a presence in every Afghan province. Its founders are explicit that 'SOLAx is not a replacement for, or an equivalent to, in-person, in-classroom education' — it is an emergency stopgap, and no independent evaluation of learning outcomes has been published.
Read the full analysis: https://www.sola-afghanistan.org/introducing-solax
Implementation detail (cost, timeline, staffing, conditions for success) is not yet available for this practice.
Do you run this practice? Claim it — verified implementers get a public contact pathway and can propose corrections.
Where this practice's information was retrieved from, and when.
South Africa
University of Pretoria and the hearX Foundation's free AI WhatsApp chatbot trains teachers to spot childhood hearing loss; 12,000+ South …
Fiji
A peer-reviewed Fiji Ministry of Education study combined child-functioning survey data with learning-support-needs data in a rule-based algorithm that more …
Sudan
A solar-powered tablet game teaches literacy and numeracy to out-of-school children in conflict-affected Sudan. A 2020 peer-reviewed study found significantly …
Mozambique
Since 2021, Instant Network Schools has expanded from one refugee settlement to 15+ Kolibri-powered offline learning centres across Nampula Province, …
Open full copilot Grounded in cited practices — always check the sources.