After Return

8. Education and training
Case study 4: Sajid
Having managed to gain his year 12 certificate a few months after his return to Afghanistan,
Sajid, who had studied ESOL in the UK, wanted to apply to a university in Kabul to study
computers and English. He travelled to Kabul to visit two private universities there, hoping that
he would be able to secure a loan and use “the small amount of money I have” (R13, IM6) to
pay for a course.
Sajid is one of only two young people who managed to make progress in his education on
return, thanks to the assistance of his brother, who had been providing him with housing and
support. One university “promised to let me know when the entry exam was due” (R13, IFI)
but did not do so with enough time for Sajid to travel to Kabul to sit it. This meant that he “lost
the opportunity to continue my education in this semester” (ibid.).
In his final interview, Sajid, despite “doing all my efforts to continue my education” had not
yet managed to enrol in university. He said “if I could not continue my studies for any reason
then the only option I will have is to get out of Afghanistan and find somewhere safer” (R13,
IM9).
between continuing their education and eating,
with one young returnee saying “if I go to school
how can I work? If I don’t work then how can I
manage for food?” (R01, ILD), and another saying
“you cannot study well with an empty stomach”
(R16, IM9). For others, the need to work to survive
simply left them with no time for education. One
young person initially told us he was unable to
continue studying because he was spending all his
time looking for work, and then, several months later,
when he had found some temporary work, that “I
want to continue studying IT, or pharmacy, but I
don’t have any time because I have to work in the
perfume shop to survive” (R04, ILD). At the point of
having been back in Afghanistan for four months,
another young returnee confirmed that “if you are
working, you don’t have time to do education. But,
if you want to do education, it is impossible without
money” (R24, IM3).
For the young people who had managed to find
family after returning to Afghanistan, pursuing their
studies was not necessarily easier. In fact, having to
support family members was named as a concrete
barrier to education by four young returnees, who
talked about not being able to study as a result of
pressure to find work to “run the family” (R17, ILD),
“feed my family” (R20, IM6), “help my family and pay
the money I had borrowed to get to the UK” (R09,
IM1) and “get a little money and support the family”
(R25, ILD).
Gaps in previous education
For eight of the young returnees, gaps in their
previous education were cited as key barriers to
continuing their studies.
For the vast majority of the returnees, who left
Afghanistan before completing their secondary
education (see Figure 22), not having an Afghan
school leavers’ certificate has prevented them
from enrolling in higher levels of education -
despite having studied to a comparable or higher
level in the UK. Several months after returning to
Afghanistan, one returnee told us that “without that
[Year 12] certificate, I can’t do anything” (R01, ILD),
and other young people explained that they had
repeatedly attempted to enrol in school in order
to complete Year 12 and gain the school leavers’
certificate, only to discover that not having the
Year 11 certificate was a barrier to entry into the
Year 12 course. After more than six months of being
back in Afghanistan, only two of the young people
monitored had managed to enrol on a Year 12
course and were in the process of studying for their
school leavers’ certificate.
Other young returnees were unable to continue
their studies in Afghanistan as a result of low level
mother-tongue literacy levels. The 2015 youth literacy
rate (for 15 - 24 year olds) in Afghanistan is 61.9% for
males and 32.1% for females. 54 In contrast, only nine
of the young returnees monitored for this report were
literate in their mother tongue. One young returnee
who had completed Diploma level studies in the
UK talked of how he was prevented from entering
university in Kabul because of his “problems with
Dari and Pashto writing” (R23, SI1), and almost all of
the young people who had not completed primary
school before leaving Afghanistan mentioned
not being able to read or write in Dari or Pashto
as a barrier to continued learning (and indeed to
broader functioning in society). One young person
told us that, like many young returnees, he had
never fully mastered writing in English, and that
now, because he had “no reading English really, no
reading Pashto” it was not only “too late for me to
go to school here because I am a man”, but that
in addition “when you can’t read you sign all these
forms and you don’t know what” (R20, ILD).
54 UNICEF. 2015.
After Return 35