May 2025
AYLA Project Report — General Overview & Duolingo Initiative
Programme-wide overview, objectives, coupon initiative results and acknowledged sponsors.
Challenges & opportunities
What stands between an Afghan girl and an education
Four barriers, and four things that work anyway. This page describes only what AYLA can evidence from its own programme — where an external statistic belongs, we have left a gap rather than filled it with a guess.
The situation Afghan girls are in
Since 2021, most universities, schools and learning centres in Afghanistan have been closed to girls and young women. A generation that was in secondary school when the restrictions came in has now spent years out of formal education, with no official route back.
AYLA's response was not to campaign and wait. It was to move the classroom somewhere the ban could not reach: a live video call, on a phone, at home. That works — but only for as long as someone funds the data and someone volunteers to teach.
The students in these classes are not a hypothetical cohort. They are in Kabul, Herat, Balkh, Ghor, Bamyan and eight other provinces, and some have been displaced into Pakistan. They log in from shared phones, through power cuts, in households where a girl studying is itself a decision someone had to make.
The barriers
Four things that stop a student, in the order they actually stop her
- Political
Formal education is closed
Secondary schools and universities are not available to girls. Certificates, transcripts and exam sittings that international applications assume exist are often unobtainable — which blocks students long before an admissions committee ever sees them.
- Economic
Test fees and data cost more than families have
An English proficiency test fee can exceed a month of household income. So can a year of mobile data. Both are prerequisites for applying abroad, and neither is negotiable — which is why AYLA treats coupons and internet packages as core programme costs rather than extras.
- Social
Studying can require permission and cost safety
For many students, attending a class is a household negotiation and, in some places, a risk. Classes are delivered remotely and student identities are protected for that reason — nothing on this site names a current student inside Afghanistan without her consent.
- Technical
Connectivity decides attendance
In AYLA's own course evaluations, the barrier students named most often was technical and time constraints — not the difficulty of the material. Power cuts, shared devices and unreliable networks are the practical reason a girl misses a lesson.
Opportunities for change
Why remote teaching works when almost nothing else does
None of this fixes the underlying situation. All of it keeps a specific student in education while the situation lasts.
- 1
Remote teaching scales past the ban
One volunteer teacher with an internet connection can reach a class of thirty students across six provinces. AYLA has run eleven such classes simultaneously.
- 2
At-home English testing exists
The Duolingo English Test can be taken at home on a laptop. A donated coupon converts directly into a certified score an international university will accept.
- 3
Afghan alumnae are the workforce
Students who finish a course become moderators, then teachers. The programme's capacity grows from inside rather than depending on outside recruitment.
- 4
Remote work is a real income route
Graphic design and digital skills are among the few forms of paid work available to women who cannot leave the house for a job. Training in them is economic policy, not just curriculum.
Statistics & reports
Our evidence base, and its limits
AYLA publishes a full report at the end of every round. Those reports are the source for every figure on this website.
August 2023
AYLA Online Courses Final Report — Round 5
Class-by-class detail, attendance, agreement letters, course evaluations, feedback and expenditure for Round 5.
What this page deliberately does not claim
You will not find a national literacy rate or an out-of-school headcount here. Those figures matter, but AYLA has not collected them and a charity website is the wrong place to invent them. The organisation reports on the students it teaches, and nothing wider.
Change one of these
Every barrier on this page has a price tag.
A test fee. A month of data. A weekly teaching slot. AYLA cannot reopen a university, but it can get a student past the specific obstacle in front of her.