In Afghanistan, many remote areas lack formal primary schools, and the Ministry of Education and the U.S. Government are working together to extend coverage to these underserved villages.  To ensure that all Afghan children have the opportunity to receive an education, USAID’s Partnership for Advancing Community Education in Afghanistan (PACE-A) project establishes community-based primary school classes and trains Afghans to teach them.

Through PACE-A, USAID recently provided training for 108 teacher trainers from 18 provinces in Afghanistan.  The training will improve teachers’ capacity to teach reading to rural students in community classes throughout the country.  The teachers also learned to use math manipulatives, which are toys or tools that physically demonstrate mathematical concepts, to enrich regular math instruction.  USAID will provide follow-up training to more than 2,000 rural teachers in time for the start of the 2010 school year in late March.

“I appreciate the efforts of teacher support working group members in initiating this training to improve the quality of interaction between the students and teachers,” said Nahid, one of the teacher trainers.  “I think these trainings will be even more effective [when] the support group actually visits the schools, observes the teachers, and evaluates teaching performance to achieve better results in student performance,” she added.