From July to October 2009, Afghanistan’s USAID-supported National Program for In-Service Teacher Training trained 15,000 Afghan educators in humanities subjects for grades seven to nine. This training, which took place in 11 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces, is crucial to improving the quality of teaching in Afghanistan, as many teachers lack standard teaching qualifications. It improves teachers’ skills in subjects such as geography, history, Islamic studies, Dari, Pashto, and English, and enables educators to teach in more a participatory way using student-centered techniques.
Significantly, 27 percent of those who completed the training were female. Under the Taliban, women were forbidden such opportunities, and USAID’s training provided a leap forward in their capacity to educate the next generation of Afghans. Miss Bilqis, a Pashto-language teacher from Khost province, noted, “Since I completed the in-service teacher training, I can claim that my teaching has strongly improved and my students can learn the lessons much faster than before.”