Afghan teachers and students are stuck with shoddy textbooks riddled with factual and typographical errors. Credit: Najibullah Musafer/Killid

By Kreshma Fakhri
KABUL, Dec 11 2012 (IPS)

New textbooks, printed as part of an ambitious multi-million dollar exercise to reform the curriculum in Afghan public schools, have been found to contain glaring mistakes, adding yet another burden on a cash- and resource-strapped sector of this war-torn country.

The ministry of education forked out 91 million dollars for the printing of new textbooks as part of a planned massive overhaul of the public education system in Afghanistan. The authors were paid handsomely to ensure the books were of the highest quality.

Instead, teachers and students have been saddled with barely legible study guides and are struggling to make sense of textbooks that are riddled with both typographic and factual errors.

Civil society and some parliament members have placed the blame on “nonchalance and corruption in the ministry of education”. Unrepentant, the latter has assured the public the mistakes will be rectified.

Farooq Nekbin, a teacher in Habibia High School in the capital, Kabul, said there are “many scientific and factual mistakes” in the new textbooks. For instance, he pointed out that the invention of the microscope has been dated differently in the textbooks for 10^th, 11^th and 12^th-grade students.

A teacher of mathematics at the same school, who did not want to be identified, said, “The figure for the newton, the SI unit of force – shown on page 40 of the class 11 textbook – is completely wrong.”

Nadera Saeedi, head of the mathematics department at Rukhshana High School in Kabul, was of the opinion that the authors recruited to draft the new texts simply plagiarised the content, despite having been being sponsored by the Education Ministry to travel to Iran, Turkey and Jordan to study textbook writing.

“The text of the books has been copied from other countries’ books,” she said. “They are very difficult (to understand); nobody can solve the exercises.”

One of the physics teachers at Rukhshana high school said she found 15 mistakes in the first 15 pages of the new physics textbook for 11^th-grade students. Even the illustrations contained errors, she said.

Furthermore, the books have been organised illogically, with no concept of the education levels in Afghanistan.

Teachers are now struggling to make sense of the new curriculum.

This oversight could have particularly destructive consequences in Afghanistan, where the literacy rate was a miserable 30 percent in 2010.

As one of the world’s least developed countries (LDCs), Afghanistan has fought hard to make progress towards the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of providing universal access to education by 2015.

This latest holdup in the public education sector could set Afghanistan back several years in meeting the internationally determined target.

Official indifference

Though Education Ministry officials have not denied the problem outright, they have offered a different explanation for the mistakes.

According to Abdul Zaher Gulistani, director-general of curriculum development and compiling of textbooks, “We accept the existence of the mistakes but these mistakes cannot be used to question the content of the textbooks.”

His deputy director, Asadullah Muhaqiq, said the mistakes would be rectified in the next edition of the textbooks.

Sediq Patman, deputy minister for academic affairs at the Education Ministry, insisted there would have been no mistakes if the authors had approved the proofs. But this was not possible since “the books were not printed in our printing houses but outside the country”.

But Khalil Ahmad Shahed Zada, a member of parliament from the western Herat province and a member of the parliamentary cultural commission, blamed the shoddy production on the “nonchalance of the authorities”.

“If the mistakes happened during the printing it was because of lack of supervision,” he said, adding that Afghan schoolchildren should have got the best of books because “we (paid) the money to have the best”.

“Even the books that are available in the bazaar have so many mistakes.”

He joined others in lamenting the fact that neither the parliamentary commission nor local schoolteachers were consulted about the design, content or production of the new textbooks and curriculum.

The head of literature in one of Kabul’s most famous schools said the ministry of education only sought teachers’ views on the quality of the books after they had already been printed.

“They (the Education Ministry) should have invited experienced teachers to contribute before the curriculum was finalised,” he said. “What is the use of giving our views when everything is done?”

External specialists

The project for curriculum reform in Afghan schools began in 2002 and has since absorbed millions of dollars, including a tenth of UNICEF’s total budget for Afghanistan in the last three years, according to Aziz Froutan, a UNICEF spokesperson.

Officials in the Education Ministry and the Educational Curriculum Development Directorate said the costs kept mounting due to delays, the hiring of external specialists, and exorbitant production expenses.

Ministry officials said roughly 400 people have worked on curriculum development since the project’s inception. According to Gulistani, half of them were external advisors, mainly Afghans based abroad, whose wages were paid with assistance from the World Bank.

“Each advisor worked with us for one year, and left. Only 40 of them are still working with us,” he said.

Not unexpectedly there has been considerable dispute over the disparity of salaries between external experts and locals. Even Gul Ahmad Saghari, head author of the textbook project, has complaints.

He told Killid the Afghans based abroad “worked with us for exorbitant salaries … we worked for small salaries, sitting up all night to improve the books.”

And meanwhile, far away from the political wrangling, Afghan school children are muddling along as best they can with flawed textbooks.

*Kreshma Fakhri writes for Killid, an independent Afghan media group in partnership with IPS.

The Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) estimates a 22 percent increase in cases of violence against women. Marius Arnesen/CC-BY-SA-2.0

By Kreshma Fakhri
KABUL, Dec 5 2012 (IPS)

Afghan women are no strangers to gender-based violence. For decades now, violent crimes against women have been heading for epic proportions, as young girls are forced into marriage, wives and daughters are abused, and women are dealt harsh punishments for ‘moral crimes’.

Now, officials and rights groups have noticed an alarming surge in these incidents, with crimes against women becoming more frequent – and more savage.

The Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) estimates a 22 percent increase in cases of violence against women during the last six months of 2012 compared to the same period the previous year.

On Oct. 12, three people were arrested for the murder of a woman named Mah Gul at her home in Shalbafan village in the Injil district of Afghanistan’s northwestern Herat province. The woman’s head had been cut off.

The police arrested her husband and in-laws following a claim by the dead woman’s brother – who took Gul’s body to the office of the Women’s Affairs Department in Herat City – that the family murdered her.

Mahboba Jamshidi, head of the Women’s Affairs Department, confirmed that Abdul Qader, Gul’s brother, had indeed been the one to bring in the body.

“We saw (Gul’s) jugular vein had been slashed. She died due to excessive bleeding,” Jamshidi told Killid.

The case was then handed over to the office of the Attorney General (AG), and the arrests were made.

Mah Gul’s family says their daughter was killed because she resisted her mother-in-law’s attempts to push her into sex work.

This story deserves to be categorised as an unprecedentedly horrific crime, but in fact it is just one example of an increasingly common phenomenon in Afghanistan.

A few months ago, a 20-year-old named Kulsoom, who resisted her abusive husband’s attempt to sell their daughter for money, was brutally murdered by him in her father’s house.

According to Jamshidi, “Kulsoom was against the practice of forced marriages, and had run away with her children to her father’s house. Her husband Anwar followed her there, and killed her.”

Family jail

Last month newspapers reported the release of a woman, also named Kulsoom, who had been forcibly detained in a “family jail” – a makeshift holding cell in part of an old stable – in Kasho Village in the Teshkan district of Afghanistan’s northeastern Badakhshan province.

Kulsoom said her husband, who was already married, was a very cruel man who kept her imprisoned; she was sexually abused and tortured.

“They (Kulsoom’s husband and his first wife) kept me in a dark room and beat me,” the woman told the media from her hospital bed, where she was shifted after being rescued by the police.

Assistant Professor Zofanoon Hassam, head of the provincial Women’s Affairs Department, said Kulsoom – who was pregnant when she was rescued – delivered a severely undernourished baby after being admitted to the hospital.

Sahar Gul from Darayem district was sold through marriage to a man from the northeastern Baghlan province. Her mother-in-law forced her into prostitution. Earlier this year the police rescued her.

On Jun. 27, armed men beheaded a 13-year-old girl called Shazia for resisting their attempt to kidnap her. Police have made three arrests in the case.

Lack of security

AIHRC Commissioner for Human Rights Dr. Soraya Sobhrang said the majority of fatalities involving women who resisted their captors took place in the country’s less “secure” provinces.

Moreover, she told Killid, “The commission is particularly concerned about the fact that in 80 percent of cases of sexual assault the survivors are teenage girls, under 18 years old.”

Meanwhile, the ministry of women’s affairs says a total of 471 cases of violence against women were registered in 2012. Most of the victims had resorted to suicide or self-immolation, or else run away from the house to escape brutal domestic violence.

Fawzia Amini, director of the legal department at the ministry of women’s affairs, said, “Unfortunately we have seen that more than 50 percent of the cases involve murder, (suicide), self-burning and hanging, as a result of family violence. The violence is more severe than in previous years.”

Parwin Rahimi, in charge of the Women’s Support Department at the AIHRC, believes a lack of security is the leading cause of the rise in violence.

“When everyone has a weapon, and the criminals are being supported by powerful, armed people or a commander, the numbers (of crimes against women) will keep increasing,” she said.

Rahimi added that though the law very clearly states that punishment for perpetrators of crimes against women will be most severe and there will be no amnesty or shortening of their jail terms, politically-connected assailants use Afghan courts to secure amnesty and light sentences.

“We have seen that many criminals who have committed crimes against women are released by (presidential) decree. The lack of law enforcement (is a major reason) for the increase in violence against women.”

The AG’s office stoutly defends its track record. Rahmatullah Nazari, deputy AG, says his office has investigated cases that rights groups were not even aware of.

On Nov. 19, Afghan President Hamid Karzai backtracked on an informal moratorium on the death penalty and signed the final execution warrants of 16 Afghan prisoners convicted of crimes including rape, murder and abduction. The prisoners were hanged.

*Kreshma Fakhri writes for Killid, an independent Afghan media group in partnership with IPS.