Girls and young women of Afghanistan older than 11 years have been unable to attend school since the Taliban took over their country. This project aimed to renew their dreams through online education at home. The project was funded with $10,000 from second hand book sales and donations from our club members and the Australian Community Foundation. At the end of the project, we will be eligible for a further grant of $5,000 from the Rotary International Foundation. We appointed six experienced but unemployed teachers to teach classes of 25 in homes in Jalalabad. Classes were soon full and teaching 350 students in their local language Pashto through the year-long project. With our restricted budget, we could not make videos of the classes to put on our website. We are now progressively uploading videos of classes from the internet in all subjects taught in Afghanistan schools on our website, many of which are currently accessible by Afghan students.

As far as we know, this is the only interactive Australian on-line teaching system of its kind designed to help girls and young women in Afghanistan to dream about their future. Challenged by dwindling resources, we innovated by recruiting school-girl volunteers to construct our website; a young IT student with two of her classmates created educationforpeace.online, an interactive on-line system between Afghanistan and Australia which is growing by the week. We also acknowledge the potential of our interactive website to be involved in assessment of Afghan reports from Australia and for selection of new teachers in Afghanistan.

The key to our success has been the teamwork, with four online trainers of teachers in Melbourne, in addition to the six-Afghanistan teachers. These teams were supported by two senior Rotarians of the Rotary Club of Carlton and the Board members who provided administrative and mentorship support.