PESHAWAR: The United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) has announced ‘emergency support’ for government school teachers in Afghanistan with aim to keep educating school-going boys and girls.
The UNIFCEF said that teachers’ salaries will be paid from EU funding, which is equivalent to $100 per teacher. UNICEF’s initiative will benefit 194,000 teachers across Afghanistan who have not received their salaries for the past six months. UNICEF said in a statement that the move was in recognition of the role teachers are playing in educating millions children in Afghanistan’s public schools.
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Mohamed Ayoya, UNICEF’s Representative for Afghanistan, said: “We are happy to provide emergency assistance to those teachers in Afghanistan’s public schools who have been struggling for months without salaries.” Ayoya said UNICEF will need an additional $250 million to continue its support of public school teachers and called on donors to make emergency donations to the fund.
Following the control of Taliban on Kabul in mid-August, the Taliban have now allowed women to resume work in health and education sectors, and have opened public and private universities to women, while girls from secondary schools in 34 provinces have also been reopened due to international pressure.
The Taliban have promised to open schools for all girls by the end of March, saying that delay in opening educational institutions are due to financial difficulties. They have made it clear that female students will be able to resume their classes in accordance with Islamic Sharia law.
Aid agencies say the need for humanitarian aid has increased in war-torn Afghanistan since the Taliban took power and US-led international forces withdrew from the country. The United States and other Western nations have banned all forms of funding for Afghanistan, except for humanitarian aid. Similarly, the international sanctions have also brought Afghanistan’s fragile economy on the brink of collapse and exacerbated the humanitarian crisis caused by years of war and natural disasters.
The United Nations has warned that some 23 million people in Afghanistan, or 55% of the population of this impoverished country, are suffering from severe hunger, with nine million people just one step away from the famine situation.