After the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in August of 2021, our work on a state-of-the-art building for Sultan Razia Girls Boarding School is paused while we and our partners work through our approach.
Prior to the Taliban takeover, Sahar working closely with the Afghan Ministry of Education, seattle-based architecture firm Miller Hull and the University of Washington School of Built Environment, proposed a solution to help many rural families seeking a safer educational option; adding a boarding school component to an existing school site.
THE VISION
The boarding school will first and foremost increase opportunity for girls from insecure rural areas to go to school. The positive impacts will go well beyond that first level goal and include:
• Giving students a better quality of education.
• Enabling the students to take new ways of thinking and ideas back to their rural communities.
• Decreasing the possibility of early marriage.
• Increasing exposure to arts, culture, agriculture techniques, cooking classes, sports and technology.
• Providing a safe, beautiful, inspiring school environment.
• Increasing the percentage of students going on to college.
• Changing the educational landscape for the rural communities that students come from.
WORKING SITE
Sultan Razia Girls’ School is a well-known school throughout the area. It sits on a very large piece of land in the central part of the city. The school is roughly 407,134 sq ft (37,824 square meters).
This site offers a range of desirable features for a boarding school. The school administration is well known in the province for effectively dealing with cultural barriers that might be issues preventing families in the rural areas from sending their daughters to school. The existing school structure provides infrastructure and budgets for teaching. Open space provides the opportunity to extend the school’s current site.