Member News
By Martin Davidson - 20th July 2010
The British Council in Kabul moved to its current office in Kart-e-Parwan in 2004, from a Portakabin in the grounds of the British Embassy.
But, as I was to see first-hand, so much of our work in Afghanistan takes place outside the converted houses in which we’re based - in the classrooms we link with schools in the UK, or over the airwaves as we teach English to thousands via the radio.
The country presents our organisation with no end of challenges – security and divided opinion of the UK being just two. But with such challenges come great opportunities to make a real contribution to Afghanistan’s cultural landscape and, in doing so, build trust for the UK.
I met Chancellor Amin of Kabul University - who had just returned from receiving an honorary doctorate from the hands of Bill Bryson, his counterpart at Durham University. Walking through the campus, Professor Amin told me how the university has had to be rebuilt from scratch, after years of fighting and the looting and neglect of the Taleban years. His own office had been used as a communal lavatory.
We talked about the need to provide at least a Masters degree for the vast majority of academic staff – who, in many cases, are only a year or so ahead of their students. He also spoke of his ambition to build a university for teaching - but also with a research capability – which, above all, will be taken seriously by the global education community.
Then, at the British Council's English language self-access centre inside a faculty building, 20 Afghan English language teachers were taking part in a two-day training programme - part of an initiative to give teacher trainers the skills they need to work with the thousands of English teachers around Afghanistan.
Overall, having also met ministers of education, I was left with the strong impression of enormous commitment to improving the education systems in Afghanistan, and a lot of money from donors is going into supporting this. But - and it is a big but – there is a fear that it is all too slow, when set against a school-leaving population rising from around 500,000 a year to over 1 million in the next 4 years.
Later, I met Shoshana Coburn of the Turquoise Mountain Institute - and she and Tony Jones, country director for the British Council in Afghanistan, signed a Memorandum of Understanding on cooperation in contemporary arts and design for the future. What a fantastic institution - taking masters of fast-disappearing Afghan crafts and helping them stay alive by teaching a new generation. It also gives them the means of making a living out of their art.
Afghanistan is, without doubt, one of the most difficult places we're working in.
And what we do there is difficult: it's about building a relationship which will last after the soldiers and donors have gone.
Martin Davidson is the chief executive of the British Council.
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