Global Citizen · 11 hours ago

Pashtana Durrani Won the Global Citizen Prize Three Years Ago. Here’s How She’s Using It to Help Thousands More Access...

Born in a refugee camp and shaped by a family that treated education as non-negotiable, Pashtana Durrani founded LEARN Afghanistan in 2018 as the country's first digital school network - and when the Taliban returned to power three years later, she kept it running underground from exile. Since receiving the Global Citizen Prize in 2023, she has grown that network from 6 schools to 25, reaching students across 85% of the country: "We have scaled up from almost six schools to now almost 25 schools, and the scale of almost 600 students now has scaled up to 4,000 students." What makes her work quietly staggering is not only the numbers but the conditions behind them - classrooms that exist in secret, teachers who show up anyway, and girls who learn at real personal risk. Durrani's vision reaches further still: 34 schools across all 34 Afghan provinces, and a model that could eventually serve children in conflict zones worldwide, sustained by the kind of long-term investment she argues the international community has yet to fully commit to. Her story asks something of the reader, too - not just admiration, but the recognition that attention itself is a form of solidarity, and that forgetting is a choice.