In 2002, when Matiullah Wesa was a teenager, armed gunmen burned his school. It was this, he told openDemocracy, that led him to dedicate his life to ensuring other children in Afghanistan can get an education.
Wesa is the co-founder and president of PenPath, an NGO that works to reopen closed schools in the country’s rural areas – from the Spin Boldak district in Kandahar to Helmand province – and has so far educated more than 115,000 children.
Today, PenPath has 2,400 volunteers, including six women who give secret classes to secondary school-aged girls. Despite multiple assurances made by the Taliban at international forums, teenage girls are still banned from classrooms in Afghanistan, nine months on from the group’s takeover of Kabul.
