Nuristan Education Initiative Donate

The valley you're born in should not determine your access to higher education.

Children in Nuristan begin school in a language they don't speak at home, and reach Afghanistan's national university exam without the teaching students in the cities take for granted. We work to close that gap — teaching after school in the village, and preparing its strongest students for the exam in Kabul.

Map of Nuristan province in northeastern Afghanistan, showing its eight districts, their river valleys and the sparse road network, with the provincial capital Parun and each district centre marked. An inset locates the province within Afghanistan.
Nuristan province — its eight districts, river valleys and roads, with the provincial capital Parun marked. Source: OCHA COD-AB; roads and waterways from OpenStreetMap.
The barrier

A national exam, a remote province, and a language gap from the first day of school.

In Afghanistan, university begins with a single exam. The Kankor decides who wins a public university place — and students in Nuristan reach it carrying a disadvantage they did nothing to earn.

That is the geography a student is born into: a province the size of a small country, served by a road network that is almost entirely unsurfaced and carries no route classified above a secondary road. Its schools run short of teachers, short of sound buildings, and through long, hard winters.

And every lesson and every textbook arrives in Dari or Pashto — languages Nuristani children do not speak at home. They learn to read in a language that isn't theirs, and the gap that opens on the first day of school is still there years later, in the exam hall that decides everything.

The province

9,579 km²
The province, by area — across eight districts
94 km
Of road and track per 1,000 km²

Roads and tracks

901 km of road and track. 6.9 km of it paved.

6.9 km paved — 0.77% 901 km mapped

Asphalt 5.8 km plus concrete 1.1 km. 201 km — 22% of the network — carries no surface tag at all, so this is a floor, not a census.

Road classification

No route in the province is classified above secondary.

The three empty rungs are the finding. Tertiary roads carry half the network.

Higher education

166 accredited institutions in Afghanistan. One of them is here.

39 public and 127 private. The one in Nuristan teaches two subjects — its own site lists faculties of Sharia and Education, and no postgraduate provision.

Every figure above is sourced, dated and reproducible — see figures and sources.

Our work

Two connected programs, one pathway.

We teach in the village through the hours the school day does not reach, and take the strongest of those students to Kabul for preparation no institution in the province can offer.

In the village

After-school teaching in the core Kankor subjects, running since 2023.

In Kabul

A selected cohort in residence for six to nine months of intensive preparation.

Held to three rules

Exam-focused academics, community ownership, and evidence with safeguarding.

Both running today

Tested with private funding before the work became a nonprofit.

See how both programs work

Safeguarding

Why you won't see students' faces on this site.

Afghanistan is the only country in the world that broadly bars girls and women from secondary and higher education. That prohibition is the reason the Initiative does not operate a program for girls: our programs serve boys in middle and high school.

Everything else about how this site is written follows from the same caution. The illustrations stand in for photographs we will not publish, and no reporting we produce carries a name, a face, or anything that could identify a child.

Where we're headed

Goals we can be held to.

We publish only the targets our board has approved and our monitoring can stand behind. The full monitoring framework is on the Accountability page.

2026–2027

In our first full year, we will keep the Initiative's California registration current and file its first annual return with the IRS, put standardized testing and aggregate attendance reporting in place, sustain the Kabul Bridge Cohort through a complete preparation cycle, and begin growing village teaching from its current baseline toward a full four-teacher staff as funding allows.

The three-year horizon

Within three years, we want steady village enrollment with retention tracked year over year, an honest participant-versus-non-participant comparison where it is ethically sound to make one, and Kankor results we can follow — with a plain, stated target of at least five university admissions a year. We will expand only where safeguarding and local permission hold.

Get involved

Ways to help.

The budget is small. The leverage is not — every kind of support has a clear, specific use.

  • Give directly Our donation platform charges the Initiative no platform fee and no processing fee, so 100% of your gift reaches us with nothing deducted in transit. Make a gift
  • Introduce a funder Workplace matching, donor-advised funds, and family foundations can multiply a single gift. See giving options
  • Share the work Help people understand the barrier itself — the distance, the language, the exam — not only the fundraising ask. Read the impact summary

Every barrier can be overcome.

Open the pathway for one more student.

A gift pays for teaching hours, examination preparation and the welfare that keeps a student in the room — and for the governance that makes every figure on this page checkable.

Donate securely See where it goes