Afghan Female Student Outreach (AFSO) is a volunteer non-profit organization committed to helping return Afghan women to intellectual and professional life by way of real-time, synchronous distance learning in the liberal arts and sciences, engineering, and health sciences, taught by university professors throughout North America and Europe. We aim to educate university women at all levels, especially students who seek an academic bridge between their current situation and eventual enrollment in a degree-granting institution online or outside Afghanistan. Our immediate goal is to re-engage women at all university levels in the academic and professional learning from which they have been barred in Afghanistan. Our long-term goal is to help educate the future leaders of Afghanistan, who will have the education and experience they need to help restore their country, and especially its women, if and when the regime changes.
Afghan Female Student Outreach (AFSO) was founded in Spring 2023 to address the emergency among Afghan university women who have been expelled from their undergraduate and graduate or professional programs. To alleviate widespread depression and desperation and begin preparing these women to take on positions of responsibility if and when Afghanistan’s government changes, ten professors from four universities in Connecticut developed a pilot program of non-credit university-level seminars and TESOL classes with a set of criteria: that students be recruited from across Afghanistan; that all instructors be college professors; that all classes be taught synchronously rather than as prerecorded lectures; that we accept all qualified students regardless of their level of English ability; and that we take all measures to safeguard the security and confidentiality of these young women. As of Fall 2023, we now have an executive director, an advisory board, and 15 professors on three continents teaching more than 100 university women, with a curriculum aimed at launching our students on their journey toward completing their education outside Afghanistan.
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