A member of the Afghan parliament is attempting to level the playing field to ensure that female students from the country’s more remote and unstable provinces have the same access to higher education as their urban-educated peers.

Mujeeb u-Rehman Chamkani, an MP for Paktia, a remote, mountainous and unsettled province in southeast Afghanistan, is pressuring the government to implement a policy that will automatically grant extra points to young women from remote provinces writing university entrance examinations. Violence in the more volatile, distant and poor provinces of Afghanistan, especially in the east and south, prevents many children from attending school. Girls are at an even bigger disadvantage because cultural and social norms stop many from attending secondary school.

Last year Dr. Chamkani successfully lobbied Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan’s president, to help Paktia’s young women. Karzai instructed the ministry of higher education to add an extra 20 points to the entrance exam scores of women from remote provinces. His initiative ultimately helped not only young women from Paktia but also from Helmand, Kandahar and Ghazni. Dr. Chamkani is attempting to have the initiative repeated this year.

On January 28, 75 young women from Paktia took university entrance exams along with thousands of male students. “If the ministry of higher education sticks to the standards (for admissions), it is clear girls from Paktia will not get a higher education,” says Dr. Chamkani, insisting he is not asking for anything illegal and that women have a right to education.

However, there has been resistance to the initiative in Afghanistan’s governing council of ministers, mainly because of tribal and ethnic rivalries within the government. As access to education is more difficult in the unsettled Pashtun ‘belt’ of the country, it is mainly Pashtuns who will benefit from the scheme. This is something members of other ethnic groups in the government are unhappy about. “I am trying my best to make them understand that this is in the best interests of all Afghans,” says Dr. Chamkani.

(Excerpted and adapted from Times Higher Education)