The Center for International Education (CIE) is part of a consortium headed by Management Sciences for Health (MSH) chosen to implement the Assistance for Families & Indigent Afghans to Thrive (AFIAT) in Afghanistan.  The project will be led by Professor Ian Barron as Principal Investigator, and will employ faculty and graduate students on campus to provide technical assistance and remote training for counterparts in Afghanistan. 

This award continues CIE’s involvement in education in Afghanistan through a series of projects during the past 18 years.

This USAID-funded, five-year project will explore innovative and evidence-based approaches to strengthening care seeking, access to and quality of proven health and nutrition interventions. NHTAP will also enhance the resilience and sustainability of the national health system through improved performance and engagement of the public and private health sectors.

CIE’s participation is a consequence of its previous work from 2004-2006 managing the Learning for Life (LfL) project and subsequent work in helping to establish the first School of Public health at Kabul Medical University. The LfL project used an innovative instructional program to assist rural women in twelve provinces to gain literacy and numeracy skills while learning about good health and hygiene practices.  With their new skills, the young women were eligible to apply for mid-wife and other health worker training programs. The complete set of LfL materials is available on UMass Scholarworks HERE.

Under AFIAT UMass will use its experience from LfL to pilot an innovative, accelerated literacy program for women in collaboration with a local learning institution. CIE’s approach will use learning centers where women attend classes for several hours each day. Using nonformal and gender-sensitive pedagogies, local facilitators will guide the women through a series of learning milestones that function as equivalencies to the formal primary school curriculum. The milestones will focus on literacy (listening, speaking, reading and writing), mathematics, and health sciences to prepare the women to take the entrance exam for the Community Midwife Training program. [12-20]