WADAN’s Quiet Defiance: Building Opportunity for Afghan Women
by Bella Pich Since the Taliban returned to power, reaching Afghan women with education and opportunity has never been harder. CAI’s partnership with WADAN, a local Afghan organization, makes it possible. It is easy to believe that the unimaginable happens somewhere else. For many of us, the idea of losing the right to attend school, […]
Teaching Against the Odds: The Hidden Heroes of Pakistan’s Classrooms
by Emilie Saunders Eleven thousand feet up in the Karakoram Mountain Range of Gilgit-Baltistan (GB), there is a village called Dapa. Snow closes it off for months at a time. The families who live there survive on agriculture and livestock. There is one small school available for girls. In another remote village, Malpan Sadpara, also […]
The Economics of Exclusion
What It Costs the World When Women & Girls Are Denied the Chance to Learn & Earn by Emilie Saunders The cow arrived in the autumn of 2025. By any conventional measure, it was a modest investment: one dairy cow and her calf, delivered to a farming family in Farhad, a remote village tucked high […]
Once You Teach a Child to Read
Why the first years of learning matter most — and how Central Asia Institute’s new Director of International Programs is putting them at the center of everything we do by Alice Thomas In the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan, geography has long been destiny. Villages scattered across the Karakoram and Hindu Kush ranges are cut […]