We are relieved and delighted to learn of the release of our colleague Mortaza Behboudi, a French-Afghan journalist, this Wednesday, October 18, 2023, after 284 days of detention by the Taliban. He has been acquitted by the Afghan judiciary of all offences, including espionage, 'illegal support for foreigners' and aiding the crossing of borders to foreign countries, explains the NGO Reporters Without Borders.
Because it's vital for us to guarantee access to education, information (including public health information) and entertainment for all women and girls in the country, we continue to expand our radio coverage. In September, we opened four new stations in the provinces of Farah, Khost, Nangarhar and Badakhsha.
To provide more local news and give a voice to women living in the most remote areas, we have trained and recruited four new correspondents: Marzia in Herat province, Najma in Bamiyan province, Zahra in Balkh (Mazar) province, and Sara in Nangarhar province.
To keep pace with listeners' expectations and needs, Radio Begum is evolving its programming. In view of the popularity of our “Rah-e-Khoshbakhti” psychotherapy program, which also reflects the alarming deterioration in the mental health of Afghan women, we have doubled the duration of this program, devoting two hours to it during peak listening hours. Every day, during the morning show, female listeners can call a toll-free number to ask psychotherapy counsellors for support and advice, and pass this on to other listeners.
To further our educational mission, i.e. to reach more women and girls than through radio, and to teach science subjects that require visual content, we embarked on an extraordinary challenge: to record the entire middle and high school curriculum in Dari and Pashto in video capsules, with the utmost discretion. In less than 6 months, nearly 8,500 videos were recorded to feed a digital education platform, the Begum Academy, which will be launched in November. It will enable all girls who wish to do so to follow the official school curriculum.
Thanks to video, we can now offer the teaching of scientific subjects.
More than 25 editors worked tirelessly to edit the video vignettes
We would like to thank our teams in Kabul for their commitment and outstanding work. These operations were led by the Paris office, and implemented by the Begum girls in Kabul with an enthusiasm and commitment that commands respect, especially given the situation.
Thanks to these knowledge warriors, Begum is fulfilling its mission of relentlessly defending, supporting and promoting Afghan women.
Our most regular listener is Fatima, a 16-year-old girl, blind from birth, who calls the station every day.
Fatima lives in a village near the town of Bamyan and has never had the opportunity to go to school because of her disability. She told us that her life took an extraordinary turn when she first listened to the lessons broadcast by Radio Begum on a radio that her brother (also blind) had given her. In her own words, Fatima “found herself transported to classrooms she'd never been in before, where passionate teachers brought to life subjects she'd never been able to study: history, Dari, English, Pashto and biology”.
In the evenings, she gathers her friends and reviews the day's lessons, sparking discussions, feeding their curiosity and dreaming of going back to school.
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