When the world thinks of Afghanistan, it thinks of what has been lost; the country is too often described by what it lacks. Teach For Afghanistan (TAO) was built on a relentless belief that Afghans write a different story for their country through the power of education.

The EU has formally classified Afghanistan among its 2026 forgotten crises. Against this backdrop, the existence and continued growth of Teach For Afghanistan is a story about what it means to choose your country when the world has moved on. 2026 marks 10 years of Teach For Afghanistan’s sustained impact.

Over 10 years, TAO has trained and placed more than 550 Fellows across three provinces. Fifty percent are women. That number matters deeply in a context where 245 out of 412 districts have no qualified female teachers at all. The 170,000 students reached by TAO's network are 70% girls. 

Perhaps one of the most remarkable achievements of TAO is that 79% of alumni are still working in the education sector in Afghanistan, still applying the leadership skills they developed in the classroom during their two-year teaching commitment. Over 90% of TAO’s core team today is alumni, a quiet but powerful testament to the organisation's founding belief that change must grow from within.

As Rahmatullah Arman, CEO and Founder of Teach For Afghanistan, reflects: "We did not build TAO from the outside. We built it from inside Afghan classrooms, with Afghan leaders, for Afghan children. That is the only way lasting change is ever made."

The past decade came with extraordinary and compounding challenges too. TAO navigated political transitions and survived the collapse of international attention, earthquakes, and floods. It has continued operating through chronic funding volatility and the existential pressures that come with running an education organisation in one of the world's most complex crisis contexts. We never stopped.

Ideas Worth Spreading at TEDx Darulaman

That spirit of choosing action over waiting has found a global platform. Three members of the Teach For Afghanistan community have taken the TEDx stage to share what they have learned from building change inside Afghanistan.

In his talk, Rahmatullah Arman challenges the assumption that solutions can simply be imported from one country to another. He makes the case that sustainable change in Afghanistan requires local leadership, cultural understanding, and community ownership. 

TAO alumnus and Provincial Lead, Fawad Saeedi, speaks to something just as fundamental: why we spend so much time waiting for the right moment, better circumstances, or someone else to act, and what it costs.

And in her talk, Teach For Afghanistan's Student Leadership Lead and former TAO student, Rabia Haidari, shares her story of founding the non-profit organisation Education RASA as a youth and argues that the future is not something handed to us but something we shape through courage.

Teach For Afghanistan’s Anniversary Event

On 23 June, we celebrated a decade of resilience at a virtual anniversary event which captured both what has been built throughout the past 10 years and what remains to be done in the years to come. It brought together the TAO community, global partners, and voices from inside Afghanistan.

The event opened with a message from Sana Gul, a TAO student, who shared what learning in her classroom means to her. The centrepiece was a global panel titled Sustaining Education in a Forgotten Crisis, moderated by TAO's Senior Adviser Aishwarya Shetty, and bringing together Katy Noble, Global Head of Education in Emergencies at Teach For All; Faiza Hassan, Director of INEE; Randa Abumudallala, representing Amna; and Habiburrahman Abed, UN Volunteers Country Coordinator for Afghanistan. The panel explored what the sector still fails to understand about Afghanistan and how its victimization serves no one, why wellbeing of teachers and learners cannot be treated as a luxury in protracted crises, and the persistent gap between what matters and what actually gets funded on the ground. The conversation put a clear name to something too rarely said in global policy spaces: Afghan communities have been the “invisible infrastructure” holding education together when formal systems are under strain and they deserve to be recognized.

This year, TAO also did a brand refresh with a new logo and website. A TAO student explained what the new logo means at the event too!

The second panel, moderated by Saeedi, turned the spotlight inward. Three TAO alumni, Ijazulhaq Momand, Bushra Mushfiq, and Elham Mohammadi, spoke about why they chose to teach and what their students, in turn, taught them. Impactful closing remarks were delivered by Asif Foulad, Country Director of Muslim Hands Afghanistan and TAO Board Member.

Support Our Work

The next decade of Teach For Afghanistan depends on the people who believe, as we always have, that Afghan children deserve an excellent education and that its own people should lead the way. We've launched a time-bound anniversary fundraising appeal to support the movement which you can donate to here.