The Last Place in the World Where Afghan Girls Can Go to Learn

As they drove away from Kabul, Sinah tried not to think about what would happen if police stopped their car. The cool fall weather turned to dry heat as they crossed the rugged provinces separating the capital of Afghanistan from the southern border with Pakistan. She rode with her sister, two little brothers, her mother, another young family, and, in the driver’s seat, a man who never spoke—their smuggler. Women were no longer allowed to travel without male relatives in Afghanistan, and if they were caught attempting to escape, the Taliban’s punishment would be harsh.

Sinah was 14 when the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan and barred girls her age from school. For a student who had been first in her class, excelled in biology, and dreamed of becoming a doctor, Sinah’s hopes of a high school diploma and a university education were slipping away. She was lucky that her parents believed in education. Her mother had a high school diploma; her father a university degree in journalism. They decided Sinah and her sister would go to Pakistan, where it was safer to study. With her long dark hair, gentle smile, and soft demeanor, Sinah didn’t give the impression of a rule breaker, but she saw no other choice.

The family couldn’t afford a visa, so they hired a smuggler and crossed Afghanistan by car, heading south from Kabul to Kandahar. Around midway, as they drove through the high plateaus of Ghazni province, Sinah noticed there were no women on the streets—they had all but disappeared from public life. She was keeping a diary of the trip on her phone, and she typed a short poem about oppression, ignorance, and how unfair it all was.

Despite Sinah’s fears, their car moved unimpeded. By evening, they neared the border of Pakistan. At the edge of a sandy expanse, they got out. A group of around 40 other Afghan refugees was already waiting.

They listened for the sound of cars—Taliban or Pakistani border authorities—but all was quiet. Sinah looked at the mountains separating her from Pakistan and thought the distance felt insurmountable. With each step, she sank into the sand. She grabbed her family’s hands and they began to run.

When they reached the mountain, they started climbing. In the early hours of the morning, 10 hours after they’d set off, they hit a border fence. The smuggler clipped a hole, and one by one they slipped through. Sinah feared authorities might be waiting on the other side, but no one was there. An hour later, cold and exhausted, they were picked up by a truck and taken to the nearest city, where they transferred into a car and began the 17-hour drive to Karachi. When Sinah’s worst fears were realized and a police officer stopped their vehicle, the driver slipped him a little money and they went on their way.

In the country she’d just left behind, Sinah was one of an estimated 2.2 million girls out of school. Banning girls’ education was among the first decrees the Taliban made after it overthrew the Afghan government in 2021, declaring that such schooling violated both Islamic law and Afghan cultural mores. At first, the education minister claimed access to secondary schools and universities would be reinstated after “technical issues”—such as dress codes and curriculum—were resolved. That was years ago; today, girls are still barred from school.

But secretly, many take great risks to continue their education, even as the Taliban’s grip grows stronger and the world’s attention moves on. The remaining options are dangerous or ineffective: The Taliban frequently raids underground schools and illegal tutoring centers, beating and arresting students and teachers. Online courses are often blocked by internet shutdowns. Inside Afghanistan, with no prospects for their daughters’ futures, families are desperate. Those who can leave have become refugees in neighboring countries. And a lucky few have found their way to the only school in the world designed just for them—hidden away in a former hotel on a different continent some 3,500 miles away.

On the leafy outskirts of a large African city is a compound of low-slung buildings where girls in long blue dresses scamper to and from classes. This isn’t a stuffy boarding school in London or Geneva, and the classrooms are not filled with the children of politicians and CEOs. This is the world’s only boarding school for Afghan girls, and it sits in the heart of East Africa. The School of Leadership, Afghanistan, or SOLA, first relocated to the residential neighborhood of Kigali, Rwanda, amid the violence that consumed Afghanistan in 2021. For the past five years, it has operated in exile—the same status held by its students and much of its staff. Students live and attend classes in a cluster of three-story stucco buildings encircling a lush courtyard and swimming pool. The cafeteria’s banquette seating and a faded roadside sign are the only clues that this was once a hotel. Neighbors strolling past the tall walls and iron gates on their way to work or school are likely unaware of the extraordinary experiment taking place within.

In some ways, SOLA is a typical boarding school: Students’ days are filled with classes, sports, and extracurriculars. They have dorm parents, and vision boards decorating their walls. On a recent spring afternoon, a science class examined the innards of a dissected chicken, and math students slogged through a fractions worksheet. In the art room, a painting of Taylor Swift hung over students putting the finishing touches to final projects. At night, girls streamed in and out of the library holding laptops, their fingers stained with henna from a recent celebration marking the end of Ramadan.

In every other way, SOLA is impossibly unique: Since the Taliban banned girls’ education after age 12, many of the school’s students have not entered a real classroom since 2021. The 118 current students and their families have made a choice that means they may never be able to go home. Even thousands of miles away, their choice could have repercussions inside Afghanistan, and so the students are banned from social media and cannot even send photographs to their families without each file being stripped of its metadata.

While the students have been in Rwanda, some of their parents have been taken by the Taliban. Others have had a sibling die. But none have returned to Afghanistan. Their futures, as one student put it, rest on three things: "Time, patience, and Shabana-jan."

Shabana Basij-Rasikh is the petite 36-year-old head of SOLA. She has a soft voice and a throaty laugh that punctuates nearly every sentence. She cofounded the school when she was only 18, first as a small tutoring program to help prepare Afghan girls to study at American boarding schools. She hoped that one day they would return to help rebuild Afghanistan from the ruins of war. But then she thought: What if they didn’t have to leave? In 2016, Shabana opened the country’s first girls’ boarding school in a rented building in Kabul. She envisioned a future Afghanistan led by the young women her school produced.

Though the Taliban was not in power then, she had lived through its rule once before. To her, it was clear that it saw girls’ education as a direct threat to their power because, as she says now, “of the intensity and commitment they have to stopping it.”

Shabana was six years old in 1996 when the Taliban first took Afghanistan and banned girls from school. Her parents decided to dress her in boys’ clothing and send her as the “escort” for her sister. Under the guise of running errands, the two would attend one of the illegal schools operating in homes across Kabul. Each day they’d take a different route. By the time the U.S. invaded and overthrew the Taliban, in late 2001, Shabana had spent nearly six years studying in disguise. At age 17, she made her way to Middlebury College in Vermont, and from there returned to Afghanistan to begin building SOLA.

Then, and now, this history has been utilized to sustain Shabana’s mission. She repeats it again and again, at commencements and in panel discussions, speeches, and op-eds. And it is worth it because once people hear her story, they will do almost anything to help. The funding for SOLA is entirely private, and some of the most recognizable names in tech, philanthropy, and entertainment contribute generously. With their help, she has educated more than 300 girls in the past decade.

In 2016, its first year, SOLA received 70 applications and accepted 24 students. Five years later, in the spring of 2021, the U.S. military began to withdraw from Afghanistan. Already gaining power in the north, the Taliban moved rapidly toward Kabul. Shabana began to formulate a plan: She would set up a one-year study-abroad program in a neighboring country and take the entire school out of Afghanistan.

When no nearby country wanted to take in a group of Afghan students, a donor suggested she look at Rwanda. Shabana was unconvinced: What would her students’ parents say when she proposed bringing their daughters to a country many of them had never heard of? But the donor made a call to the President’s office. Nearly two decades earlier, President Paul Kagame had liberated Rwanda from a genocide that left an estimated 800,000 people dead. Since then, he’d turned Rwanda into a beacon of development in the region. Now he invited the Afghan girls to take refuge there. On August 5, 2021, Shabana flew to Rwanda and toured a hotel in a quiet neighborhood of Kigali.

She hadn’t yet signed the papers when her timeline shifted dramatically. On August 15, the Taliban stormed into Kabul with unanticipated success.

Thousands of terrified Afghans rushed to the airport, where U.S. forces were hastily evacuating.

Shabana’s quest for girls’ education had not gone unnoticed by the Taliban, and her name had appeared on its hit list. For that reason, Shabana learned that she was a priority for evacuation. Before going to the airport, she burned the records of every SOLA student. When she arrived, she informed the American military that she would not be leaving without her students and faculty, who were frantically attempting to reach the airport. Just 10 days earlier, she’d told her husband she was pregnant. She dreaded telling him that she’d turned down a seat on a flight that could save her life.

Over the years, SOLA had developed an impressive roster of supporters, from Melinda French Gates to Hillary Clinton. Now Shabana would need to pull every string she had to get her students, staff, and their families into the heavily fortified Kabul airport and out of Afghanistan. As the crowd outside grew increasingly desperate, she slept in 10-minute increments. After three days, all SOLA students, staff, and their family members had boarded flights out of Afghanistan.

On August 19, they landed in Doha and were placed in housing built for the World Cup. That first night, some students dragged their mattresses into one room and slept side by side. In the coming days, they lined up to receive basics like shampoo and underwear. Nine days after the Taliban took Kabul, they were on a flight to Rwanda.

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, the newly reinstated Taliban regime promised that it would allow girls’ education to continue. But a month later, girls were banned from middle and high schools. About a year after, female students were barred from public universities. Then women working in universities, NGOs, and government jobs were fired.

But in a quiet neighborhood in Kigali, Shabana was hurriedly rebuilding SOLA out of a hotel. Her students’ mothers were sewing uniforms and teaching Rwandan cooks how to make Afghan staples like pilaf, salads, and doogh, a tangy yogurt drink. The girls were decorating classrooms, setting up their dorms, and reckoning with what had happened in the flurry of evacuating: They had left their homeland and their families. And they might never go back.

Sinah and her family had made it to Pakistan, but the situation there was not better. Sinah tried to enroll in school, but Afghan refugees weren’t eligible. She tried to rejoin her online classes, but Afghans were not being given identity cards to purchase phone data and WiFi. For four months, Sinah was out of school. Finally, one of her father’s relatives agreed to let her come over and attend online classes on her phone. But before long, the family’s disabled daughter began having panic attacks, and they asked her to leave: They feared that Sinah carried a curse.

Then one day, on a WhatsApp group, someone dropped a link to SOLA. On its website, Sinah read about the all-girls boarding school offering a free year-round education to any Afghan girl who passed a rigorous admissions process. It offered basketball, advanced science classes, a student newspaper. It sounded too good to be true, but when she Googled it, she saw that it had been featured on American television. She applied.

In the years since the Taliban takeover, SOLA’s admissions process had exploded. By 2023, there were 1,950 applicants, but the school had space for only around 30. In a year-long process, each prospective student is reviewed by at least three people and goes through multiple interviews. Shabana sits in on every final interview—hundreds in all. She knows the ideal SOLA student can’t be found just by checking grades or testing for English skills.

“We’re looking for girls who understand this education is not just for them— it’s beyond them,” Shabana says. “And they have the resilience to handle all that means: leaving your families behind and coming to a new country.” By 2025, there were nearly 5,400 applicants, and the administrators stretched the admitted to 53 new students—an acceptance rate of less than 1 percent.

Often, at night, Sinah went up to the roof of her family’s apartment in Karachi to try to find reprieve from the stifling heat. She’d listen to music, watch the birds, and wonder if she would ever fly away like they did. Sometimes she cried, thinking about all she’d been through and prayed for everything to turn out okay. Now, with her SOLA application submitted, she cried, thinking it actually might.

For future SOLA students, getting accepted is just the beginning of an arduous journey: visas that cost thousands of dollars, medical tests, school records that are locked away under Taliban control. Arranging travel to SOLA’s campus is so difficult that students arrive in batches throughout the year, and sometimes a full year after they’ve been accepted.

In February 2025, Sinah logged on to what she thought was her third Zoom interview with SOLA. Instead, she was told that she’d been accepted. A year had passed since she’d applied, and she’d buried the possibility deep in her mind to avoid disappointment. Suddenly, her fantasies of flying away were becoming real. “I think those cryings helped a lot,” she says now. “Because when I got into SOLA, I was literally saying to myself that all the things I was aspiring to came true.”

She video-called her dad in Afghanistan to tell him the news. He cried too and told her that she was also realizing his dreams. But Sinah’s difficulties were not over. To leave Pakistan, she needed vaccines and bloodwork, but local doctors were not allowed to treat illegal Afghan refugees. For days, she and her mom visited hospitals and clinics before they found a doctor willing to help. Then there was the exit permit, which Sinah’s family couldn’t afford—but SOLA agreed to cover it. After that was a 20-hour ride to Islamabad, a city where she knew no one.

On her final day in Pakistan, Sinah went to the airport alone. If she was stopped by police, at least she now had the right papers—her mom did not. When she met the seven other incoming SOLA students there, the whole group was crying. She tried to comfort them and their parents: “We are not going to war,” she told them. “We are going to get an education.” In early summer 2025, five months after she’d been accepted, Sinah landed in Rwanda.

When new students arrive, they’re greeted at the airport by the school’s big-sister committee holding signs and flowers. Back on campus, the whole student body waits at the gate to welcome them. And after a period of quarantine, there is a party. Loud music—now banned in Afghanistan—blasts through the courtyard. Not long after, the new students jump into the pool. Few have ever swum before, and many later say it’s the first time they’ve truly felt free.

Recently, when the newest batch of arrivals sat in their first morning assembly, one of them stood to speak: “After five years of delay, I sit in a classroom and I wear a uniform and it feels so good,” she said. Nearly everyone in the room cried.

As the years stretched on under Taliban rule, SOLA began offering intensive classes to help bridge the gap for students who had missed years of formal education. In 2024, Shabana and her husband, Mati Amin, launched SOLAx, a WhatsApp-based education platform that now reaches more than 40,000 users.

For students like Husna, a 19-year-old from Kabul, the lost years weigh heavy. Before the Taliban takeover, she’d been on track to graduate high school in 2023. Since then, she has gone from being a middle-class teenager to attending illegal courses and online schools in Afghanistan to being a refugee in Uganda and, finally, to studying at SOLA in Rwanda. “There’s a huge difference between our lives and the lives of ordinary girls,” she says. “It’s easy for them, like drinking water. But for us, we have to fight for every step. We have to prove that we deserve to study, to have this chance.”

Sinah had been out of school for nearly four years when she arrived at SOLA. Even so, she found it was a seamless transition into life on campus: The food was Afghan, the uniforms were Afghan dresses with light-blue headscarves, and the school celebrated Afghan holidays like Nowruz and Eid. It was, she thought, “a mini Afghanistan.” Other aspects took time to adjust to; the ban on social media was particularly difficult. Sinah considered herself the journalist of the family, and she had always shared current events with them. Now a physical distance was compounded by a new digital detachment.

So far from home, SOLA is “forced to be both their school and their parents,” Shabana says. She is the legal guardian of every student at SOLA. And she worries about their safety all the time. She knows that her mission inspires a zealous hatred in extremists thousands of miles away. “The less people know about the girls and their families, the more I feel safe,” she says.

Even in Rwanda, the girls wear masks when they go out because curious bystanders occasionally take videos and post them online. There are also new, more localized threats that the students and staff must adapt to: Since their arrival in Rwanda, the country has tackled Covid-19, Marburg virus disease, and an Ebola outbreak in neighboring countries.

At an assembly near the end of this school year, Shabana stood to address these rules: Not long ago, some students had managed to circumvent the firewall to download social media apps, and she urged them to think about why the ban stood. “It’s perfectly normal for this phase of your life to push against authority,” she said. “As we look at the situation in Afghanistan, things are not getting better, things are getting worse—[and] one day you might go back.”

The social-media detox was probably good for her, Sinah conceded. She made fast friends with her roommates and classmates, and she took to academia. In creative writing, she pulled inspiration from her life for fictional stories and poetry. In humanities, she participated in debates about current events and human rights. She decided she wanted to study international development, to make sure no one else would experience what she and her family had faced.

Earlier this year, Sinah was accepted to a social-justice workshop at the University of Oxford. She and five others—“the Oxford Six,” as they were called on campus—were overjoyed. Sinah, who calls herself a very spiritual person, considered it a miracle. But the U.S. and U.K. had recently banned Afghan nationals from getting student visas. Even with a Rwandan passport, travel is difficult, if not impossible. The Oxford Six were not given visas. They joined the workshop virtually, and on the night of the formal banquet in England, they dressed up in traditional Afghan outfits and ate cake with their teachers in the cafeteria in Kigali.

Even as politics seem to fence them in, SOLA’s students foster global ambitions. On a recent summer afternoon, they presented their yearlong personal projects. In nearly every classroom, students stood behind tables, holding elaborate displays. “First I have an advertisement,” one girl was instructing a visitor. “If you want to learn about nuclear bombs, go to Kimia. If you want to learn about genetic engineering, go to Madina, and if you want to learn about galaxies and black holes, go to Nargis.”

As Shabana walked from table to table, she couldn’t stop tearing up. She excused herself for a moment after a new student hugged her and exclaimed in Dari, “SOLA girls can do anything!” Later, after watching a video of a student performing a traditional Hindi dance, Shabana learned that the student’s father would not approve. “How can I follow my passion when it might disappoint the people who sacrificed everything for me?” the student asked. Shabana dabbed her eyes. “You have to make a choice most people don’t have to make,” she replied. She got choked up in front of a massive gorilla made out of plastic bottles collected on campus, and again while watching a presentation about a future smart city for Afghanistan. “This is too much for me!” she said, laughing, gesturing at the hall full of aspirations.

Sinah had written a policy paper examining barriers to education, titled The Impacts of Inaccessible Education Across Four Countries, and formatted it like an official NGO report. “When the sacrifice of a girl becomes a compulsive need, it potentially endangers a generation,” she wrote. When Shabana approached her table, Sinah handed her a copy and told Shabana she had friends in Afghanistan who’d lost their education and been forced to get married. While writing the paper, she’d realized that girls across the world had experienced the same thing. “I learned I’m not the only person deprived of education,” she told Shabana.

That day, SOLA students noticed that Shabana visited every table and deposited a personal note in each handmade feedback box. Her own picture featured in numerous projects about global female leadership. One by one, nearly every student presented her with a neatly wrapped copy of their work. To them, she is more than a surrogate parent or school leader—she’s something of a guru. They say that she knows what’s inside their minds and hearts better than anyone.

To spend any time on SOLA’s campus is to think about how many students are not there. And to talk to the students is to realize they think about it too—all the time. Written in blue pen on 14-year-old Saweya’s wrist is: “Let them”—a reminder not to dwell on what she cannot change and to focus on the rare opportunity she’s been given. “I carry hopes and wishes of millions of girls who couldn’t be here,” she says. “All 118 of us here—and all the girls who came before, and all the girls who will come after us—will experience this.”

One of the school’s aims is to keep the students too busy to consider the weight on their shoulders. On school days, every hour is scheduled. There are no extended breaks in the year: spring, summer, and winter holidays are packed with workshops and extracurriculars run by volunteers from around the world.

“My family says, ‘Do you miss us?’” says Kawsar, a 16-year-old who was so thrilled to arrive at SOLA, she wanted to sleep in the school uniform on her first night. “I say, ‘Sometimes, when I think about it; but we are a big family here, and we don’t have time to miss you.’” When girls do start feeling homesick, Kawsar says, the student-led happiness committee places chocolates or pick-me-up notes on their beds.

But SOLA’s staff know that parents are desperately missing their daughters. Feroza, the school’s live-in psychologist, will never forget last Eid, when the students’ families decided to mail their daughters new dresses. When the outfits arrived, not a single one fit. Feroza cried as she made the alterations. “Parents are missing seeing their children grow up,” she says.

This August marked five years since Kabul fell to the Taliban and five years since SOLA arrived in Rwanda. Only seven students who arrived in the original evacuation are left on campus. SOLA is not yet internationally accredited, and the oldest students are sent to secondary institutions to get their high school diplomas. One hundred percent of SOLA students have gone on to college. Soon, Shabana hopes, that middle step won’t be necessary.

On the fifth anniversary of its exile, SOLA will open a new campus: its first permanent home. On a chilly June morning, Shabana heads out of Kigali to visit the site, peeling off the highway past snack shacks and a nearby memorial to the Rwandan genocide.

At the end of a tree-lined road, the next phase of Afghan education in exile is taking form. Housing and classrooms have been built into the hillside, and when the campus is finished it will host a farm, a pottery studio, a tandoor oven for baking Afghan bread, and a mosque oriented toward Mecca with a blue-tiled minaret. There will be a museum to tell the story of the school and its remarkable relocation. By next year, SOLA aims to have its international accreditation, so the students will be able to graduate on this campus.

“I focus a lot more on the promise of this place,” Shabana says, looking around as more than 1,000 construction workers are leveling the soccer field and pouring concrete for the pool. “The loss is there. But I look at this as a way of returning to Afghanistan.”

But what if there is no future for SOLA or its graduates in Afghanistan? The students don’t talk about that possibility. They also do not ask how or when they can see their families again. They understand the sacrifice they’ve made. “Hope is one thing that keeps you alive,” says Feroza, the psychologist. “We all hope one day we will go back. Then you will have that pride to face your people and say, ‘Yes, I have done something.’”

For Sinah, as well as most other SOLA students, returning is a distant milestone, one that will mark the completion of the circuitous path her family has taken.

Before she was born, Sinah’s parents left Afghanistan for Iran. When she was 2 years old, they decided to return home: In Iran, Afghan refugees weren’t allowed to study, and both of her parents dreamed of receiving an education. Over dinner, sometimes, Sinah’s father would tell her about how his own parents wouldn’t let him make the hour-long walk to school and that he had made himself notebooks out of discarded cigarette cartons. Back in Afghanistan, Sinah’s mother got her high school diploma, and, not long after, Sinah’s father came home in his graduation cap and gown, holding a university degree in journalism.

It was just a few years later that Sinah was thrown off her own path and sent on a dangerous journey to get an education. When that happened, she would think: They continued with those hardships, so why should I not continue? A few months after she got to SOLA, her father sent her a video of his family throwing a traditional celebratory feast in honor of her acceptance. “They are celebrating my experience, that I’m here,” Sinah says. “That one daughter from our family left, not because we had to but because of education.”

This story appears in our 2026 Legends issue.