Education and Innovation
We pair leading-edge tech with an Afghan heart, creating opportunity and inspiring hope
Innovative WhatsApp-Based Learning for Every Afghan Girl
SOLA is proud to offer SOLAx: a WhatsApp-based online academy that can be joined by any Afghan girl, anywhere. Students will be able to access daily, asynchronous classwork in three languages (English, Pashto, and Dari) by texting the SOLAx chatbot on WhatsApp, and they’ll only need a mobile phone and a basic cellular connection to participate.
Upon successfully finishing a course, students will receive a certificate of completion from SOLA. These certificates will be safely secured online and individually marked with digital identifiers, giving each student proof of educational achievement that can be presented at any time.
SOLAx is open and accessible to anyone who registers, anywhere in the world – but we’ve designed our platform in direct response to the Taliban’s education ban. Our intended audience is Afghan girls worldwide, specifically including the millions of young women within Afghanistan who are past primary school age and who are barred from in-person schooling. Our tech is egalitarian in design: since SOLAx only requires a cell phone and a basic mobile connection, we open equal access to education for girls from lower-income families and from rural areas, and families can enroll multiple children in different classes from the same shared device.
Our mission is to bring education to Afghan girls wherever they may be. Our vision is of a global network of sisterhood: a generation of compassionate and confident Afghan women with the leadership skills to rebuild Afghanistan and guide their homeland into a better future.
SOLAx Vision
Meet Our Founders
Shabana is the co-founder and president of the School of Leadership, Afghanistan (SOLA). SOLA is the first and only boarding school for Afghan girls, operating in Kabul from 2016 through the summer of 2021 and the Taliban’s return to power. That August, Shabana led the evacuation of her entire school community from Afghanistan to Rwanda, where SOLA has reestablished its operations and its students have resumed their studies.
Shabana Basij-Rasikh
Shabana is a magna cum laude graduate of Middlebury College and earned her Master in Public Policy from Oxford University; she also holds honorary doctorates from SOAS University of London and Cedar Crest College. In 2018, Shabana was awarded the Malalai Medal, one of Afghanistan’s highest national honors, for her work in promoting girls’ access to education. In 2023, she received the Rolex National Geographic Explorer of the Year award from the National Geographic Society and was named an Inaugural Carnegie Distinguished Fellow at the newly launched Institute of Global Politics at Columbia University in New York City.
As a SOLA board member, Mati leads the charge in building SOLAx, an online platform expanding education for Afghan girls globally. A seasoned edtech entrepreneur, he recently sold his language learning company to a prominent US publisher. Mati has a strong passion for technologies that not only catalyze significant change but also dismantle barriers, ensuring accessible education for all. He completed his undergraduate studies in economics at Williams College, a master’s in finance from Babson Graduate School of Business, and an M.Ed. from Harvard.
Mati Amin
A Message From Our Founders
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