Child sponsorship changes lives. You can help the people of Bamyan, Afghanistan build a better future.

Location
Bamyan is in central Afghanistan, 240 kilometres north west of the capital, Kabul.

Mountainous, isolated and barren, Bamyan can feel like the most remote place on Earth. The soil here is arid and water shortages are acute, so food is always in short supply. 

Life in Bamyan
Bamyan is a land of climatic extremes. The winters are long and severely cold, with temperatures plummeting as low as -20ºC. The summers are punishingly hot and prone to drought, while spring frequently brings flash floods.

Bamyan is one of the poorest provinces in the whole of Afghanistan. Almost everybody relies on agriculture and livestock for their livelihood, but the soil is poor and during the long winter months the fields cannot be worked at all. Farmers depend on just a few crops – primarily wheat and potatoes.

But in recent years harvests have been failing, leaving families to go hungry. Fewer than one in twelve households has access to clean water. To make things worse, the sheep, goat and cattle stocks have been decimated by decades of war and are now estimated to be a quarter of what they were 10 years ago.

Access to education
For children in Bamyan, education is the vital step towards escaping poverty forever. But the schools in this remote region are difficult for many children to reach and there’s a desperate shortage of teaching staff. Illiteracy rates are as high as 95 per cent. War has had a huge impact on education too. The few schools that once existed in the region were destroyed during the conflict and there is now a desperate shortage of teaching staff, especially women teachers, and learning materials such as books and stationery.

ActionAid's work in Bamyan
Thanks to your support, ActionAid is tackling these problems. We’re setting up a new programme of literacy and numeracy classes for children who can’t travel to school. And we’re training a new generation of teachers. With your support, the children of Bamyan now have every hope of escaping the poverty they were born into.

Read the updates below to find out how the community in Bamyan is benefitting from child sponsorship:

• April 2010: increasing food production for farmers, and more...
• October 2010: 112 families supported, and more...
• October 2011: winter school programme, and more...