SOLA opens a permanent campus in Rwanda for Afghan girls

The School of Leadership Afghanistan has opened the campus it has been building on a hillside in Rwanda. Classes for the 2026 academic year begin this month in buildings the school owns, five years after Shabana Basij-Rasikh flew her students out of Kabul.

When the Taliban took the capital in August 2021, Rwanda offered the school a place to land. About 250 people arrived on 25 August that year: the boarding students, more than 100 recent graduates, and faculty. Four days later lessons restarted in a hotel. Every year since then the girls have studied in rented rooms. Groundbreaking on the permanent site was in February 2025. The sign in the middle of the new grounds reads "SOLA, a home in Rwanda."

Basij-Rasikh said the phrase is literal. "That's exactly what this place represents for us, a permanent home for our girls. I'm so grateful for the welcome that we have received."

The numbers behind one campus

At full size the Rwanda site is designed for more than 250 students across grades 6 to 12. That is a doubling of the current roll and still a rounding error against demand. In 2025 SOLA received 5,385 applications from Afghan girls in 13 countries, a 65 percent rise on 2024. The school accepted 53 girls, just under 1 percent. The peak application count when SOLA still operated in Kabul was 264, in 2021.

New students now come from the diaspora, girls who left Afghanistan after 2021 and often have no secondary school that will take them in the country where they landed. The UN's International Organization for Migration is helping move the accepted class to Rwanda. Older graduates from the original Kabul cohort are already at universities outside Rwanda. The younger boarders stay.

Even after the expansion, more than 99 percent of applicants will be turned away. SOLA built an online platform so girls who cannot travel can study on a phone at their own pace. That is the only way the school can touch a population measured in the hundreds of thousands rather than the low hundreds.

What the school is for

SOLA opened in Kabul in March 2016 with 24 girls. The mission has not changed. Basij-Rasikh wants a generation of Afghan women who can go back and rebuild institutions the Taliban shut. The Rwanda campus is a substitute, not a replacement, for a Kabul site the school still hopes to finish one day and run in parallel.

The timing is pointed. It is five years since US forces left and the Taliban banned secondary education for girls inside Afghanistan. A boarding school on a Rwandan hillside does not reopen those classrooms. It keeps a thin line of Afghan girls in a full curriculum while the ban holds. The 5,385 applications are the measure of how many families still treat that line as worth crossing a continent for.

Basij-Rasikh's short description of her students is the part that travels. "These girls, they will never give up. It's just not part of their vocabulary or thinking." The campus is the first place since 2021 where that sentence has a building attached to it.