What investment pays the best return? Some of you may be wondering why I am actively supporting three Afghan kids to go to international schools through the AWR Lloyd Foundation – and in particular why I am sponsoring a teenage Afghan girl to go to a top school in the UK. In Afghanistan and Pakistan the Taliban has pro-actively blown up and destroyed schools which allow girls to attend them. Illiteracy in Afghanistan amongst women and girls is over 85%. The Taliban has outlawed education for girls in the territories it occupies. They use violence, fear and indoctrination to spread their influence and to assert their control. Extremist and narrow-minded views are by no means confined to the Muslim World. Indeed the ignorance, prejudice and arrogance of the West has been one of the main stimuli for support for extremist groups in the East for hundreds of years. The violence of groups like the Taliban in turn stimulates more extreme reactions towards Islam and Asia in the West. And so on… It is a vicious cycle which ruins innocent peoples’ lives and which continues to threaten and damage world peace and prosperity. And its not even just an East-West problem. Sadly even in the Buddhist world there is ample evidence of prejudice and violence against Christian and Muslim minorities in Myanmar, Thailand and Sri Lanka. There are no easy solutions to break this cycle, but individuals and small firms like AWR Lloyd can make a difference through small gestures. By sponsoring and hosting a few Afghan kids we are allowing them to get a much better education than they otherwise would – and we are ensuring that they are away from the constant dangers of living in a war-zone. But the project has a much greater significance than this. We are fostering constructive links, communication and friendship between cultures which hardly know each other. And while we learn more about Islam and show our respect for Muslim culture through this project – we are also taking a symbolic stand against extremism. We are saying that all boys and girls have a right to be educated – and indeed that it is education itself which is the cure for prejudice and conflict - and for the poverty and human misery which these evils cause. From Jane Eyre’s Charlotte Bronte, the following quote is relevant: “Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilised by education: they grow there, firm as weeds among stones.” While the Afghan girl we are sponsoring will remain anonymous for security reasons – and while there are probably not more than a handful of Afghan girls able to benefit from the kind of opportunity we are providing – there is one girl from a Taliban-controlled territory in Pakistan who has recently become world famous. An eleven-year old girl living in the Swat Valley of Pakistan, called Malala Yosafzai, started writing a blog on a BBC site in 2009 on what it was like to try and get an education in the face of Taliban opposition – and promoting the right for girls to go to school. The Taliban vowed to kill her and her family but she continued her blog. In 2012 Taliban gunmen tracked her down and shot her in the head. Remarkably she survived and was sent to a hospital in the UK for surgery to repair her skull. She now attends a school in the UK. Yesterday (Friday 12th July) she spoke on her 16th birthday at the United Nations about her struggle and about the primacy of education. Please have a listen to her speech. This girl is brave: youtu.be/9F5yeW6XFZk Ignorance breeds prejudice, poverty and violence. Prejudice and violence breeds more ignorance and more poverty… and so on. Education and self-learning are the only way out of this downward spiral. Education is the best ‘investment’ any individual, family or society can make, with the highest ‘return’. “An investment in knowledge pays the best interest” said Benjamin Franklin. And education is not something that ends when you leave college… it should be a life-long philosophy and habit. Mahatma Gandhi said “Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever”. AWR Lloyd personnel are ‘knowledge workers’. Our competitive edge is our ability to provide insightful analysis and expert advice to our clients. I believe we must all therefore share in the ‘philosophy of education’, of continuous self-improvement and self-learning… not only in our everyday work but also in the humanitarian causes which we support.
Posted on: Fri, 15 Aug 2014 04:43:45 +0000
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