PESHAWAR, March 19: A planning workshop on developing a sustainable strategy for basic education for Afghan refugees in the NWFP began here on Tuesday.

The four-day workshop was organized by the German Technical Cooperation and inaugurated by Afghan Refugees Commissioner Mushtaq Ahmad Alizai.

The objective of the workshop is to plan the future of Basic Education For Afghan Refugees (BEFARe) project in the wake of the latest developments taking place in Afghanistan affecting the situation in refugee camps in Pakistan where BEFARe runs educational projects, said a press release.

BEFARe is the largest educational project for refugees worldwide, according to sources in the United Nations High Commission of Refugees. BEFARe has been in existence since 1989 under a bilateral agreement reached between Pakistan and Germany.

In non-formal education, BEFARe has also offered mother and child health courses to more than 80,000 women.

The project is also actively engaged in Pashtu and Dari literacy courses for men and women to enable graduates to read, write, calculate and understand the simple intents of daily life.

By the end of the last year, 59,000 participants had passed the courses (out of which 22,000 are women. BEFARe also initiated ‘Home Schools’ for those boys and girls who “dropped out”, or are too young to be admitted in adult literacy courses, or too old for primary schools.

These classes provide the necessary link between the formal and non-formal sector and are successful; to-date 22,000 children (5,500 girls) have passed the home school courses.