PESHAWAR, Sept 6: The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is likely to wind up its decade-long Afghan Education Project (AEP) in Peshawar by the end of current month and launch its activities in Kabul before winter.

According to the management, they had yet to set a deadline for shifting the project, but planned to move to Afghanistan before the coming winter. Work on the establishment of offices, studios and networking activities was in progress in Kabul that would be completed soon, an official said.

Other sources confided to Dawn that the government had asked the BBC management to close its education project in Pakistan and served notices on all unregistered Afghan NGOs, including the AEP, to leave the country. Following the government decision, the project management decided to wind up its activities in Peshawar and move to Kabul.

“This was mere misunderstanding between the authority concerned and the project’s management,” an AEP official said. He said in the wake of development activities in Afghanistan and repatriation of a large number of refugees they had decided to shift the project to Kabul to facilitate its listeners inside Afghanistan.

A number of broadcasting services are already doing well by covering health, de-mining, education, human rights issues and entertainment from Kabul Radio.

The BBC started the project in early 1990s in Peshawar to create social and political awareness among millions of Afghan, who have been living in refugee camps in Pakistan.

Under the project, the BBC released a variety of programmes for its Afghan listeners, including education, health, refugees’ social awareness, free distribution of teaching material, plays and music in Dari and Pushto languages.

These plays and programmes were released in collaboration with Pakistan Broadcasting Corporation, from Bush House, London, and Peshawar station on daily basis. Its long play “Navai Core, Navai Zawand” (New Home and New Life) became popular among the refugees. So far, 1,500 episodes of the play have been aired.

Among the projects run by the BBC, the health education project which provided vital information to the listeners on maternal health, delivery and pregnancy-related issues, served the Afghans a great deal. Not only that programmes on sex education were aired based on the letters of the listeners booklets were also dispatched to them on regular basis.

The music programmes aired by the BBC were all the more entertaining because they provided an opportunity to the scattered Afghans to listen to their singers in the nook and corner of the world. Specially, the Afghans living in Pakistan and Afghanistan enjoyed the programme immensely because they had no other source to listen to the national singers from any other radio except the BBC.