Khyber Pass Kids Cross Frontier to Study

Children in the Afghan border town of Torkham are having to cross into neighbouring Pakistan just to go to school, because there is no state education available locally.

Clad in orange uniforms and carrying black bags with the logo of their Pakistani schools, around 180 children have to cross the border at the Khyber Pass, which is hard going in the hot weather of summer. "It's very hard," one of them told IWPR as he made the trip.

Another obstacle is that at school, the teaching medium is Urdu rather than the children’s native Pashto.

Zabihullah Ghazi is an IWPR-trained radio reporter in Nangarhar, Afghanistan.

This report was produced as part of the Afghan Critical Mass Media Reporting in Uruzgan and Nangarhar project, and is also published on the Afghan Centre for Investigative Journalism website which IWPR has set up locally.