About Us
About SAFE – Support For Afghan Further Education
Support for Afghan Further Education (SAFE) is a voluntary, Ireland-based registered charity (CRA No. 20026660) focussed on supporting education and development in rural Afghanistan, with a special emphasis on enabling women and girls to play their part.
We are a non-profit, non-political organization, founded by a group of volunteers in 1990. Soviet troops had withdrawn from Afghanistan the year before, but armed conflict continued. with devastating effects on one of the world’s poorest countries, where drought and famine now occur more regularly than ever.
In SAFE’s early years the aim was to help Afghan school graduates to study abroad and become equipped as leaders in the rebuilding of their communities and their country. From 1993 onwards, the focus shifted towards assisting rural development projects, with a dual emphasis:
- enabling rural communities to work for their own future development
- encouraging the participation of women.
Our major implementing partner is CAWC (Central Afghanistan Welfare Committee), which evaluates local conditions and identifies small rural development projects that answer to the needs of particular communities.
SAFE has no paid employees at home or abroad and sends no expatriates to work in Afghanistan. Until political conditions worsened, the Chairperson visited projects annually. All services are provided voluntarily and we have no administrative overheads: 100% of donations received goes directly to our projects.
The late Terence O’Malley as Chairman of SAFE, meeting Afghan refugees at
Shamshatoo Camp, Pakistan, in the year 2000
Why Afghanistan?
More than half of Afghanistan’s population—23.7 million people— needed urgent humanitarian aid and assistance in 2024, with 12.4 million people facing food insecurity and 2.9 million at emergency levels of hunger. As of November, the UN Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan had received only 31 percent of the needed funds, and humanitarian programs had closed because of the lack of resources. The loss of foreign assistance has severely harmed Afghanistan’s healthcare system and exacerbated the health impacts of malnutrition and illnesses from inadequate medical care.
Women and girls have been disproportionately affected by the healthcare crisis. The Taliban’s ban on women’s employment and restrictions on their movement outside the home have compounded the crisis by creating additional discriminatory obstacles to delivering and receiving assistance on an equal basis. Bans on secondary and university education for girls and women have also meant a shortage of women healthcare workers.
(Human Rights Watch, World Report 2025)
