About the Hazarajat

The beautiful Bamyan Valley lies in the heart of the Hazarajat.

Rural families in Afghanistan are attempting to recover from decades of war with sparse help from the outside. Few families have escaped trauma, death, or tragedy as a result of the war, drought, and degradation of their environment or dissolution of their communities. A traditionally persecuted ethnic minority, the Hazara, mostly populates the Hazarajat. Today, six years after the fall of the Taliban, the Hazarajat still has barely passable roads, little infrastructure and an exhausted populace. Traditional agricultural knowledge has been lost as hundreds of thousands of the population fled to Iran. Now most farmers grow wheat or potatoes, selling the entire crop in the large cities and buying expensive imported vegetables, fruit, cloth, tools, and household items, stagnating the economic recovery and insuring a subsistence level of living.

Poor communities recovering from the war have a disproportionate number of war victims, developmentally disabled, widows and orphans, to try to take care of with very little in the way of resources. Traditionally Afghans have a strong family safety net for vulnerable family members, but this tradition has been overwhelmed by the devastation of the war creating intolerable conditions for vulnerable people within the Afghan family structure. Family violence is endemic, exploitation of widows and their children for financial gain, and neglect and abuse of the disabled and aged is prevalent. Subjugation of women and children is driven by poverty as much as religious or cultural traditions.

Roads through the Hazarajat are in poor condition.

PARSA has worked in rural communities for the last eight years, with a three-year residence in Panjab in southern Bamyan Province. We have learned over the years that large amounts of money are not the solution to this problem in these rural areas. In fact, unschooled donors can further destabilize communities and create dependency through unskilled development. We work on the premise that small scale personalized development support, village-by-village, is the best way to assist the Afghans as they recover their communities and economies. Our integrated programs provide measured support and target the most vulnerable for support taking economic pressure off of the village community, but holding the leaders of the village to account for providing support to their vulnerable people, primarily women. This year we have opened an office in Bamyan City, and we will be working with 10 villages in the outskirts of three towns in the Hazarajat. Our rural programs have a core focus of education, supplemented by training programs. We work mostly with women and girls who have been prevented from an education for economic or religious reasons.