Our Story

"This was a land were spirits ran free and high and a fierce exuberance filled the air, blowing away dry logic and dull reason, making almost anything seem possible.” - Robert Schultheis, ‘Night Letters: Inside Wartime Afghanistan"

Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the world. It has some of the world’s highest rates of illiteracy, and of maternal and infant mortality. After September 11th, 2001, the world understood the danger of leaving the Afghanistan people vulnerable to civil war and fundamentalist ideology.

Since 2002, aid money flooded the country, but little of it reached the remote villages where 60% of the Afghan population lived. There, ordinary Afghans and their families struggled to stay alive.

From the outset of our work, Future Generations understood the main problem in Afghanistan was lack of self-esteem, self-confidence and self-respect – the result of years of Soviet Union domination followed by a destructive civil war. Working with organizations like FGC, these vulnerable people began to rebuild self-respect and confidence. Gradually, ordinary Afghans took control of their futures, rather than allow their lives to remain in the hands of a powerful few hundreds of miles away.

In 2003, in the Shahidan Valley of Bamyan province, 36 villagers met with the Future Generations team. One of the villagers said: "We have been fighting for years to own our future, but now our future is controlled by UN agencies, NGOs and foreign consultants to the Afghan government. We have followed our leaders and now they are in Kabul living like kings. We are hungry and poor, living like beggars, waiting for UN agencies to give us food so that we do not starve and tents so we do not freeze. They are not helping us to live like human beings. We want to stand on our own feet."

With help from FGC, these 36 villagers formed a group called the Pagal Party. Soon after, they started building a school so they could educate themselves and own their future. That year, 36 ex-combatants studied in the school, while teaching hundreds of illiterate Afghans in their villages. The next year, they organized community people in every village to plant trees, register new schools, build latrines and protect the mountain bushes that were used as fuel.

In 2005, the Pagal Party gathered together the leaders of 72 villages in the Shahidan Valley. For five days, the leaders discussed their future and their children’s future. They established a central shura composed of representatives from all the villages in the Shahidan Valley, with the vision of having:

1. Better health
2. Better education
3. Better economy
4. Better environment
5. A peaceful society

Future Generations sees this holistic model – one that focuses on communities making their own decisions with guidance from Future Generations – as a possible solution for many of the problems that Afghanistan society faces today.