After Uganda, it is Rwanda’s turn to welcome refugees from Afghanistan. While the first plane filled with people fleeing the Taliban’s capture of Kabul arrived in Kampala on Wednesday, Kigali is waiting for an entire school to arrive. This is the Afghanistan School of Leadership, the only boarding school for young girls in the country. It was the founder of the facility who announced it on Twitter on Tuesday.
According to Shabana Basij-Rasikh, the director of the boarding school, 250 students, teachers, staff and family members left Kabul last week and are on their way, via Qatar, to Rwanda where the school will settle for a full semester. A temporary move is hoping for the founder of this girls’ school, who assures that she wants to return to Afghanistan as soon as conditions allow.
The information was quickly confirmed by the Rwandan Ministry of Education, which welcomed the Afghan students on Twitter. Kigali does not want to give more details at the moment to respect the request for the boarding school’s discretion.
Rwanda already hosts more than 130,000 refugees from neighboring countries, mainly from Burundi But for the past two years, the country has also received African asylum seekers evacuated from Libya by the UNHCR, while their cases are being processed by Western countries. Recently, an agreement between Rwanda and Denmark if migration issues had created controversy, some saw it as a way for Copenhagen to outsource its asylum system in Rwanda, which Kigali has formally denied.
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