ABLE in Afghanistan

Blue-eyed octogenarian and information advocate Nancy Hatch Dupree is a rare bright spot in Afghanistan today. But the impact of her work can only be fully appreciated in its brutally unglamorous context.

The 2009 Afghan presidential elections were lengthy and disappointing, highlighting the extreme levels of corruption that are endemic in this war-torn nation of 31 million. Three decades of fighting and instability have led to a near-complete breakdown in the educational system, with many educated Afghans fleeing the country. Partner this with indifference or even active hostility to secular education among many rural populations and the result is literacy rates estimated at 28% at best, or some say more accurately, 15%.

While the U.S. government’s Agency for International Development (USAID) has spent over $6.9 billion in aid to Afghanistan since 2002, less than 6% of those funds are dedicated to education, with major improvements still needed. Many schools are conducted in tents or under the shade of trees, with school buildings operating only in selected urban areas.  With shortages of pens, pencils, paper, and textbooks, school libraries are a dreamed-of luxury afforded to only a few.

The education sector is perennially underfunded, receiving scarcely 10% of what other sectors receive. The Ministry of Culture and Youth governs the country’s few remaining public libraries, but its budget is miniscule and largely devoted to salaries. Money for acquisitions is virtually nonexistent.

Access to information and books in Afghanistan has been in crisis for years: There is no national library. Much of the Kabul University Library was destroyed during the civil war and Taliban years, but now operates, albeit with outdated collections, with no automation, no heat, and very few computers.  The National Archive of Afghanistan is plagued by preservation challenges, with no heat, electricity, or climate control, and an infestation of insects that are destroying the collections. And there is almost no publishing industry.

Before the war

Prior to the wars, every government ministry in the Afghan capital of Kabul had its own library with collections of great importance. Most of those collections no longer exist, having become sources for heat to fuel stoves during times when wood was scarce, or sold in bazaars at bulk weight to make bags used by shopkeepers.

This dismal state of affairs served as a backdrop to a September 15, 2009, Capitol Hill reception and celebration of the work of Nancy Hatch Dupree by President Barack Obama’s Special Representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke. Dupree has dedicated a lifetime to documenting and preserving Afghanistan’s cultural heritage. She has spearheaded an effort to develop the Afghan Center at Kabul University (ACKU), currently the most modern library in the country, as well as the ACKU Box Libraries Extension (ABLE), which has placed more than 230,000 books throughout 215 rural sites in 32 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces. Holbrooke admitted that until the reception he had never met Dupree nor seen her Afghanistan work firsthand, but praised her effort as an example of what can be accomplished by individuals. He also noted that while he wished the U.S. government had funding for good work such as Dupree’s, the government’s resources were not adequate to supplement all private efforts undertaken in the region.

At the age of 83, Dupree is articulate and passionate about the country in which she has worked for over 40 years. She admits that her foray into Afghanistan was “sort of an accident.” Dupree initially arrived in Kabul in 1962 as a diplomat’s wife, fell into writing guidebooks, and then married archaeologist Louis Dupree. She traveled extensively around the country until she and her husband were expelled in 1978, and relocated to Pakistan.

When the Soviet-Afghan war ended, Dupree was able to resume her work in Afghanistan. Dozens of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) followed, all implementing uncoordinated efforts to try to rebuild the county. Recognizing the chaos, the United Nations launched Operation Salam (Peace) to better coordinate humanitarian and economic assistance to Afghanistan through the establishment of various committees on health, human resources, etc. The U.N. asked Dupree and her husband to serve on Operation Salam’s library committee and informed them that the committee’s ambitious goal was to purchase every single book that had ever been written about Afghanistan. The Duprees recognized the illogicality of this request, but regardless, Louis Dupree compiled a comprehensive Afghan book list. He wanted to demonstrate that not only was it impossible to afford to purchase all of those resources, but that even if the U.N. had the funds, there was no place in Afghanistan to house such a collection. In addition, because of low literacy rates and the resources printed in languages other than the local Dari or Pashto, clients of the library could realistically use only about 1% of the resources.

Instead, the Duprees proposed a pragmatic approach to the committee: to collect the practical materials, reports, and “lessons learned” that NGOs developed when trying to rebuild the country, as well as locally published materials in local languages. Thus, in 1989, the library committee established the precursor to ACKU, the Afghan Resource and Information Center. Dupree chuckles good-naturedly as she reflects on the beginnings of this project. “We didn’t know anything about how to run a library or how to catalog. We started with nothing, got a bit more organized, and while we realized that we were collecting all of the documents needed by the NGOs, at the same time, we recognized there were information needs elsewhere.”