Shabana Basij-Rasikh and Mati Amin Believe AI Can Help Restore the Right to Education

Education is interwoven with the human experience. It’s a right that transcends borders and has the potential to transform the trajectory of an individual life, a community, and even an entire society. But when school becomes dangerous or disappears altogether, the ripple effects can last a lifetime.

For half a decade, Shabana Basij-Rasikh and Mati Amin have witnessed the growing potential of digital technologies, including AI, to help fill the gap. Shabana started the School of Leadership, Afghanistan (SOLA) in 2016 as a boarding school for Afghan girls. When the Taliban took over and SOLA evacuated in 2021, the team realized that Afghan girls, now forced to quit school after their primary years, needed safe and effective learning pathways. In response, Shabana and Mati expanded the digitization efforts they began during COVID-19 to restore the hopes and dreams of Afghan girls around the world.

The two co-founded SOLAx. This online, WhatsApp-based academy serves 20K+ children in over 75 countries. Designed as a learning companion for girls of varying grade levels, the team is exploring ways to integrate generative AI for more robust and tailored educational content.

In a recent interview, Shabana and Mati shared insights on how digital technologies are changing the game for education equity and their vision for the future of AI-powered learning.

How did your journey inspire you to explore AI for humanity?

Shabana: I grew up in Kabul under the Taliban regime. I was 6 years old when they came to power in 1996 and 11 when their regime fell in 2001. During the years in between — years in which girls’ education was completely illegal — I attended secret schools in Kabul, run by women inside their homes. Today, the Taliban forbids girls from attending school past 6th grade, or past the onset of puberty. I understand how it feels to be an Afghan girl deprived of the right to education, but I also understand how it feels to be an Afghan girl who refuses to give up on her right to learn. I see them, thousands and thousands of them, and I will never look away.

Mati: Although I’m an Afghan, I grew up in a refugee camp in Pakistan where access to quality education was certainly not guaranteed. As a child, I was fortunate to find my way to school, and I very clearly remember telling the officials at school that I wouldn’t go unless my younger sisters could go too. My sisters became the first women in my family to receive an education. I’ve seen with my own eyes what education can do to both change individual lives and uplift entire families. Shabana and I had our daughter in 2022, and because of her, I am often reminded of the importance of this work. Someday she’s going to ask me, “Dad, what did you do to help girls in Afghanistan?” I’m committed to being able to give her the right answer.

Both: SOLAx, our digital, WhatsApp-based education platform, is part of that answer. In fact, the seeds for its creation were planted a year before the return of the Taliban, in the spring and summer of 2020. It was the beginning of the COVID-19 days, and we’re sure many Western readers remember the challenges for schools and the difficulties in implementing effective online education interventions and initiatives. In Afghanistan, those same challenges and difficulties were more intense by orders of magnitude. Creating new and innovative ways to reach our students during COVID-19 eventually led to new and innovative ways to reach Afghan girls in Afghanistan and the diaspora post-2021. That work ultimately led us both here.

How are you leveraging AI to provide a more robust and engaging educational experience for girls?

Mati: We are currently leveraging AI to help us digitize the Afghan curriculum and disseminate our content through SOLAx. In the future, we will use AI to provide personalized support for individual students, tied to the specific courses a student takes. The vision is to create a digital helper. It’s something that any teacher would provide for a student or a class, but for a user base of 30K, 50K, or even 100K individuals who all need individual support, we need solutions that amplify human capacity. AI gives us the ability to do what we otherwise couldn’t.

Shabana: With digital technologies and AI, there is no limit to the number of girls whom we can help access an education. Consider the total number of applications we received for spots at our SOLA facilities, now based in Rwanda. In 2023, we received 1.9K applications. In 2024, we received 3.3K. In 2025, we’ve already received 5.4K. We only have the physical space to enroll roughly 30 students each year, which means that in 2025, we’ll be accepting approximately 0.5% of the girls who applied. The word “heartbreaking” isn’t strong enough to describe how these constraints feel. SOLAx opens the door to a classroom without walls, one that crosses all borders and reaches every girl who wants to learn.

Both: Today, SOLAx is pretty remarkable in its reach: we have students in every province of Afghanistan, as well as in more than 75 countries globally. All in all, we’ve had 20K+ students sign up to SOLAx. Each subscriber is able to access diverse learning options via our chatbot, and can choose to receive their lessons in any of three languages (English, Dari, or Pashto), for active, tailored learning in a profoundly robust environment. SOLAx originally launched with 8 ESL courses and 3 Storytelling for Impact courses, but now provides an Afghan 7th-grade online curriculum with 9 courses, each offered in Dari and Pashto — and we’re preparing to roll out an 8th-grade curriculum soon. The goal is to eventually offer a full 7th to 12th grade curriculum…or, in other words, to offer instruction in every grade that the Taliban prohibit girls from attending in Afghanistan.

How do you balance a digitized learning environment with the holistic care needed to nurture students’ self-confidence, human creativity, and future-readiness?

Both: Well, SOLAx is only one color — an important color, certainly — but still, just one color in the painting we’re creating of a united and peaceful Afghanistan. It operates in the digital sphere while, in Rwanda, we work face-to-face and person-to-person with our students both inside and outside the classroom. Whether in the music room or on the athletic field, we encourage self-discovery and strive to build self-confidence. We’ve been quite clear publicly about what SOLAx is and isn’t. This is a direct quote from the FAQ on our website: “SOLAx is not a replacement for, or an equivalent to in-person, in-classroom education. It’s an alternative for girls whose educational lives are on pause, and may have been that way for years. It’s a light of hope and an initial step on a path that leads back to the classroom.” What we do is balance online opportunity with classroom opportunity. Most importantly, we create and restore hope.

What core values drive your unique vision for impact in an AI-driven future?

Shabana: Access to quality education is a human right. I don’t just believe this — I know this. We blossom into the fullness of ourselves when we are free to pursue our curiosity and are encouraged to study, learn, ask questions, and grow in the confidence of our knowledge. These ideas, our core beliefs, are at the heart of what we aspire to do with SOLAx.

Mati: Our learners are unique. They’re Afghans first and foremost, but they’re geographically distributed across Afghanistan, exile communities, and the global diaspora. As we digitize the Afghan curriculum, we want to be true to who these learners are, and we want our lessons to incorporate what is culturally relevant and appropriate to Afghans. When we use AI, we always want Afghan educators in the loop to ensure that everything we share and teach through SOLAx will be most relevant for our learners.

Both: Education was not an easy or guaranteed thing for either of us growing up. That is why we’re driven by the desire to make our work completely unnoteworthy. What we mean by this is that there’s nothing exceptional at all about girls going to school or accessing education in the West. It’s profoundly exceptional for Afghan girls, and we’re working toward a day when Afghan moms and dads can kiss their daughters goodbye as they head into the classroom or online to learn. To us, that vision shouldn’t be exceptional at all.

Which visionary leaders, philosophies, or movements give you hope for a more human-centered AI future?

Both: We believe that AI has immense potential to support and uplift humanity when developed and applied responsibly. This belief gives us hope, but it also drives our conviction that those in positions of power are responsible for guiding the future of AI in ways that promote equity, transparency, and well-being. Ultimately, that future will require thoughtful, ethical, and proactive decisions from all of us. The decisions we make today will undoubtedly shape the role AI plays in society for generations to come.

What is your 7-word autobiography?

Shabana: Inheritor of bravery, bearer of opportunity’s flame.

Mati: Seeker of impact, builder of accessible learning.