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Promoting education cause: Hamid Karzai Foundation inaugurated

AT-KABUL: Hamid Karzai Foundation named after the former Afghan President inaugurated on Saturday in Kabul for the purpose to serve youth with educational facilities in the country and abroad.

The ex-President Hamid Karzai said that this foundation was totally aloof from politics as it will remain absolutely an academic center to serve the youth across the country.

Speaking at the inaugural ceremony he said that the foundation will follow goals of providing education facilities to needy and talented youths at home and abroad, arranging seminars about renowned professors, cultural figures, and religious scholars.

“During my presidency creating education opportunities through different ways was something else while establishing this foundation to serve the children of the nation is something totally different,” Karzai said.

“The foundation will remain aloof from politics. It will serve youngsters in the modern education. I had in mind that we need such a foundation because in our country it is the lack of education that is the mother of most of social, political, cultural and economic evils,” he said.

He said the lack of education has been affected medical services, science, technology, sociology and a number of other education-related subjects and fields whereas resultantly most of the patients leave for foreign. “Today we are backward. As a result, we compromise on too many things. If we want to overcome our current challenges, we must advance in education,” he said.

“Our objective is to augment the struggle and passion of those students who made a difference during the past 14 years and make them enable to bring laurels to the country in the field of education,” he said.

“The thousands of youngsters who were educated, training and given jobs in the past 13 years are just a drop in the river, there are too many others remaining to be educated, he said.

“The country needs from 10 to 60 more years to be at par with other nations of the world in education. To be there, we need to keep continue supporting education,” Karzai said.

“During the past three decades when a deadliest war was imposed on us, others were advancing in education. However, the game of death and destruction caused a heavy blow to Afghanistan in all walks of life, and the country remained one of the most backward countries of the world,” he lamented. “There is no room for nepotism in the foundation. We are providing equal opportunities to talented Afghan students from across the country and abroad,” he vowed. “The foundation aims at serving the deserving students in the fields of engineering, medical, science, economics, and computer science,” Karzai said.

Dr. Rangin Dadfar Spanta, who was advisor to ex-President Hamid Karzai on national security affairs, is the advisor and chief executive of the Hamid Karzai Foundation. Spanta said the foundation was a cultural and academic center and it is there to support those talented students who usually come across challenges. “The foundation will serve deserving students at home and abroad,” he said. “The foundation believes in Afghanism only and the selection criteria don’t take tribalism, nepotism and any other affiliations into account. Being an Afghan and a being a talented student is the criterion to qualify for the opportunities being served by the foundation,” he said. He said the source of funding is the remunerations of former President Hamid Karzai’s lectures he had delivered in foreign countries. “The budget doesn’t suffice because serving the youth in the field of education needs vast resources,” he said.

Spanta called on the economically well-off people particularly the traders to support the Hamid Karzai Foundation.

The foundation will also observe national academic and cultural days. It will hold commemoration programs in remembrance of leading Afghan academicians, culturists. These programs will have no political motives. The programs will only be for academic purposes,” Spanta added. The former Minister of Information and Culture, Sayed Makhdom Raheen, said that the people of Afghanistan have borne unspeakable troubles during the past 40 years. “Those who made even a little difference deserve huge admiration as making development amid challenges is an enviable progress, however, challenges still exist, which marred academic development, which needs to be addressed,” Raheen said.

He said that Muslims across the world are facing crises as they are hit by a vicious circle of poverty even they are equipped with natural resources—including gold and oil.

“Toda the western world look down on Muslims because they have remained away from making progress in education and technology,” he said.

He said that according to Islam, those who know and don’t know cannot be equals.

Ex- Advisor Niamatullah Shahrani said that Islam and Quran exhort Muslims on learning, but unfortunately we couldn’t develop societies of knowledge and learning. He called on Afghans to speed up education activities. This is pertinent to mention here that a number of universities and affluent traders announced their support to the Hamid Karzai Foudantion and vowed they will keep supporting the foundation in the future as well.

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