SOLA

This is the incredible work of a National Geographic explorer named Shabana Basood.

She is... from Afghanistan, and she founded something called SOLA, the School of Leadership Afghanistan.

It is a school for girls and to create incredible leaders.

And I'm not going to go into all the statistics of the impact she's had.

Shabana Basij-Rasikh is a leading advocate for girls' edu- education in Afghanistan, where according to the UN, about 2.4 million girls are excluded from secondary education and conditions for all Afghan women and girls have continued to deteriorate.

Back in 2008 when she was just 18 years old, Shabana co-founded SOLA, that's the School of Leadership Afghanistan, a boarding school for girls in Kabul.

But after the return of the Taliban in 2021, girls were banned from attending school from the age of 12, and for girls learning at SOLA, this became impossible.

Shabana burned the girls' educational records to keep their families safe and rerouted the entire establishment to Rwanda.

And in most of the country, most teachers, more than four-fifths of them, were men.

That is why one activist, Shabana Basij-Rasik, started the country's only boarding school for girls, the School of Leadership Afghanistan, or SOLA.

Since the return of the Taliban, SOLA has relocated to Rwanda.

Shabana joined my co-host Marco Werman recently to talk about SOLA and its mission today.

But the reason I burned the records of our students was several months before that day, I had a father of one of our students come to my office.

And his daughter was the only girl in his entire village who was going to school.

And she was a student at our boarding school.

Something he was very proud of, but something he did in complete secrecy.